WALTON GOGGINS

Darren Aronofsky’s “The Whale,” the Marilyn Monroe drama “Blonde,” Alejandro González Iñárritu’s “Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths” and Guadagnino’s “Bones and All,” with Timothée Chalamet, will all have their world premieres in competition at the Venice International Film Festival this fall.

This week’s new entertainment releases include albums from Canadian rocker Bryan Adams and a Stephen Sondheim tribute from Betty Buckley, Ryan Reynolds starring as a time-traveling pilot in Netflix’s “The Adam Project” and a small-town murder case gets some big-star wattage in NBC’s “The Thing About Pam” with Renée Zellweger.

It won’t put everyone in the mood for sugar cookies, ugly sweaters and hot chocolates this Christmas Eve. Gibson’s Kris Kringle character has the answer: the famous North Pole enterprise would be a shell of its former self. Gibson’s Kris Kringle is only a little bit jolly on his best days, almost certainly clinically depressed, and the twinkle in his eye is not due to elfin magic but rather to jaundice. In a time of mass losses of life and pessimism, then, what makes the film good is that viewers can appreciate the parallels between what’s on screen and outside their own four walls. (Edited by Michael Long and Ganesh Swaminath Lakshman)The post Melly Christmas: Gibson’s Gun-Toting Santa is a St. Nick for Our Times appeared first on Zenger News.