L.A. Weekly's Movie Picks are your look at the hottest films in Los Angeles theaters this week — from indie art-house gems and classics to popcorn-perfect blockbusters and new movies garnering buzz. Check our Film section every week before you make your big-screen plans.

Opening Friday, Jan. 18

Glass, M. Night Shyamalan's belated sequel to 2000's Unbreakable and 2017's Split, will surely be the first mega-hit of the year. To say a lot has happened in the intervening years is an understatement. Shyamalan's career sustained a dramatic dip and then a sudden rise, comic book adaptations became Hollywood's biggest cash cow since the Bible, and Samuel L. Jackson and Bruce Willis stayed exactly the same. If Shyamalan's film has any claim to being dramatically different from other superhero movies of recent vintage, it's that the mythology sprang whole from the writer-director's mind. Here, the story yokes together three characters from the previous two films: David Dunn (Willis), a security guard with tremendous strength and endurance; Elijah Price/Mr. Glass (Jackson), a self-styled supervillain with highly brittle bones; and Kevin Wendell Crumb (James McAvoy), a man with 23 different personalities who can change his body chemistry with each persona. The movie puts all three of them in the same mental hospital, presided over by a caseworker (Sarah Paulson), and a sinister plot begins to brew. Shyamalan, one of the most confident American showmen since Rod Serling (or at least William Castle), has proposed some rug-pulling plot twists that are his stock in trade while grounding the drama (are these people superhuman or just sick?) in pop psychology.


Also opening Friday, Jan. 18:

Adult Life Skills
An Acceptable Loss
The Brawler
Don't Come Back From the Moon
I Hate Kids
The Last Man
St. Bernard Syndicate
The Standoff at Sparrow Creek
Unbridled.

L.A. Weekly also recommends (still in theaters): If Beale Street Could Talk; Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse; Aquaman; Vice; Welcome to Marwen; Roma; Bohemian Rhapsody; Ralph Breaks the Internet; Mary Poppins Returns; Green Book; A Star Is Born.

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