Winter is coming. No wait, that’s TV. Hang on.
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November is coming. (That’s lame but let’s just go with it.) Movies are en route fast and furious, with major blockbusters trying to capitalize on the holiday season, art house films vying for Oscar glory, Blu-ray releases fighting for your Christmas dollars and film festivals desperately seeking to raise awareness of motion pictures that you don’t know you love yet. It’s very difficult to keep track of everything happening past, present and future in the entertainment industry, so CraveOnline has put together this handy-dandy November Movie Calendar so you can get handle on all of the important dates, unmissable movies and home video must-haves and then go about living your lives like an actual person. Let us be geeks about this. You probably have a day job or homework to do or something.
Open your calendars – or, if you’re under 50, the calendar applications on your phones – and make a note of everything we’re about to tell you in the CraveOnline November Movie Calendar. Because we’re about to get drunk and forget about all of this.
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
Film Calendar November 2013
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November 1
Orson Scott Card’s controversial sci-fi epic Ender’s Game heads to theaters courtesy of X-Men Origins: Wolverine director Gavin Hood. Looking for small-scale thrills? Keanu Reeves makes his directorial debut with the martial arts extravaganza Man of Tai Chi, starring The Matrix stuntman Tiger Hu Chen in a series of fights choreographed by the great Yuen Woo Ping.
Looking for something more a little more meaningful? Matthew McConaughey makes his big Oscar bid with Dallas Buyers Club, about a straight man diagnosed with AIDs in 1986 who smuggles FDA-unapproved medication in the U.S. Looking for something a lot less meaningful? Free Birds stars Owen Wilson and Woody Harrelson as animated turkeys who travel back in time to stop the first Thanksgiving.
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November 3
Celebrate the birth of everyone’s favorite makeup effects guru with a marathon of Tom Savini’s best and goriest films: Maniac (1980), Creepshow (1982), Day of the Dead (1985), and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986).
Tom Savini turns 67 in 2013, and if you saw him recently in Machete Kills, you know that he doesn’t look a day over 50.
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November 5
If you saw The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey and thought the only problem was that it was too short, today is a good day to go Blu-ray shopping. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey: Extended Edition adds 13 more minutes to the already whopping two-hours-and-forty-nine minute running time.
Also available on Blu-ray November 5: Stephanie Meyer’s complete vampire/werewolf romance saga gets a five-film Blu-ray boxed set in Twilight Forever, Adam Sandler returns to ravage small town America in Grown Ups 2, Mark Wahlberg and Denzel Washington team up to shoot everybody and everything in 2 Guns, and Channing Tatum protects President Jaime Foxx from terrorists in Roland Emmerich’s White House Down.
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November 7-14
The AFI Film Festival runs from November 7 through November 14, so check into CraveOnline regularly for all the latest reviews of films that could very well change this year’s Oscar race, including Ben Stiller’s The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, Spike Jonze’s Her, Peter Berg’s The Lone Survivor and John Lee Hancock’s Saving Mr. Banks.
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November 7
Thor: The Dark World officially opens on November 8, but if you don’t want the two post-credits scenes spoiled for you, you’d better head out to the multiplex on November 7 to catch the first midnight showing. For Asgard!
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November 8
If you’re too classy to see Thor: The Dark World in theaters (or, more likely, if tickets are simply sold out), November 8 also marks the release of three major art house films.
The Book Thief stars Geoffrey Rush and Emily Watson as the adopted parents of a young communist refugee (Sofie Nélisse) coming of age – and stealing books – in Nazi Germany. Oscar-nominated screenwriter John Sayles writes and directs Go for Sisters, about an addict (Yolonda Ross) and her parole officer (LisaGay Hamilton) – and also childhood friends – who cross the Mexican border to find the addict’s missing son. In How I Live Now, The Host’s Saoirse Ronan struggles to survive in a post-apocalyptic United Kingdom.
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November 11
Celebrate the 25th anniversary of everyone’s favorite killer doll, because Tom Holland’s Child’s Play premiered in theaters on November 11, 1988. Relive all of Chucky’s greatest murders in the recently released Chucky: The Complete Collection Blu-ray, and follow along with CraveOnline’s exclusive video series The Chucky Files, featuring in-depth interviews with creator Don Mancini about every film in the franchise.
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November 12
Head to the your local video store (or pre-order online, if you must) for the hottest Blu-ray releases. The summer’s most controversial blockbuster Man of Steel finally comes to home video, the animated racing snail comedy Turbo zooms onto home video, a landmark anime classic gets the special edition treatment with Akira: 25th Anniversary Edition, and horror fans will definitely want to check out F.W. Murnau’s original vampire classic in the new Nosferatu: 2-Disc Remastered Edition (recently declared one of The 50 Scariest Movies Ever Made by CraveOnline).
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November 15
Major movie releases are running scared this week, but you may want to take your significant other to see Best Man Holiday, a sequel to the 1999 romantic comedy The Best Man, which catches up with Taye Diggs, Terrence Howard, Nia Long, Sanaa Lathan and their equally implausibly attractive friends a decade-and-a-half later.
Also opening in theaters, Oscar-winner Alexander Payne (Sideways, The Descendants) is back with his latest award-winning drama: Nebraska, starring Will Forte as a man escorting his father, Bruce Dern, from Montana to Nebraska to collect a million dollar prize that may or may not be waiting for him.
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November 17
Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street may have been pushed back to December 25 (if we’re lucky), but you can still celebrate the 71st birthday of one of the great American directors with any of his classic films. Our favorites? Try Mean Streets (1973), Taxi Driver (1976), Raging Bull (1980) The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), Goodfellas (1990), Cape Fear (1991), The Aviator (2004) and The Departed (2006), the film that finally won him a long-deserved Oscar for Best Director.
Don’t have the time? Just watch the music video for Michael Jackson’s “Bad.” You know he directed that too, right?
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November 18
Initially a box office bomb, now an established holiday classic, A Christmas Story came out 30 years ago this November 18, in 1983. The late Bob Clark directed this nostalgia-fueled tale of a little boy named Ralphie (future Iron Man producer Peter Billingsley… and yes, that’s accurate) who wants a BB gun for Christmas. The whole world seems to conspire against him getting his holiday wish, under the suspiciously ubiquitous excuse of “You’ll shoot your eye out.”
A Christmas Story will be inescapable on TV soon. You may as well get it over with and watch it today.
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November 19
November 19 brings all the August movie releases to Blu-ray, including the disappointing thriller Paranoia (starring Liam Hemsworth, Gary Oldman and Harrison Ford), Planes (starring Dane Cook as a cropdusting plane who dreams of racing), We’re the Millers (starring Jason Sudeikis and Jennifer Aniston as a drug dealer and a stripper who pose as a wholesome family to smuggle pot across the border), and Edgar Wright’s acclaimed sci-fi comedy The World’s End (starring Simon Pegg and Nick Frost as estranged friends who reunite to complete an epic pub crawl and fight robots).
Also on Blu-ray: the unsettling Indonesian death squad documentary The Act of Killing, and Shout! Factory’s new collector’s edition of John Carpenter’s original, low-budget action classic Assault on Precinct 13.
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November 22
There’s a good chance you’re already in line for The Hunger Games: Catching Fire right now. If not, you may need a reminder that the first adaptation of Suzanne Collins’ sci-fi book series was a worldwide phenomenon that shot Jennifer Lawrence to superstardom, featured attractive young teens killing each other in a dystopic futurescape, and had Elizabeth Banks in the world’s goofiest outfits.
Also in theaters: Vince Vaughn finds out his sperm donations led to 533 births in The Delivery Man, and Stephen Frears turns his dramatic eye to Philomena, the story of a journalist (Steve Coogan) who helps a woman named Philomena (Judi Dench) search for the son who was taken from her decades earlier, when she was forced to live in a convent. Mmm… Oscar bait…
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November 26
More late summer releases hit the Blu-ray market today: Ethan Hawke plays an ex-racecar driver forced to commit crimes in Getaway, the star-studded gang from RED returns in the aptly titled action-comedy RED 2, Ashton Kutcher tries to switch things up by starring in the Steve Jobs biopic Jobs, and acclaimed filmmaker Wong Kar Wai directs the latest biography of Bruce Lee’s sifu Ip Man in The Grandmaster.
Have more money to burn? Don’t forget that today marks the release of Breaking Bad: The Complete Series, and the long-awaited Blu-ray release of the complete Zatoichi: The Blind Swordsman collection from Criterion.
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November 27
Diverse options reign at the multiplex this weekend. Kasi Lemmons directs Forest Whitaker, Angela Bassett and Jennifer Hudson in the live-action Christmas musical Black Nativity, Jason Statham fights James Franco in the action-thriller Homefront (written by Sylvester Stallone!), Josh Brolin stars in Spike Lee’s remake of the cult Korean classic Oldboy, and Disney will try to melt your heart with their latest animated epic, Frozen, starring Kristen Bell and Josh Gad.
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November 29
If you absolutely must go out shopping, then our prayers are with you.
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November 30
Ridley Scott turns 76 on November 30. We’re going to celebrate the career of the man who directed Alien (1979), Blade Runner (1982), Thelma & Louise (1991), Gladiator (2000) and Black Hawk Down (2001) by pretending The Counselor never happened.
