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“Mallari” attempts for a certain kind of innovation with a narrative structure freshly lifted off anime-like, parallel-world, time-travel story telling. Leveraging in the fantastic, three generations of stories overlap one another convincingly to tell a ghost story that haunts the titular family for decades. But all of these attempts at novelty to reimagine the lore of a historically documented serial killer from the colonial Philippines? The film seems to be capturing through its creativity an attitude as old as its narrative itself.

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The marvel of Mallari’s technical achievements cannot be ignored. Derrick Cabrido’s years of handling horror films is matched by Enrico Santos‘ veteran penmanship and Pao Orendain‘s textured images that shape the scenes with enough darkness to fill the scares. Santos’ script in particular exhibits a really good pulse in pacing sequences. Their attempt to...

Shout! Studios presents The Magic Flute by Florian Zigl, executive produced by Roland Emmerich, at 325 theaters with expansion likely. A reimagining of the Mozart opera, it follows a present-day teen sent from London to the Austrian Alps on singing scholarship at the legendary Mozart boarding school. There, he discovers a century old forgotten passageway into the magical world of Mozart’s famed opera.

This Harry Potter-ish adventure fantasy stars Jack Wolfe as Tim Walker, who passes from school into the world of the opera and its many adventures as hero Prince Tamino. Wide releases may be picking up steam and Scream, but in terms of new specialty, and family fare, these isn’t much new competition this weekend.

Melissa Boag, EVP of Family Entertainment at Shout! Studios, hopes it will play with fans of magical adventure, Harry Potter, and classical music. Wolfe is a star of Netflix YA series Shadow & Bone.