If you manage to find time to watch a movie on your couch this weekend (and there is a lot going on in the next few days, so I would truly be impressed), you should make an effort to make it a movie you rent from Tucson's longtime favorite video store, Casa Video. 

The most popular movies at their store last week were:

1. Independence Day: Resurgence

How bad was 2014’s Ouija? It was so piss poor and forgettable that I had to actually look into my archives for a review to confirm I had actually seen the damn thing. I wasn’t sure. In short, Ouija was a deplorable shitshow. Ouija: Origin of Evil is a bona fide movie miracle in many ways.

Ouija was awful, but it was enough of a hit to warrant a sequel. Still, it shocked me to see the sequel had actually made it to movie screens rather than some direct-to-digital platform. The fact that Mike Flanagan, the director of the crappy Oculus, was at the helm did little to quash my skepticism.

After about 30 seconds of watching young Lulu Wilson as Doris Zander, I realized that Flanagan might to be onto something with this casting. This kid, with her authentic 1960s haircut and mature-for-her-years delivery, crafts one of the great horror film performances of all time.

Yes, I’m bestowing that honor on a performance that occurs in a sequel to one of the worst horror films ever made.

The film, set convincingly in 1965, follows right along with Wilson as truly inspired and creepy. The Doris character plays with a Ouija board, and soon has some pleasant conversations with her dead father. Then, very bad things start to happen.

Is it one of the best horror films ever made? No. A few missteps in the final act take it down a notch. Is it one of the best horror sequels ever made? You bet it is.

This is a charming documentary about people who raise chickens for competition, and the people in this movie take their craft seriously.

There’s the mom who got over a drinking problem by focusing on her chickens, resulting in a sense of career purpose and a few awards. There’s the singer with a gig in Branson, Missouri who longs to be home with his family, taking care of his chickens and attending the major competitions. And then there’s the engineer who designs racecar and tractor pull engines, but works obsessively on the side with chickens for show.

If anything, the movie teaches a lot about the actual chickens, the many breeds, and their kind of adorable mannerisms.

Let it be said, some of the chickens the folks raise in this movie are pretty impressive. Director Nicole Lucas Haimes has made a fun movie that leads up to a final competition where all those mentioned above are involved. I never thought I’d find a chicken beauty pageant interesting, but Haimes makes it so.

Chicken People is having its Arizona premiere at The Loft during this year’s annual Loft Film Fest, Friday, Nov. 11.

I’m starting to develop a big time like for director Kelly Reichardt.

Wendy and Lucy, Meek’s Cutoff, Night Moves and now this, a well-crafted movie based on short stories by Maile Meloy.

Three stories featuring Laura Dern, Kristin Stewart and Michelle Williams intertwine in less-than-obvious ways, with stellar performances from all. Dern plays a lawyer who finds herself with an unruly client (Jared Harris) she either can’t help, or doesn’t want to help. Michelle Williams plays a wife building a new house while her husband (James LeGros is alive!) acts all disenchanted. Kristin Stewart chimes in as a woman teaching a class she knows nothing about while an unauthorized student (Lily Gladstone) takes a shine to her.

Gladstone, a relative newcomer, is nothing less than outstanding in her awkward scenes with Stewart, who continues to impress in indie roles. Williams, who has worked with Reichardt a few times before, lights up the screen, even when her character is somber. Dern reminds that she is still one of the best actresses on the planet.

The movie is deliberately paced, and Reichardt has a way of presenting a scene without telegraphing what is going to happen, or demanding we feel or react a certain way as viewers. She let’s her films breathe, and it’s both masterful and daring.

This plays out like a deranged Batman-with-a-calculator action flick. Ben Affleck plays Christian Wolff, a high functioning autistic man who has managed to harness his extreme intelligence with numbers and physical tics down into the strangest of professions. By day, he’s your average accountant helping a farm owner find tax loopholes to save a few thousand bucks. At night, he’s some sort of accountant ninja who can take out a room full of mob guys with a dinner knife and some totally Batman forearm blasts to the face. Christian takes jobs laundering books for dirty folks all over the world and, while he does have a modest, sparsely decorated home, he also has a mobile man cave (or, should I say, Batcave) that keeps all the spoils of his riches—money, gold, Jackson Pollock paintings and, yes, collector’s items like Batman comic books. During one job trying to find missing money for a prosthetics company led by the guy from Dressed to Kill (John Lithgow), he takes a liking to fellow accountant Dana (the invaluable Anna Kendrick), and they conspire to find the missing money, which, of course, wasn’t really supposed to happen. Maybe I’m the only one who sees this movie as Batman doing taxes. Maybe that makes me some sort of amateurish idiot who likes movies that are actually a little on the bad side just because they play out in a weird way in his overreaching mind. If so, I say “Hooray!” to that. My ability to make a movie something else in my head means I have a better chance of making my movie ticket money well spent instead of blown dollars, like the money I blew on that The Girl on the Train piece of shit.

Rolf Lassgard is astonishingly good in this sweet and funny film about an old man giving up on life shortly before he gets some reasons to recharge his battery.

Ove (Lassgard) lives in a community where he acts as the enforcer of the rules, and he takes it seriously (Don’t you dare throw a cigarette butt on the ground when he is in eyeshot). Having lost his wife Sonja (Ida Engvoll), who we see in flashbacks, Ove has developed a cantankerous reputation that has most seeing him as an old coot.

A new couple moves in next door, a cat takes residence in his house, and the couple’s children become his friends, thus delaying his attempts to take his own life.

Director and screenwriter Hannes Holm does a great job letting us know, little by little through the flashbacks, the events that have led to Ove being the man he is. By the time the flashbacks have played out, it’s hard to blame Ove for being a little grumpy.

Lassgard is thoroughly enjoyable in the movie, managing to make the character somebody likeable, even when he’s screwing up.

Even though the movie takes place in one little community and basically focuses on the life of one man, it has an epic feel to it. Holm has made a special movie with this one.

Horror fans know director Ti West for his cult classic horror film House of the Devil, and the horror films V/H/S, The Innkeepers and The Sacrament. His latest, starring Ethan Hawke and John Travolta, is a major departure from his usual projects, a capable, full-on homage to Sergio Leone westerns.

Hawke plays Paul, a drifter who finds himself in a frontier ghost town with a few remaining inhabitants. He and his dog immediately get into some trouble with Gilly (James Ransome), the son of the town marshal (Travolta).

Bad things transpire (this is sort of John Wick set in the old wild west), and Paul sets out for revenge. The resultant gunfights are nicely staged, accentuated by good work from Hawke, Travolta and Ransome.

While Hawke is always reliable these days, Travolta’s film career has been on a bit of downslide (one of a few his career has endured). His performance here as a semi-crooked lawman with a small streak of decency is actually funny at times, and consists of his best work in a film in over five years (It must be noted that he was also quite good as Robert Shapiro in The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story).

The film’s biggest surprise would be Taissa Farmiga, providing solid comic relief as a fast talking hotel operator. West does admirable work on the western playground.

The movie doesn’t feel all that original or groundbreaking, but it does look good, has some solid acting, mixing in some nice dark humor for an overall good time.

Despite good performances from a cast that includes Emily Blunt, Justin Theroux and Allison Janney, director Tate Taylor’s The Girl on the Train winds up being a little too ridiculous for a movie that wishes to be taken seriously.

Blunt spends much of the movie blotto drunk as Rachel Watson, a slurring alcoholic who aimlessly rides a train to New York City every day, spying on the people living in her former house, as well as the neighbors.

Rachel is divorced from Tom (Theroux), who seemingly couldn’t take Rachel’s drinking and their inability to have a child. Tom is remarried to Anna (Rebecca Ferguson), they have a child, and they would really like Rachel to stay away. Tom and Nancy’s nanny, Megan (Haley Bennett), lives nearby with her husband, (Luke Evans). Rachel spies on them in their most intimate moments as she races by on the train, envying what she sees as the perfect young romance.

Then, Nancy sees Megan with another man—setting off an odd, drunken tailspin that results in her getting involved in the drama when Megan goes missing.

So, for starters, I’m just not down with this premise. A deliriously drunk woman is able to decipher the goings-on inside homes as she races by in a train. Yes, sometimes the train slows down, and she does know the inhabitants somewhat, but this is a highly unlikely plot gimmick that’s stretched out to unrealistic proportions. Then she gets involved with the missing woman’s husband, and eventually finds herself a target in the investigation.

The movie is too kooky to be taken seriously.

Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

Director Christopher Guest, who hasn’t made a movie in nearly a decade, returns with what is easily his worst.

His usual acting corps (minus Eugene Levy) takes a crack at the world of mascots, and I can’t think of a dumber subject for a comedy. Much of the movie is performers in full mascot suits in a competition doing routines that have nothing to them and eat up the running time. There’s a laugh every now and then, but mostly groans, and the subject matter just doesn’t call for a full movie.

Parker Posey has the film’s biggest laugh after eating bad sushi, and it’s not a very big laugh, so that’s not saying much. In what amounts to a truly desperate move, Guest cameos as his Waiting for Guffman character, Corky. His presence in that persona simply reminds us that this once funny guy is now straining for laughs, Mel Brooks style. His improvisatory style has worked before on better subjects (community theater, pet shows, folk music), but this one certainly suggests that he has run out of ideas. In many ways, it actually rips off Best In Show, his pet competition movie.

Mascots is just a less funny version of that movie with people dressed as pets rather than having real animals running around. This is a tremendous waste of everybody’s time, and needs to be removed from Netflix to make room for more shitty Adam Sandler movies.

Available for streaming as a Netflix original.

My weekend plans: Read though my Voter Registration Guide, finish reading The Joy Luck Club and finally watch Swiss Army Man. What are you guys up to?

Here's your weekly look at the most popular movies at every Tucsonan's favorite video rental place:

1. X-Men: Apocalypse