“Music and cinema fit together naturally. Because there’s a kind of intrinsic musicality to the way moving images work when they’re put together. It’s been said that cinema and music are very close as art forms, and I think that’s true.
Even though he’s often stereotyped as solely a director of inferior British gangster films, based on his first two releases Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, Guy Ritchie is actually more of an experimental director than you may initially realise. Even though his early films were successful and enjoyable guilty pleasures, Ritchie had something of an insatiable need to be taken seriously, looking towards the European arthouse for inspiration. His third feature Swept Away, starring his then wife Madonna, was a remake of a satirical 1974 Italian film not widely known to international audiences.
Every week Film Inquiry publishes the movies that are opening in cinemas! This week: Sinister 2, American Ultra, Hitman:
Written and directed by Simeon Duncombe and starring Jack Fagan, Trick Meter is an action packed four-minute adventure into another (quite nightmarish) dimension. It tells the story of a young skateboarding enthusiast who quickly finds himself in a deadly game of survival. With only three minutes on the clock, does he have the skills to make it back to reality?
A great director can elevate a movie that is nothing short of trash cinema into something masterful. Throughout his career, Orson Welles repeatedly chose projects (most notably Touch of Evil) as a challenge to see whether he could make a good movie out of source material that was far closer to the gutter than the stars. A cursory glance at some of the best directors of all time, from Welles and Alfred Hitchc*ck to David Fincher and Steven Soderbergh more recently, reads like a list of directors who enjoy cinema at its silliest, yet are such technically skilled filmmakers with a clear love for genre filmmaking that their movies are only ever laughable in a knowing way.
Entourage is an extremely puzzling film. Keeping in mind that the TV show giving rise to the film is superficial in nature, I don’t mean puzzling in the way you’d describe an Alain Renais film as puzzling. No, it is the reasons and decisions around everything to do with the film that I don’t quite understand.
Set in the 70s, By The Sea tells the story of Vanessa (Angelina Jolie), a former dancer, and her husband Roland (Brad Pitt), a writer, who are traveling France together. Unhappy in their abusive relationship and growing apart, this trip is their last attempt to save it. The trailer is short and doesn’t show much else other than their disjointed relationship – she hits him, he supposedly hits her and leaves her lying on the ground.
Over at our official Facebook page , we are currently posting daily Film Recommendations, with each week being a different theme. The first theme is Stylish Gangster Films, crime films which are elevated by aesthetically appealing visuals and great alternative takes on the usual gangster film tropes. 1.
As a film fan, I think it’s hugely important to have deep and insightful conversations about what we’re seeing on the silver screen. Whether it be with your family, a group of friends or even an online forum, talking about films is the best way to know and learn about the art of filmmaking. It doesn’t matter where you get your material from, as long as you personally learn something from it, and I believe YouTube is a medium that can help you do that.
I’m not now, nor have I ever been, a teenage girl. I’m not even a teenager anymore, and chances are if you’re in the UK and tried to see The Diary of a Teenage Girl, you won’t be either. Thanks, BBFC.
About half the world is extremely eagerly (and impatiently) anticipating Tarantino’s upcoming film, The Hateful Eight. Starring usual Tarantino suspects like Samuel L. Jackson, Tim Roth and Kurt Russell, The Hateful Eight is set in a post-Civil War Wyoming.
Fantastic Four is a film that people wanted to hate from the start. First, there was the controversial casting of Michael B. Jordan as the traditionally white character Johnny Storm; shortly following this was the discovery that Victor Von Doom was a computer hacker instead of a brilliant inventor; finally, there was the casting itself, which involved younger characters just finishing high school, whereas most adaptations of the story present the Fantastic Four as adults.
If it were not for Paul Thomas Anderson, there is a (very) good chance I wouldn’t be interested in writing about movies. It is because of his films that I take time to write for this humble little website. When I was a high school senior in 2009, my interest in movies inflated dramatically, and I watched a movie just about every night.
Two decades after the original Jurassic Park became the most successful film of all time at that point and ushered in the era of CGI, the blockbuster cinema landscape is very different. With Marvel Cinematic Universe, franchises six or seven sequels deep, and young-adult dystopias dominating the big releases more and more every year, original screenplays or adaptations of adult-oriented novels are struggling to make an impact – it is inconceivable that Steven Spielberg’s classic could have been released today with anything near the same level of success as in 1993. And so while the original film has a devoted fan base, few would have thought there was that much demand for a new Jurassic Park film, especially after its two increasingly inferior sequels.
With a Finger in Each Ear, We March Blindly On The Vietnam War, which had begun as a geopolitical chess match in the 1950’s, escalated into a full blown land war in 1965 when President Lyndon Johnson authorised the use of American ground troops to help South Vietnam defeat the Communist North. More than any conflict in the 20th Century, Vietnam segregated America into a civil war of ideals. The burgeoning counterculture rejected and rallied against it, even denouncing the troops themselves.