A strange thing’s been happening in American cinemas in recent years, and it’s the most natural by-product of modern marketing that you can get. There’s been a rise in low budget films targeting very narrow demographics, specifically Christian, Hispanic, and African American audiences. Now that everyone can be monitored and categorized thanks to online tracking, these films are able to launch small but effective marketing campaigns that only their targeted demographic sees.
Michael Thelin’s directorial feature debut is perhaps most effective in its earliest stages. When we are first introduced to a sleepy suburban neighbourhood, it is already clear that something is amiss. When we witness the kidnapping of a young woman on her way to babysit, we begin to get some idea of what is in store.
In 1971 a particularly interesting film bestowed with an X rating made its way to a limited release in New York City and Los Angeles. This film was not a commercial success. It was a film that was so “out there” some reviewers refused to even see it.
Every Tuesday Film Inquiry publishes the movies that are opening in cinemas! This week: The Divergent Series:
Ryan and Amy are sitting nervously on a sofa in a nondescript room. A doctor addresses them, “Mr and Mrs Green, I’m sorry, it’s not good news”. The doctor continues to tell them that their one year old son’s chemotherapy has not worked.
Like all social groups, people with disability have been portrayed in diverse ways in Hollywood, from stereotypical representations in horror to genuine inspirations in melodramas. Disability is represented as a metaphor through imagery or characters’ features, or as a direct subject within the narrative. The entire concept of genre is recycled from elements within society, and the relevant features of each specifically labels the disabled into a certain character type.
For many Cubans, the country’s recent economic reforms have drastically changed their hopes for the future. Access to decent wages, which had long been a demeaning struggle for its citizens, has them tasting things like stable markets, modern farming equipment, and premiere drag races. Okay, so drag races aren’t the most important of dreams, but to its avid participants the return of sanctioned events means a little slice of heaven.
There have been an abundance of actor, actress and director collaborations throughout the history of cinema. One of the first collaborations in Hollywood was that of director D.W Griffth and actress Lilian Gish, who worked together on over thirty films throughout the 1910s and 1920s.
Taste is a fluid thing, though we seldom view it as such in the moment. For many, our cultural tastes define us and they are as solid and inscrutable as a pope made out of granite. Yet this is something that is often felt even bereft of the experience required to discover, explore and refine what kinds of cinema to which one really responds.
Perhaps the most impressive aspect of Robert Eggers’ The Witch is its unwillingness to pander to its audience. Though people may have been expecting a semi-typical supernatural horror film (complete with jumpscares and excessive gore), what they receive instead is something much more disturbing in its implications. Set in Puritan era New England, The Witch is an atmospherically driven, religion-coated film that is, at times, both beautiful and terrifying.
It’s tempting to back away slowly from Nina, to pretend you didn’t see it and in doing so sidestep the subtleties of the controversy surrounding it, because while we regularly come together to discuss the statistics of race representation, colorism rarely enters the conversation. Whether this stems from discomfort and ignorance by the predominantly white media, the pessimistic idea that we need to fight one battle at a time, or one of the many other factors that contribute to the silence surrounding this issue, silence will get us precisely nowhere. So let’s talk about it.
Stand By Me is one of my favorite movies, I could watch it a hundred times without getting bored. I have watched it in different phases of my life, through various perspectives. Every time I watch it, I learn a new detail that I had not noticed the before.
As a director, Atom Egoyan has increasingly shifted away from the emotionally raw content of his beloved 1997 film The Sweet Hereafter in favour of seedier, pulpier material that film suggested he had emotionally matured away from. Egoyan’s love of trash cinema informed his earlier work, but after showcasing his potential to make a drama film divorced of genre pretensions, the fact he is still preoccupied with putting an unwarranted arthouse inflection on such material feels like wasted potential. How to make trash cinema out of human tragedy without being offensive He manages to attract the attention of A-list casts and find his way back into the official selection of the Cannes official selection with most releases, purely on the strength of his earlier work, not out of a desire to honour his current sub-De Palma mindset.
Let’s snuggle into the familiar embrace of the British biopic. A genre all on its own, their tempered looks at history often play as apologies for past sins, with recent entries like The Imitation Game and Suffragette discussing or taking on outright the treatment of gay men and women by past British society. The problem is that they often feel like hollow pats on the back, because while the atrocious behavior that the films portray have become antiquated, more mild wrongs are still committed against these groups every day.
This is the second and final part of our What Is Film Analysis article. Find the first part, on Narrative and Character, here. Production The giveaway of any bad production is the settings and costumes.
