Every Tuesday Film Inquiry publishes the movies that are opening in cinemas! This week: Money Monster, The Darkness, Love & Friendship, The Lobster, High-Rise, Last Days in the Desert, Search Party, Dheepan, Kill Zone 2, Sunset Song and What We Become.
PJ Woodside and her partner, Steve Hudgins at Big Biting Pig Productions in Madisonville, KY are creating quite a stir in the independent horror scene. They’ve put out a film a year for the last decade. Their most recent film, Frances Stein, was recently released on Amazon Prime and has been getting a steady stream of five star reviews.
Richard Linklater may be the definitive coming-of-age filmmaker of our time, effortlessly blending John Hughes indebted stories of young people coming to grips with their own identities, with an Altman-esque ear for naturalistic dialogue. His films feel timeless, yet completely of their time – snapshots of a generation that will remain beloved when the next generation of cinephiles lay their eyes on them. A “Spiritual Sequel” His latest film, the punctuation-friendly Everybody Wants Some!!
Strong opinions abound for writer/director Nicolas Winding Refn’s work, which is to be expected when you make the kind of bold choices that he does. There’s not much middle ground when you drench things in violence and style, as people are either going to go with the heightened sensibility or not. The Neon Demon certainly won’t be changing that aspect of his M.
Superhero films are seemingly a dime a dozen lately. Though only the beginning of May, we have already seen the release of Deadpool, Batman v. Superman:
This is the second and last part of “What Is Mise-en-scène”. Find part one (dealing with mise-en-scène of setting, costume and objects) here! Cinematography If there is an important element in mise-en-scène then cinematography is it.
Janeites unite, because here’s a Jane Austen adaptation that’s not another Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility! Writer/director Whit Stillman delved into Austen’s deep cuts for the epistolary novel Lady Susan, a piece she wrote before her major novels that remained unpublished until after her death. As you can see from the trailer for Love & Friendship, the source material is a bit of a standout from Austen’s other work.
You can improve your life by paying attention to how films use characters and themes to explore human values, virtues, and character strengths.
We all know James Franco as one of Hollywood’s top A-list actors and working artists who has his hand in various aspects of the arts, but a handful of film students and emerging talent in Hollywood know him as an instructor, mentor or college professor. In March 2014, he decided teaching at USC, UCLA and CalArts wasn’t enough, so he opened his own school, Studio 4. In October 2014, James taught his first class at his new school:
The juvenile humor of a man named Weiner getting caught in a sexting scandal is almost impossible to resist, as you either give in to the giggles or smile at the you-can’t-write-that-shit feel of the situation. For those unaware, this happened in America (twice) to former U.S.
Mise-en-scène is one of the great terms used in film criticism. It is also the most basic and is usually the first thing you’ll learn on any film theory course. Unfortunately mise-en-scène is also, strangely, one of the hardest terms to understand.
In the brilliant and insightful documentary A History of Horror, British writer and actor Mark Gatiss explores the horror genre throughout many countries. While discussing British horror cinema of the 1960’s, Gatiss uses the term ‘folk horror’ to describe a short but very curious subgenre. The films that make up this genre are unmistakably British and owe a large debt to the trail blazers of horror cinema in Britain:
With the spy genre in full resurgence, audiences may not be salivating for another entry. Don’t sleep on Our Kind of Traitor, though, because it’s based on a John le Carré novel (same name), which comes with the promise of a different kind of espionage. Carré generally avoids a lot of action, preferring to keep his spies stuck in the murkiness of the real world.
Aaaaaaaand it’s May. Time to highlight some of the best articles we published last month! Last month we published over 60 articles, and among them many film reviews (like ones for Mr.
You may be wondering why you are reading a review for a film initially slated for release in 2014, after its première at the Los Angeles film festival, in the here and now of 2016. It tells us a lot about contemporary cinema and the struggle independent films face in finding distribution that this well-made film has waited two years for a wider release when there have been countless lesser films clogging our screens in the intervening time. It has been with the recent support of Ava DuVernay’s company ARRAY that Echo Park has found a cinematic release in LA and New York as well as an international release through Netflix and, if you are looking for something different to the sometimes saccharine cuteness of US indie romances, I would encourage you to seek this film out.