Film Inquiry publishes a list of the movies that are opening in cinemas every Tuesday. Opening this week: Star Trek Beyond, Ice Age:
“Interest can produce learning on a scale compared to fear as a nuclear explosion to a firecracker.” Stanley Kubrick on the importance and power of curiosity. As educators and parents we want to to care for, nurture, mentor, socialize, and provide for our children to the best of our ability.
Jin Mo-young’s debut documentary feature, My Love, Don’t Cross That River, is extremely touching, and from solely watching the trailer of this South-Korean film, you can see why. Released for the festival circuit in 2014, Jin shows us a 98-year-old Jo Byeong-man and 89-year-old Kang Kye-yeol, who’d been married for 76 years. Jin filmed the elderly couple in their mountain village home in Hoengsong County, Gangwon Province for 15 months.
Nearly everything about the film The Shallows seems to indicate that you wouldn’t be at a loss for missing it in theaters. The premise of an attractive woman in turmoil, coupled with an unbelievably vicious shark – each of these stories on their own has been done time and time again. Yet, somehow, The Shallows manages to just surpass the murky depths that most of those films sink to.
Whistling in on a plaintive melody is La La Land, a musical so out of left field that it needs a gentle introduction for you to acclimate to. And so LA wipes in, Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling make their entrances, and it’s not until the trailer is over that you realize how far you’ve gone. Sure, it’s just a teaser, but it’s transportive in a way that cuts through the cliché of that word.
Over at our official Facebook page, we are currently posting daily film recommendations, with each week being a different theme. This is a collection of those recommendations! This week’s theme is films shot by a female cinematographer.
The opening sequence of Ousmane Sembene’s Faat Kiné shows us the complexity of urban motion in a place where modernity and traditionalism are still somewhat at odds. We see groups of women in traditional Senegalese dress walking through the city of Dakar. Then, the camera pulls further and further away from them until we can see can see a whole city block.
What happens when two performance artists grow up, get married and have kids? Their kids become part of their art, of course. This is the story of Caleb and Camille and their two children whom they affectionately dubbed “Child A” (Annie) and “Child B” (Baxter).
Mike Birbiglia examines the start of another comedy career in Don’t Think Twice, the second feature from the writer, director, actor, and all-around performer. He had a lot of support adapting his semi-autobiographical play and book into his first film, Sleepwalk with Me, but strikes out on his own with Don’t Think Twice, taking sole writing and directing credits. Still, it’s hard not to think of a film about an improve troupe as an ensemble, especially when it features of bevy of established comedians like Keegan-Michael Key and Gillian Jacobs.
We have all watched a globetrotter movie at some point and thought “man, I want to do that!” Regardless of if you’re an avid adventurer or a couch potato, film can ignite that urge for discovery and make audiences want to grab life by the horns. Whilst most wanderlust movies satisfy a craving for exploration, I have realised that only a select few have the power to truly motivate viewers, making them want to escape their lives of comfort and luxury and replace it with blisters and exhaustion.
Independence Day came out when I was 14. I was a huge X-Files fan (I did a school project on Area 51) and so thought it was pretty much the greatest film ever. It was also at this time that I began to fall in love with movies, and Independence Day was part of that trend of 90’s summer blockbusters that opened my eyes to what contemporary cinema meant to a lot of people.
If you were to ask me what genre of movie will never die, I’d probably put my money on boxing films. It’s already survived since 1894, when the first live fight was recorded by William K.L.
Let me know if you’ve heard this one. A man wakes up after an accident with no memory of who he is or where he’s been, and while incredibly disabling, his predicament leads him down a lengthy search to discover his past and identity. This and other uses of memory loss have been popular in film for generations.
Ewan McGregor stars across Stellan Skarsgård, with Naomie Harris and Damian Lewis, in this film adaptation of the John le Carré (who is also on board as executive producer) novel of the same name, with a screenplay penned by Hossein Amini, helmed by British director Susanna White. With neo-noir ingredients, this thriller falls somewhere between slow-burn and slow-going. At times, we’re left to wonder why there isn’t more action, or twists (I felt similarly during Jack Ryan:
2016’s Sundance Film Festival was a splashy show of muscle from streaming leaders Amazon and Netflix, with early headlines being grabbed by the latter for its pre-festival acquisition of Tallulah. The film reunites Juno stars Ellen Page and Allison Janney for another movie that circles around a baby, but this time Page’s character isn’t as up front about the child’s origins. Tallulah is the kind of film that likely would’ve found a home with a major studio’s independent label, like Juno’s deal with Fox Searchlight, before the streaming companies pushed into feature distribution.
