Every Tuesday, Film Inquiry compiles a list of the movies that are opening in cinemas. Opening this week: The Girl On The Train, The Birth of a Nation, The 13th, Voyage of Time, Under The Shadow, Middle School:
Baz Luhrmann is a divisive director. His unique blend of pop culture references coupled with highly choreographed, hyperbolic sequences can, for some, prove distracting. Certainly, these criticisms are understandable, if not valid.
During September, we featured a short film every day, to promote general awareness of short films and the great talent behind them, and to help people find some excellent shorts. Today we’re listing all the short films we featured. We’re also including a bunch of fun graphs to illustrate the data behind the short films!
Killer Friends is a short horror-comedy written by Zach Noe Towers and co-directed by Towers and Tina Carbone. The film stars Jenna-Lee Carreiro, Dave Racki, and Peggy Sinnott alongside Towers, who plays the indestructible jerk himself, Scott. With Friends Like This, Who Needs Enemies?
It’s taken thirteen years for the guys to stage another Christmas heist, but Willie and Marcus are finally back in all their surly glory. They’ve set their sights a bit higher this time, using their Santa and elf routine to infiltrate a large charity group instead of measly department stores. The rude and seemingly uncontrollable antics of Willie put the entire enterprise in jeopardy last time, and thirteen years doesn’t seem to have changed his behavior.
Hundreds of thousands of moviegoers, press, and industry players descend on Canada every year for the Toronto International Film Festival. Eleven days of red carpets, screenings, junkets, and presentations cause a gluttonous amount of content to stream out of the city, covering everything from awards season contenders to fashion faux pas. It’s difficult to imagine anything getting missed by the avalanche, but those who attend know just how immense the festival is.
Sometimes when a movie starts off slow, it picks up and has a good pay off in the end which makes the slow and boring parts forgivable. That’s not the case for Detours, written by Mara Lesemann and directed by Robert McCaskill. The film stars Tara Westwood and Carlo Fiorletta with cameo appearances by Paul Sorvino and Phyllis Somerville.
It’s the final day of our #ShortFilmADay challenge (more here), if you will believe it! I, for one, hardly can – these thirty days have gone by so fast and we’ve seen so many amazing short films! But you didn’t think we wouldn’t go into October without some final fireworks, right?
Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong has done a few acting gigs in recent years, but nothing with the heft and screen time of Ordinary World. In the film, Armstrong stars as a rocker in the midst of a mid-life crisis, and his presence is surprising not only as an actor but as a normally aging adult. His character has left the stage behind for normal family life, and with that comes greying hair and a basic style.
“Sure, I’ll see you again before either of us knows it”. It’s a sentiment resonating with most of us after the passing of a loved one. This line opens the beautiful, bleak, January Hymn, written and directed by Katherine Canty.
Preservation of the environment shouldn’t be a political issue, let alone a controversial one. Yet the right wing governments of the western world are frequently abandoning environmental and climate change issues, even building entire grand-standing platforms on how the entire act of climate change is a mere myth. The masses no longer trust “experts”, no matter how many facts they have on their side about the devastating realities of our changing environment.
With the #ShortFilmADay challenge, Film Inquiry promotes the watching of short films, and supports indie film and filmmakers! It’s never to late to join! Find more information about the challenge here.
Inferno bumps the Robert Langdon film series up to a trilogy, as the symbologist is again swept up in a globetrotting mystery. While not as controversial as the series’ previous entries, The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons, the film stills deals heavily with Catholic mythology, this time centering on Dante’s Inferno and its formative influence on the modern idea of hell. It’s not surprising that the series, taken from books of the same name by Dan Brown, have such enduring popularity.
Over at our official Facebook page, we are currently posting daily film recommendations with each week being a different theme.This week’s theme is the films of British cult director Alex Cox, and this article is a collection of those recommendations! The definition of the “cult movie” director, Alex Cox has had an incredibly interesting career, flirting with both studio and independent filmmaking – imprinting his own unique anarchic vision with each film he makes.
The idea of the “secret sequel” seems to be a new marketing scheme in horror cinema as of late. Earlier this year, a sequel to the film Cloverfield came out, called 10 Cloverfield Lane, yet nobody knew it was a sequel until a couple months before its premiere. In similar fashion, Blair Witch, the sequel to 1999’s seminal horror The Blair Witch Project, was originally filmed under the fake title “The Woods” so as to hide its true intentions.