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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
At long last, we have footage for Passengers. Most people have been waiting for this since mid-2015 when news hit that Sony was green lighting a sci-fi romance led by two of the hottest actors in the game. Christ Pratt was flying high off of The Lego Movie, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Jurassic World at the time, while Jennifer Lawrence was still in the midst of both The Hunger Games and X-Men series.
With easily accessible streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime, it’s easy to understand how independent short films go overlooked. However, the short film is a unique medium that provides avenues of expression to the super-indie filmmaker whose voice might otherwise be quelled in the big, bad world of explosions and monetization. Short films are the food trucks of the cinematic universe:







