Ben-Hur actually opens with the horses getting ready to bolt from the gates for the chariot race. That will seem heretical to audiences familiar with the Academy Award winning 1959 version of the story. Younger moviegoers may not even realize this is a remake, and may not even realize that the phrase “chariot race” used to refer to a big movie’s big action climax.
With an ensemble cast telling a relatable story about friends and lovers, Clea DuVall succeeds with her directorial and writing debut feature film. The Intervention stars Natasha Lyonne, Melanie Lynskey, and DuVall, bringing a But I’m A Cheerleader reunion to the screen, and also adds Cobie Smulders and Jason Ritter, among others. This is a fun and heartfelt story about four couples who gather for a weekend away at Jessie (DuVall) & Ruby’s (Smulders) family vacation house.
Something tells me that The Light Between Oceans won’t start with the opening and closing of a butterfly knife. No, this trailer feels like a departure for writer/director Derek Cianfrance, who previously wowed audiences with his ragged love story Blue Valentine and generational epic The Place Beyond the Pines. Those films took a toll on their audiences, and while The Light Between Oceans won’t cover easy material, it looks like it’s coming in a melodramatic package that will make it easier to digest.
In a time when facts, figures and certainties are thin on the ground, when reality itself appears to be fragmented into many non-congruent shards, it is perhaps not so surprising that some sense of perspective can be gained in the comforting darkness of the cinema theatre. Discombobulated by events both political and personal, I sought refuge from Manchester’s silvery anti-summer at a screening of Paul Fegan’s Where You’re Meant To Be, chronicling musician Aidan Moffat’s journey around Scotland in his quest to re-interpret some of the country’s folk standards in a more contemporary light. Throughout the film and the subsequent Q & A with Fegan and Moffat at Manchester’s Home, the theme of authenticity surfaced from the loch of uncertainty that clouds our ability to make sense of these times.
In the fifties, Tex Avery made a series of shorts for MGM collectively called “The World of Tomorrow” in which the animator imagined what wonders the kitchen appliances, automobiles and society of the future will offer. The cartoons present with one fantastical gadget after another, all quite utilitarian, but with tongue firmly planted in cheek. The message is clear, technology may be our salvation, but left in the hands of man there will always be something to muck up.
‘So Bad They’re Good’ movies are a thing now. Movie list websites are awash with them. Troll 2 is often the high-watermark, and it appears that most of these no-budget horrors tend to be of American origin.
What to do when the aliens arrive is one of the great questions before us, and I don’t just mean in the fictional realm. Humans have been thinking about our introduction since before we ventured into outer space, even going so far as to curate images and sounds of Earth, slap them on a couple gold records, and attach them on the space probes Voyager 1 and 2. The likelihood of these ever being found by intelligent life is minimal, but it’s a pleasant daydream to imagine the utter confusion of anything that might find them.
In January 2006 at the Sundance Film Festival, the world was introduced to Jody Hill and Danny McBride by way of The Foot Fist Way. Billed as a comedy, the movie starred McBride as a down-on-his-luck Taekwondo instructor from North Carolina. The film quickly establishes itself to the viewer as a grossly sophomoric bit of business, with plenty of crass dinner table conversations and shallow behavior throughout.
The Phenom is a difficult film to pin down. While trailers and taglines suggest a sports drama in the vein of, say, A League of Their Own or For The Love of the Game, this somewhat sombre drama feels tapered down, unwilling to pander to the feelgood melodrama that can sometimes overwhelm these kind of movies. It’s the story of the improbably named Hopper Gibson (Johnny Simmons), a talented pitcher thrust into the limelight after signing for a major league club straight out of school.
Film Inquiry compiles a list of the movies that are opening in cinemas every Tuesday. Opening this week: Mechanic:
“It’s like everything changed in the blink of an eye. One moment we were fine, then everything turned to shit.” When I heard those words in voice-over I thought:
*Editorial Note: This documentary short won the Best Documentary prize at the first Drunken Film Fest, organised by Film Inquiry’s Jax Griffin. The documentary selections were hand picked by Arlin Golden, another contributor to the site* Every American community is home to countless strange pastimes and traditions, but many of these events don’t fully adapt to modern American life.
The glossy biopic genre is getting yet another entry in Hidden Figures, which dredges up the forgotten story of African-American women in NASA and displays it with wit and verve. We’re only two years removed from the mathlete battle between The Imitation Game and The Theory of Everything, and while Hidden Figures has no clear rival this year, it will be hard not to draw comparisons to those two recent films. Why?
About midway through Andrei Tarkovsky’s feature 1962 film debut of Ivan’s Childhood, in the midst of a Russian battlefield field torn asunder during World II, a cross is backlit by a setting sun. The cross is obscured in shadow and yet its beauty remains. A spiritual man, Tarkovsky was never afraid to ask questions about spiritual matters.
As a person who came of age in the 1980s, I was lucky enough to witness some incredible cultural, societal and artistic developments. The fall of the Berlin Wall, for example. Chernobyl.