The suspense thriller gets a modern makeover in Nerve, which takes on both modern cyber culture and the cult of instant celebrity in a slickly produced, fast-paced crowd-pleaser aimed straight at the audience that’s the most likely to get it. Nerve is self-consciously cool to a fault, but it does know who its target audience is. Nerve is particularly timely in light of the current worldwide furor over Pokémon GO.
Film Inquiry publishes a list of the movies that are opening in cinemas every Tuesday. Opening this week: Jason Bourne, Equity, Tallulah, Gleason, Nerve, Bad Moms, Indignation and The Tenth Man.
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 bank heist films.
You may have already spotted our announcement on Twitter, or in the widget on the sidebar here on the Film Inquiry website, but let’s also officially announce it: My book, Film Analysis for Beginners: How to Analyse Movies is now available on Amazon!
Meera Menon’s film Equity manages to tick a lot of boxes off in terms of the kind of characters it depicts and focuses on, from having a female lead (an incomparably skillful Anna Gunn, best-known for Breaking Bad), to a female ensemble, to numerous women behind the camera (led by director Menon, helming her second feature). One of many truly impressive feats the film manages to pull off is that it not once feels like it’s ticking any boxes – that the film is inclusionary of layered, dimensional female characters is of course, noteworthy, but it is one of its many strengths. Chief among these strengths is the compelling narrative, which starts from the screenplay (credited to Amy Fox, story by Sarah Megan Thomas, also onboard as a producer and co-star, with producer and co-star Alysia Reiner), and is bolstered by Menon’s capable direction, Gunn and the ensembles’ applause-worthy performances.
A man and his dog come to the wrong town in writer/director Ti West’s In a Valley of Violence, but not because there’s ghosts or goblins running amok. The low-budget horror darling is leaving all the scary stuff behind for his western, providing him with brand new genre conventions to play with. The most obvious twist here is that the valley has some weird humor mixed in with its deadly reputation, which just might slow down the adversaries played by Ethan Hawke and John Travolta.
It would be to put it lightly that this film’s reputation preceeded it. After years of people theorising about another sequel to Ghostbusters (1984), naively deciding to overlook the fact that Bill Murray didn’t want to work with Harold Ramis again, and Ramis’ recent death, a new film was announced. The only problem was that noted comedy director Paul Feig was put in charge.
Because the Internet can take a person virtually anywhere in the world and provide potentially infinite vats of knowledge, raising children in a dictatorial environment nowadays seems more ridiculous than ever. The mechanics of detaining an adult with an existing awareness of the outside world is even more bewildering, because chances are they’ve read about the Josef Fritzl case and have at least some idea of how to escape. Alas, cinema, ever the portrayer of such cultural terrors, has provided startling means with which to explore such a phenomenon.
When it comes to cinema, it is truly the best and the worst of times. An unstable economy and the rampant rise of piracy have forced studios to rehash old films and hammer original ideas into the ground just to try and make money, with many mainstream movies now catering towards the profitable Chinese market to make those big bucks that the US haven’t been producing lately. Whilst it’s a dire situation, this new social media age has been a huge step forward in retaining and reviving film history.
When a man exposes government programs that sound more like conspiracy theories than reality, you can bet that someone will make a movie about it. It only took three years for the story of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden to hit theaters, but that doesn’t mean that it was easy to do. Co-writer and director Oliver Stone has spoken very publicly about the struggle to get financing for Snowden, which he claims was turned down by every major studio in Hollywood.
I first watched Party Monster a couple of years ago, when once-infamous club promoter Michael Alig was released from prison, where he served 17 years for brutally murdering his drug dealer. The 2003 biopic, based on James St James’ memoir, “Disco Bloodbath”, flew under the radar during its initial release. But the film’s subject, “Club Kids” of ’90s Manhattan, once commanded TV screens across the country.
2016 is already shaping up to become the year of reboots and sequels; whether or not they are deemed acceptable is a different matter. Now You See Me indeed worked as a solo endeavour back when the magic was introduced three years previous. The existence of the sequel may come as a surprise to some, due to the mixed responses circling the first instalment.
The Space Between Us is the classic boy meets girl story, except the boy and girl are on different planets and the boy doesn’t know who his father is. It’s science fiction, romance, mystery, and medical drama all rolled up into one hopefully neat package. Admit it, if the film can pull off all these threads, it’ll be a pretty great movie.
In Andrew Davis’ brilliant 1993 thriller The Fugitive, the filmmakers use a variety of techniques to lead the viewer through the story. They drop hints with color and lighting that viewers are not necessarily trained to consciously notice while they’re watching, and employ a gripping editing style that effectively supports the cat-and-mouse game that embroils the film’s two main characters. Every movie has content, which is what is seen and heard on screen, and what is referred to as form, which is the way in which the film’s creators manipulate that content to their own ends and present it to the viewer.
We are often faced with circumstances that challenge us in ways we feel unprepared to face. Sometimes, these challenges come in the form of an option: to accept or deny, to speak or to be silent, to stay or to go.