Films and culture provide us with scripts that help us make sense of dating and sexuality. Unfortunately, many of the scripts are outdated.
After a brief hiatus with Fast and Furious 7, mainstream horror’s prodigal son James Wan has returned to the Devil’s Church of Jump Scares with a sequel to his paranormal blockbuster, The Conjuring. The main lesson he seems to have learned on his franchise-hopping action excursion is how to make things feel absolutely massive, and in following the golden rule of sequels, he’s applied that bigger-is-better ethos to The Conjuring 2. The ghostbusting duo of the first film – Ed and Lorraine Warren – are called to London to flush out some more housebound demons, but in an effort to raise the stakes over the first film, Lorraine is also faced with her own adversaries:
Film Inquiry compiles a list of the movies that are opening in cinemas every Tuesday. Opening this week: Independence Day:
German expressionism was an art movement that began life around 1910 emerging in architecture, theatre and art. Expressionism art typically presented the world from a subjected view and thus attempted to show a distorted view of this world to evoke a mood or idea. The emotional meaning of the object is what mattered to the artist and not the physical reality.
Usually I will have heard about a film before it is released. It’s odd when that doesn’t happen. It’s even odder when the film was originally released almost a year ago and I still haven’t heard about it.
A new Disney princess is coming our way in Moana, and it looks like she’s continuing Disney’s efforts to make their female characters more reflective of modern women. The film is about Moana’s adventure to find a fabled island, and while she’s accompanied by her pet pig and the demi-god Maui, it’s her skills as a navigator that allow the journey to take place. This teaser, sadly, focuses more on Maui than Moana.
Over at our official Facebook page, we are currently posting daily film recommendations. Each week has a different theme. This is a collection of those recommendations!
Returning to the bountiful setting of World War II era Europe is The Innocents, being released in a few countries under the title Agnus Dei. The latter is more indicative of its focus, following a French Red Cross doctor who must treat pregnant nuns near where she is stationed in Poland. It seems that no one was left unscathed in the war-ravaged country, hence the unwanted and potentially disastrous pregnancies that are based on real occurrences.
It’s critical that media show that all people belong. However, very few films in the United States are made by and about ethnic minorities.
2016’s annual Woody Allen movie is Café Society, which kicked off this year’s Cannes Film Festival and drew more attention for a joke aimed at Allen than its middling reviews. This kind of reaction to his films isn’t uncommon. The last year he didn’t release a movie was 1981, and it’s more like clockwork than an event when another one comes out.
Despite the title being one of the most fascinating I’ve seen in a while, Careful What You Wish For, directed by Elizabeth Allen Rosenbaum, is about as painfully average as a neo-noir thriller film can get. You will not be surprised or fascinated at any point in this film, where a younger man takes an older woman (Isabel Lucas) as his lover. Though, said older woman isn’t all that much older than him, sadly showing how limited roles for women are in this industry.
Before you start bemoaning the post-apocalyptic saturation of the movie world, let’s take a good, hard look at the trailer for Into the Forest. Yes, the power goes out and the grocery stores are emptied, but there’s no great battle against these events, no chosen person who must bring humanity back. Instead, there are two sisters who gather food and comfort each other as the world changes around them.
One of the most controversial directors currently working today, Nicolas Winding Refn is a provocative force to be reckoned with. He has an utterly distinctive voice that couldn’t ever be mistaken for anybody else. Each of his films is widely divisive, almost always opening to heated opinion from audiences.
The vast majority of video game films have failed for not respecting their source material, using them only as basic backdrops to put some hackneyed plot in place for a quick cash-grab. Various franchises like Tomb Raider and Prince of Persia have all failed because of this blatant apathy, and because those involved in their making didn’t care about how to integrate the art of making video games with the craft of making films. The less said about the absolute disasters that were the various video game films directed by talentless hack Uwe Boll, the better.
Every Tuesday Film Inquiry publishes the movies that are opening in cinemas! This week: Finding Dory, Central Intelligence, Tickled, The Last King and Clown.