The wide world of films have long held a place for the meandering soul-searcher. They’re characters that move aimlessly through the world with no end goal in sight. Perhaps they’ve become disillusioned with the world as it is, or perhaps, like in American Honey, they are too young to know all the directions they could go.
Often shrugged off as a base form of entertainment, the action genre has carved out its place in the cinematic phalanx. Spy capers, heist films or just a good old-fashioned shoot ‘em up have all become, in some why or another, a part of our lives in the form of witty one-liners such as ‘I’ll be back,” Detective John McClane saving Christmas (twice) and The Rock being— The Rock. Memorable moments which have become ingrained in our memories.
Captain Fantastic will likely live or die based on Viggo Mortensen’s performance, as his character is the only one that understands both the isolated world he established for his children and the regular world they must now enter. The hope of what he and his wife were trying to accomplish must be communicated through him, and whatever ramifications come from their decisions will fall squarely on his shoulders. It’s a lonely role in a movie populated by a ton of characters, and it’s hard to come up with a guy more likely to pull it off than Mortensen.
Director Yorgo Lanthimos first grabbed the world’s attention with Alps and the seismic Dogtooth. Recently, he sprung another biting, absurdist satire into the festival circuit with The Lobster. It takes place in a world in which relationships are mandatory; the characters, all newly single, or newly of age, are detained in a hotel that works, basically, as a deadly speed dating service.
You will see the term postmodern to describe the comedy of The Lonely Island, the comedy team responsible for this film and the birth of the Saturday Night Live Digital Short, as you read opinions on their newest film, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping. It is a vague term that means comedy that deconstructs the art and is self-aware.
It’s been a while since the world checked in on David Brent, the self-described star of the documentary series The Office. Of course, we all know that Brent doesn’t exist and that his documentary was actually a mockumentary television series that aired in the U.K.
I first saw My Brief Eternity at the Wales International Documentary Festival, and such was its impact on me that after meeting the director Clare Sturges, and after writing up the festival itself, I resolved to review it so that others would come to know of it. The short documentary is a joint project between Maggie’s and Brightest Films, the former being a cancer charity, the latter Sturges’ production company. The film is about the Welsh artist; Osi Rhys Osmond.
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 movies made for TV.
How many people were having flashbacks to the Toy Story series during this trailer? I mean, the supermarket was very reminiscent of Al’s Toy Barn, and the whole premise of giving inanimate objects complex emotional lives that humans eventually wreck is Toy Story as a whole. Except the things we do to our food is way more messed up than simple abandonment, so I guess Jessie doesn’t earn a sad song until Emily pulls a knife on her now.
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.