When talking about exposé-style documentarians, or documentarians in general, you can’t ignore Alex Gibney. Ever since 2005’s Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, he’s been as prolific as he is popular, sparking public interest in everything from the U.
Director Ang Lee returns with his first film in four years, following up the critically and commercially successful Life of Pi with another book adaptation boasting some noteworthy use of technology. Lee has carved out a unique place for himself as an auteur, not looking back longingly to the days of film but exploring and pushing modern digital techniques to enhance character-based filmmaking. Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk sees him combining 3D, 4K resolution, and a very high 120fps frame rate to make the film look as close to natural human sight as possible.
Chantal Akerman is a unique director whose minimalist compositions have earned her a reputation as one of cinema’s foremost screen artists. Best known for her 1975 film Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, Akerman’s body of non-fiction work stands out with deliberately punctuated documentaries, giving the term “fly on the wall” new meaning. While Akerman’s body of work is varied, her vision of melding reality and fantasy are sometimes indistinguishable, and this omnibus of her work shines a light on an omniscient eye for capturing the world around us.
Shane Black’s The Nice Guys couldn’t come at a better time. Actually, strike that. If it had come out just a few months later after the slog of the summer movie season of blockbuster remakes, sequels, reboots, and rehashes had polluted our minds, then perhaps it would be received all the more with acclaim.
The winner of 2015’s Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, From Afar creeps into theaters with some serious credentials. It wouldn’t have come this far if it didn’t, as the story of a complicated relationship between a middle-aged man and a young gang member in Caracas doesn’t exactly scream marketability. If first-time feature director Lorenzo Vigas had been peddling it on his own, it likely wouldn’t have made it out of the festival circuit, no matter how good it was.
A common stereotype in film is that women don’t work and have no career. What can we learn from the films in which women’s careers are at the forefront?
We know that the hemp plant has been used in production of products since at least the 1600s. Up until the 1930s, marijuana was legal, used, and widely accepted. In the 1930s, with the onset of the great depression and American paranoia, “reefer madness” propaganda started to sprout up, as a huge anti-marijuana prohibition came underway.
Every Tuesday Film Inquiry publishes the movies that are opening in cinemas! This week: X-Men:
This year saw the very first Wales International Documentary Festival, which ran from 12th-14th May in the valleys of South Wales. Blackwood, to be more specific, north of Cardiff, and the home of the band Manic Street Preachers, the boxer Joe Calzaghe and the Dream Alliance race horse syndicate. They are, in fact, the very reason why the WIDF has found its home here.
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 Great Australian Genre Films.
Jaws really screwed up humanity. I mean, we’ve always had monster stories, but Jaws gave sharks a terrifying reputation, one that’s so universal that even landlocked kids like me would jump in a pool and immediately hear the John Williams score in our heads. We knew to fear sharks as if it were instinct, and it was a captivating thrill.
In Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, a treatise about the human condition, he wrote, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” For many people the work they do is pointless, only going far enough to provide limited sustenance while killing the spirit inside which yearns to be free. Naturally, this is nothing new.
Watching movies is a favorite pastime for people around the globe, and they engage in it for various reasons. You could say pictures are the ideal form of escapism, but I would argue that they are also much more than that. The movie is a portal to another world where we immerse in fantasy, drama, suspense, laughter, but also art and design.
It’s very easy for the media to get overexcited about a new Meryl Streep film, and one costarring Hugh Grant and directed by Stephen Frears at that, but this time there’s something different. I think maybe, what with the recent success of The Iron Lady and the confusion over Suffragette (where she was on screen for only a few moments), the media and filmgoers are suffering from a little overindulgence when it comes to one of the world’s greatest actresses. So although Florence Foster Jenkins has been promoted widely, it hasn’t been the film on everyone’s lips.
The comedy trio The Lonely Island made their name in the shorts scene, contributing 5-minute pieces to the monthly festival Channel 101 before becoming synonymous with the Saturday Night Live segment Digital Short. Since then, they’ve only become more popular, making the feature film Hot Rod and performing their hit song Everything is Awesome at the Oscars, while member Andy Samberg has become a household name. You may not recognize the other two members, Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone, but I guarantee that you’ve seen bits that they either wrote, directed, or featured in.