In any sector where publishing one’s writing, there are various types into which one can subvert their writing style. The four most basic are expository, narrative, descriptive and persuasive. When it comes to writing for film and media, though, all four of these sorts can be used.
2015’s Toronto International Film Festival gave audience awards to Room, the quietly affecting story of a mother and son, and Hardcore Henry, a first-person action film about a super-soldier fighting his way through Russia. Yes, Hardcore Henry’s win was in the Midnight Madness category, but that contrast is still amazing. I don’t buy into the divide between daytime and nighttime festivalgoers, because I know there’s a lot of people, like me, that start in the morning hours and stay to the raucous end.
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 women-directed films of the 1980’s.
A strange thing’s been happening in American cinemas in recent years, and it’s the most natural by-product of modern marketing that you can get. There’s been a rise in low budget films targeting very narrow demographics, specifically Christian, Hispanic, and African American audiences. Now that everyone can be monitored and categorized thanks to online tracking, these films are able to launch small but effective marketing campaigns that only their targeted demographic sees.
Michael Thelin’s directorial feature debut is perhaps most effective in its earliest stages. When we are first introduced to a sleepy suburban neighbourhood, it is already clear that something is amiss. When we witness the kidnapping of a young woman on her way to babysit, we begin to get some idea of what is in store.
In 1971 a particularly interesting film bestowed with an X rating made its way to a limited release in New York City and Los Angeles. This film was not a commercial success. It was a film that was so “out there” some reviewers refused to even see it.
Every Tuesday Film Inquiry publishes the movies that are opening in cinemas! This week: The Divergent Series:
Ryan and Amy are sitting nervously on a sofa in a nondescript room. A doctor addresses them, “Mr and Mrs Green, I’m sorry, it’s not good news”. The doctor continues to tell them that their one year old son’s chemotherapy has not worked.
Like all social groups, people with disability have been portrayed in diverse ways in Hollywood, from stereotypical representations in horror to genuine inspirations in melodramas. Disability is represented as a metaphor through imagery or characters’ features, or as a direct subject within the narrative. The entire concept of genre is recycled from elements within society, and the relevant features of each specifically labels the disabled into a certain character type.
For many Cubans, the country’s recent economic reforms have drastically changed their hopes for the future. Access to decent wages, which had long been a demeaning struggle for its citizens, has them tasting things like stable markets, modern farming equipment, and premiere drag races. Okay, so drag races aren’t the most important of dreams, but to its avid participants the return of sanctioned events means a little slice of heaven.
There have been an abundance of actor, actress and director collaborations throughout the history of cinema. One of the first collaborations in Hollywood was that of director D.W Griffth and actress Lilian Gish, who worked together on over thirty films throughout the 1910s and 1920s.
Taste is a fluid thing, though we seldom view it as such in the moment. For many, our cultural tastes define us and they are as solid and inscrutable as a pope made out of granite. Yet this is something that is often felt even bereft of the experience required to discover, explore and refine what kinds of cinema to which one really responds.
Perhaps the most impressive aspect of Robert Eggers’ The Witch is its unwillingness to pander to its audience. Though people may have been expecting a semi-typical supernatural horror film (complete with jumpscares and excessive gore), what they receive instead is something much more disturbing in its implications. Set in Puritan era New England, The Witch is an atmospherically driven, religion-coated film that is, at times, both beautiful and terrifying.
It’s tempting to back away slowly from Nina, to pretend you didn’t see it and in doing so sidestep the subtleties of the controversy surrounding it, because while we regularly come together to discuss the statistics of race representation, colorism rarely enters the conversation. Whether this stems from discomfort and ignorance by the predominantly white media, the pessimistic idea that we need to fight one battle at a time, or one of the many other factors that contribute to the silence surrounding this issue, silence will get us precisely nowhere. So let’s talk about it.
Stand By Me is one of my favorite movies, I could watch it a hundred times without getting bored. I have watched it in different phases of my life, through various perspectives. Every time I watch it, I learn a new detail that I had not noticed the before.