Let the Melissa McCarthy love recommence! Audiences have been shelling out money for the former Groundling ever since Bridesmaids, and The Boss marks her last outing before the much talked about Ghostbusters reboot. If the latter is a success then McCarthy will have a franchise on her hands (if she doesn’t already have one with Spy), and her career will be stabilized for years to come.
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 focused on zombie films not directed by George A.
The world is a terrifying place. Its machinations are convoluted constructions managed by a mixture of public servants or private business people whom we would like to assume have the public’s best interests at heart, but whose true motives are more dubious and difficult to discern. Oftentimes financial imperatives outweigh common sense, and the result is disaster on a massive scale.
Every Tuesday Film Inquiry publishes the movies that are opening in cinemas! This week: Race, Risen, The Witch, Embrace of the Serpent, Busco Novio Para Mi Mujer, Neerja and Rolling Papers.
I love the TV show Dad’s Army. Originally aired between 1968 and 1977, it is a show that remains hugely popular to this day, and I can watch it every Saturday night on BBC Two and listen to the radio version every Monday morning on BBC Radio 4 Extra. Like all incredible BBC comedies, it makes up a part of the British psyche and its characters and catchphrases are legendary.
Remember when everyone fell in love with Once? Well, that was nine years ago now, and writer/director John Carney has yet to, and probably never will, produce another hit quite like it. Begin Again made more money, but the success of Once was a right-place-at-the-right-time sort of phenomena.
Should you feel like bringing up Woody Allen in conversation there is a good chance you will either be met with a proclamation of love or a snort of disdain. The Brooklyn-born filmmaker, now in his eighth decade, is divisive for a whole range of reasons (not all of which are related to his films), but he has a solid fan-base that has allowed him to become one of the most consistently working directors around. Averaging out at one film per year, Allen has an extensive back catalogue that is often overlooked.
One of the few common experiences not only among different cultures, but different species, is the act of eating. We all just have to do it, and we don’t have a say in it. Food unites high and low, left and right, young and all, through necessity and playful manipulation of our senses.
It’s a reunion on all fronts in the Forsaken trailer. Characters find each other after a long war, actors reunite with former co-stars, and, of course, Kiefer and Donald Sutherland play father and son for the first time onscreen. Anyone who’s entertained by meta-filmmaking should relish watching the two work through their characters’ broken relationship, but there’s plenty of other less obvious things to suss out from this trailer.
The independent film movement of the 1990’s allowed for a range of young, hungry filmmakers to move to a forefront which many directors nary got a chance to experience in the past. Yearning for voices which were “out of the box” in story, dialogue and acting, these indie flicks began to span beyond just arthouse cinema. Creatives didn’t always have to rely on big studio backing to get their projects off the ground.
While watching the trailer for Get a Job, I actually found myself thinking about how young Anna Kendrick and Miles Teller looked. I initially chalked it up to excellent genetics, but then I read that the film was shot way back in 2012. It sat in the can for undisclosed reasons (not a good sign), and its director and writers haven’t had a single film credit since (really not a good sign).
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 focused on women-directed films of the 1970’s.
Long maligned no matter the medium, the short film is often seen merely as a launching pad for bigger and better things. However, for documentarians, the short is almost the primary form, as it takes a lot of time, funding and quality footage to come up with a feature-length documentary worthy of release. Thus, for documentary, the short is the rule rather than the exception, and the field is stacked with quality, potent films, more or less unhampered by typical commercial expectations.
A darling of the Cannes Film Festival, Apichatpong Weerasethakul has been mesmerizing western audiences for years now, most notably with his Palme d’Or winning Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. A feverish quality runs through both that and Cemetery of Splendour, which disregards any need for narrative clarity and dumps audiences into a world where life, death, and consciousness don’t have solid boundaries. The divide between eastern and western cinema runs deep, and while Weerasethakul is a straight up experimental filmmaker, his Thai roots add an extra layer of mystique to his movies.
It’s not often that you can say that someone is one of your favourite directors, but for a long time you didn’t even know their name or recognise that all the films you liked were theirs. Jeanie Finlay is a special case though, the documentarian who pushes you hard to look at the subject and never at themselves. Through her good working relationship with the BBC I and many of you in the UK have been watching her films without ever actually joining the dots and seeing that Finlay was the filmmaker behind them all.