Even though he has recently made a switch from being a controversially quirky indie darling to a critically adored awards favourite, David O. Russell’s storytelling obsessions have always been the same. He has always been drawn to stories about dysfunctional families and the things that either drive them apart, or bind them closer together, varying from extreme to extreme.
This is the trailer for Jonás Cuarón’s first feature length film, Desierto. Brother of Alfonso Cuarón, Jonás was Alfonso’s co-writer for Gravity, as well as for Alfonso’s upcoming project, A Boy and His Shoe. In Desierto, a handful Mexican migrant workers are hoping to find a better life in the United States.
From the entire team of Film Inquiry: a very merry Christmas! We hope your holidays will be wonderful and filled with great movies (an, of course, food)!
Christmastime. Is Here. ‘Tis the season of light and gift-giving, but also of nostalgia and tired holiday classics (I imagine that this is the one time of year many of you find the need to break out the VCR).
Concussion does to the sports film what I was sincerely hoping it would avoid: it dramatizes its subject in such an unbelievable way that it becomes nothing more than mindless propaganda. Dealing with the true subject of brain injuries within retired NFL players, the film simply floats from one cliché to the next, which left me feeling almost dazed after it had finished.
Shot in stunning 16mm over the course of seven years in Afghanistan, The Land of the Enlightened is the first feature of Belgian documentary maker and photographer Pieter-Jan De Pue, which combines a cinema vérité portrait of a nation and its young people with the magic-reality of their dreams. In the vast mountain region of the northern Wakhan Corridor (“The Roof of the World”), a gang of nomadic children raid caravans and trade scavenged Soviet land mines, raw lapis lazuli and black opium for food and fuel. Possessing a talent for improvisation and an inexhaustible eagerness to learn, they navigate a harsh reality as U.
Let’s be honest, how well do you really know your own finances? Do you keep a budget, evaluate it regularly, and monitor your bank accounts, debt, and investments? Remember, I asked for honesty.
Every week Film Inquiry publishes the movies that are opening in cinemas! This week: The Hateful Eight, The Revenant, Joy, Point Break, 45 Years, Daddy’s Home and Concussion.
Oh, woe was us when the Harry Potter series finally finished… Little was sadder than those final scenes of the 8th movie, where you knew that this time the ending was final. With the books all long finished even before the movies and Pottermore being sadly unsatisfying for anyone over 12 years old, the Harry Potter universe had truly come to an end.
In the Heart of the Sea was originally supposed to premiere in early 2015, but it was pushed to later in the year at the last second. Ron Howard hoped that more people would come out to see the film now as opposed to in early spring, since some other oceanic adventure films have seen success around this time (Life of Pi, for example). It was my sincere hope that pushing the film to December was also because it would be worthy of premiering next to more awards-friendly films, which could mean that it was better than originally expected.
You will not…hold sway over me again…Rebel Wilson! Alright, there’s a certain pleasure in watching a Sacha Baron Cohen movie only because it mixes in the absurd in a world that doesn’t realize that it is absurd. Spies don’t usually do stunts but any football (soccer to Americans) fan knows about the levels of trouble a dedicated hooligan gets into during the season.
The cyclical nature of contemporary pop culture means that for every blockbuster released, a backlash is likely imminent over the course of its opening weekend, no matter how good the reviews. JJ Abrams knows better than anybody about the perils of falling victim to the hype train; despite critical and commercial success, mere weeks after its opening his Star Trek sequel Into Darkness was voted the worst Trek film of all time at a leading Trekkie convention. Taking fanboy rage on the chin, he has decided to follow this minor outrage by taking the directorial reigns of the new instalment of one of the most beloved franchises at all time, as audiences worldwide wait with bated breath to see whether or not he has (to use a common expression) “raped their childhood”.
Frank Sinatra, whose 100th birthday would have been this December, was one of the great entertainers of the 20th century. He had an exceptional voice that made him perhaps the most influential vocalist in history, but Sinatra doesn’t sing a note in his best movie, the Cold War thriller The Manchurian Candidate (1962). This deft political drama, which wouldn’t have been made without Sinatra’s intervention, uncannily predicts many of the tumultuous events of the 1960s and beyond.
As a woman is jogging over a pier, she sees a man drowning in the sea. She doesn’t hesitate and jumps in right after him, and saves him from certain death. He survives, and they connect over what happened – and they find they are connected in a more supernatural manner, as well.
After bugging my colleagues with discussion on Woody Allen films maybe one time too many, it was suggested that I write his Beginner’s Guide. Surprisingly, the thought hadn’t occurred to me, but I’m very excited to present my guide for you here now. I’ve gone a slightly different approach than usual because of the sheer amount of films the man has made in his still-continuing career, so it’s broken up into segments rather than a few films you should watch to get you started.