Film Reviews
Here is an interesting thought: Al Pacino is having something of a career renaissance. His last three major roles, including this year’s Manglehorn, are as far away from the go-to gangster’s early movies as can be.
Even though he’s often stereotyped as solely a director of inferior British gangster films, based on his first two releases Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, Guy Ritchie is actually more of an experimental director than you may initially realise. Even though his early films were successful and enjoyable guilty pleasures, Ritchie had something of an insatiable need to be taken seriously, looking towards the European arthouse for inspiration. His third feature Swept Away, starring his then wife Madonna, was a remake of a satirical 1974 Italian film not widely known to international audiences.
Written and directed by Simeon Duncombe and starring Jack Fagan, Trick Meter is an action packed four-minute adventure into another (quite nightmarish) dimension. It tells the story of a young skateboarding enthusiast who quickly finds himself in a deadly game of survival. With only three minutes on the clock, does he have the skills to make it back to reality?
A great director can elevate a movie that is nothing short of trash cinema into something masterful. Throughout his career, Orson Welles repeatedly chose projects (most notably Touch of Evil) as a challenge to see whether he could make a good movie out of source material that was far closer to the gutter than the stars. A cursory glance at some of the best directors of all time, from Welles and Alfred Hitchc*ck to David Fincher and Steven Soderbergh more recently, reads like a list of directors who enjoy cinema at its silliest, yet are such technically skilled filmmakers with a clear love for genre filmmaking that their movies are only ever laughable in a knowing way.
Entourage is an extremely puzzling film. Keeping in mind that the TV show giving rise to the film is superficial in nature, I don’t mean puzzling in the way you’d describe an Alain Renais film as puzzling. No, it is the reasons and decisions around everything to do with the film that I don’t quite understand.
I’m not now, nor have I ever been, a teenage girl. I’m not even a teenager anymore, and chances are if you’re in the UK and tried to see The Diary of a Teenage Girl, you won’t be either. Thanks, BBFC.
Fantastic Four is a film that people wanted to hate from the start. First, there was the controversial casting of Michael B. Jordan as the traditionally white character Johnny Storm; shortly following this was the discovery that Victor Von Doom was a computer hacker instead of a brilliant inventor; finally, there was the casting itself, which involved younger characters just finishing high school, whereas most adaptations of the story present the Fantastic Four as adults.
If it were not for Paul Thomas Anderson, there is a (very) good chance I wouldn’t be interested in writing about movies. It is because of his films that I take time to write for this humble little website. When I was a high school senior in 2009, my interest in movies inflated dramatically, and I watched a movie just about every night.
Two decades after the original Jurassic Park became the most successful film of all time at that point and ushered in the era of CGI, the blockbuster cinema landscape is very different. With Marvel Cinematic Universe, franchises six or seven sequels deep, and young-adult dystopias dominating the big releases more and more every year, original screenplays or adaptations of adult-oriented novels are struggling to make an impact – it is inconceivable that Steven Spielberg’s classic could have been released today with anything near the same level of success as in 1993. And so while the original film has a devoted fan base, few would have thought there was that much demand for a new Jurassic Park film, especially after its two increasingly inferior sequels.
After five movies and nearly two decades, you would think that the Mission: Impossible series would begin to lose its momentum. Remarkably, the series is still just as strong as ever, maybe even more so, with both Ghost Protocol and the latest, Rogue Nation now peaking as my top favorites.
Design studio Art & Graft have injected a welcome sense of humour into 1150 Canyon Road, a dark and stylish crime animation. The London-based animation team, led by creative director Mike Moloney, have done a stunning job of throwing together a narrative and several brilliant characters in just two and a half minutes and a single shot. Combining the paranoid, ’80s crime caper themes of L.
The arcade was video games’ greatest legacy. In a simpler time, before gaming consoles became mobile and placed within the home, the arcade was at the heart of the world’s most ultimate video gaming experience. As an impact, the popularity of the arcade video games snowballed into the animated characters that we now see onscreen – among them the likes of Donkey Kong and Pac-Man.
“A Cajun devil hunter goes to the crossroads and meets the devil’s attorney”. The compelling summary of Chasseur had me hooked before I even started watching, let alone the mesmerising central performance from the film’s writer and director, Christopher Soren Kelly. An unconventional structure, perhaps, but a successful one.
Woody Allen’s perennial dialogue of death and futility is upon us, and, as someone who takes comfort in the recurring anguish of Mr. Allen’s films, I couldn’t be happier with his 2015 iteration, Irrational Man. He executes a story equivalent in scope to what has become one of the auteur’s main ambitions these fifty years:
I was having a conversation recently with a friend who complained about how he gets annoyed when he sees child celebrities, as “they’ve already achieved more in life than I ever will and they are younger than me!” As a recent university graduate, without a firm footing into the grown-up world of work, I’m increasingly empathising with this statement, whilst also increasingly acknowledging how ridiculous it is. Why should I be bothered that people who are more talented than me are going places, just because they are younger?