Film Reviews
For as long as there have been films, there have been coming of age movies and there have been high school movies. These types of film, these genres, have become so overdone, that it becomes hard for a single film to really stand out. Dope does.
More than 150 years after the old West faded into legend, the western genre is still very much alive and well. Slow West is the feature debut of writer-director John Maclean. Although it contains some clear watermarks of a first-time director, it is also among the more unique modern westerns in the way that it plays around with traditional western tropes and conventions.
Ever since the glory days of silent cinema, Hollywood has been criticised of running out of ideas. This is why the biopic is the perfect genre for screenwriters and directors. A typical life doesn’t neatly fit into a simple three-act structure, but by highlighting an individual’s greatest successes, and framing them in a way that makes everything else inconsequential by comparison, you can turn something as uninteresting as somebody’s life into a thrilling drama.
Before watching Ant-Man, it would be safe to predict that the movie would be the film that destroys the foundations of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. This is a film that has suffered from well-publicised production troubles, leading many to question the artistic integrity of the directors the studio chooses to helm its projects, whose directorial vision has to be sacrificed in order to create another chapter in studio head Kevin Feige’s grand master plan. Production troubles sometimes lead to fantastic movies, but more often than not, they lead to gigantic box office flops – not even the seemingly unbeatable Marvel can overcome that, surely?
At the start of Andrew Bujalski’s latest film, Results, Danny (Kevin Corrigan) entreats his wife, Christine (Elizabeth Berridge), from the street below the open window of their New York apartment to let him back into the marital home. She closes the window, so he grabs its ledge in an attempt to pull himself up to and through the plate glass barrier. Danny, who carries Corrigan’s rosaceous, wan features, brittle hair, and generous paunch (sorry, Kevin), quickly drops to the ground.
Five Minutes is an interactive short horror film set in a future where the world is overrun with zombies. After being infected, dad John knows he only has five minutes before he turns. But he is loathe to leave his daughter, Mia.
Immortality is a myth. This is a fact not only based on a reality standpoint, but also literarily. Ask anybody the first thing which crosses their minds when discussing the subject, and most likely mythical beings such as wizards, witches, vampires or superheroes would top the list.
Initially, it seems that I Am Evel Knievel competently weaves archival footage with a range of talking heads. However, the documentary goes to great lengths to embellish a very unlikeable man and omits some of his life’s failings, making it an inferior production to the BBC’s Richard Hammond Meets Evel Knievel, which also has the advantage of featuring the man himself shortly before he died on November 30th 2007. During the 1970s, Evel Knievel was one of the most famous names in America and the world.
Sequels sell like hotcakes. Filmgoers cannot be faulted for summing up today’s film industry simply as that. We don’t really need to draw up any charts or statistics to figure out that half of the films in 2015 consist of sequels.
There is something so endlessly fascinating about the character of Sherlock Holmes that prevents him from ever becoming boring to audiences, no matter how different Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective creation is to the pop-culture tastes of the time. The source material is so undeniably entertaining that even if it gets revised as an action blockbuster, as seen in Guy Ritchie’s two recent movies, or transplanted into the modern day, on Steven Moffat’s BBC series, it never loses any of its original charm. No matter how unique a new adaptation of the stories may be, Doyle’s stories are so widely revered that nearly every adaptation of them remains faithful to the essence of the characters, even if they may take a few liberties.
Inside Out is the latest in a long line of Pixar films that deal with the personification of something that you may have thought to be emotionless. Rather than bugs, toys, or fish this time, though, it is dealing directly with emotions themselves. What if the inner workings of our head were similar to an operational business, where our emotions literally guide and influence the actions in our daily life?
Testament Of Youth is based on Vera Brittain’s memoir of the same name. Her book pays homage to her own losses while growing up during World War I, but also the great loss felt by her generation. Brittain’s book is perhaps unique in that in the UK we are often told about the loss of life during the war.
Ignorance truly is bliss. Before watching Joshua Oppenheimer’s harrowing 2012 documentary The Act of Killing, I had no knowledge of the 1965-1966 genocide in Indonesia, which was initially intended on purging “communists” from Indonesian society, but resulted in a million innocent people being massacred. That I could have no awareness of the subject could be blamed on western ignorance – upon receiving the BAFTA for best documentary, Oppenheimer claimed that the UK and US were partly responsible for these atrocities to happen due to their insistence on destroying communism at any cost (a statement that was naturally cut out of the TV broadcast).
Like many people, I was a great fan of Bridesmaids and The Heat, so it was likely that the newest film to pair Paul Feig and Melissa McCarthy would be right up my alley. Likely, but even I had my doubts over Spy. A spy comedy?
The Voices, the English language debut of French-Iranian director Marjane Satrapi, unarguably gives Ryan Reynolds the best acting role of his career. Sadly, his gleefully maniacal performance is the sole positive – and that is most likely due to the lack of interesting roles he’s been given throughout his career that make this performance stand out in comparison. The character he’s playing is badly devised and written, yet Reynolds somehow manages to make the character compelling.