Film Reviews
There is only one theatre within reasonable driving distance where I can go to see the smaller, limited release films that come out. On their website they list any small film as an “art film”. When I finished watching Snowpiercer this title seemed like a complete misnomer.
According to my personal checklist, the extent to which a film can affect a viewer is a mark of its quality. Pioneer must have done something right, because it absolutely wrecked my sense of calm. A full 24 hours after watching director Erik Skjoldbjærg’s thriller for the first time, I still find myself feeling strangely uneasy – stealing glances over my shoulder, eyeing my friends and family with icy distrust…I even threw out a plate of unattended food on the off chance it had been poisoned by the shady agents of a deep-sea drilling conglomerate.
I’m going to preface this article by saying I’m very set in my ways. Taken into a different context that means I’m old, and at the ripe wizened age of 27, I shun your new fan-dangled ideas of what makes a good movie. Furthermore I will use this mindset in reviewing the short film 9 Minutes.
Calvary chronicles a week in the life of Irish Catholic Priest, Father James Lavelle (Brendan Gleeson). When we meet him, Father Lavelle hears a haunting confession: the man was abused by a priest in his youth.
In this animated short film called Francis, a young man tells us about his memories of a camping trip. As he grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, he’d often go camping in the Quetico Provincial Park, up on the border of Minnesota and Canada. However, he won’t be going back there any time soon, not after what happened there to Francis Brandywine.
Last year, Denis Villeneuve directed one of the most pleasant surprises of the year with Prisoners, an unrelentingly tense film about child abduction that presented intriguing moral questions while also providing satisfying twists and turns throughout. That filmed starred Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenhaal. Gyllenhaal has teamed up with Villeneuve again in Enemy, a much smaller and much, much more mind-bending film than Prisoners.
The Quiet Ones director John Pogue took a risk – inviting the viewer to follow along with Professor Joseph Coupland’s (Jared Harris) “experiment” to prove that the supernatural is simply a manifestation created in the minds of the mentally disturbed. What Professor Coupland and his team didn’t expect was a genuine haunting. The Quiet Ones was unexpected, different.
Wow. I didn’t go into How To Train Your Dragon 2 expecting my world to be rocked, but… it sort of did.
Room 8, a short film written and directed by James W. Griffiths, takes place in a Russian prison. British prisoner Ives (Tom Cullen) is taken to a new cell, where he meets the mysterious Shears (Michael Gould).
Remember Mrs. Doubtfire? It’s not a spectacular movie, but I remember it fondly, having enjoyed it when I was little.
Here at Film Inquiry, we were quite excited about The Rover. The trailer looked very promising; moreover, the movie was directed by famous and notorious director David Michôd. Famous for his hauntingly emotional scripts, notorious for the amounts of violence he tends to feature.
In Edge of Tomorrow, Earth is hit by a meteor infested with a strange and highly violent alien species called the Mimics. They immediately start to destroy the world, and everything the humans do is futile. The alien species is strong and fast, and more importantly, has control over time – though no one (aside from a very select few) is aware of it.
X-Men: First Class wasn’t necessarily designed to be part of the original trilogy’s continuity. X-Men:
This awesome short shows you the mysterious disappearance of Private Glenn. His mission is to be dropped on a planet, though we don’t know what else the mission entails. All we see, constantly, is his face – he was recorded by the camera mounted on his helmet, and all we see from his surroundings is what’s reflected on that helmet.
Maleficent is the latest addition to the Disney legacy that tells the story of the 1959 animated classic Sleeping Beauty, but this time from the perspective of the story’s villain, Maleficent. Maleficent is played by Angelina Jolie and Princess Aurora, the Sleeping Beauty, is played by Elle Fanning. The movie also marks the directorial debut for visual effects producer Robert Stromberg.