comedy
Skiptrace (originally titled Jue Di Tao Wang) is a 2016 action-comedy film directed by Renny Harlin and starring Jackie Chan, Johnny Knoxville and Chinese actress Fan Bingbing. It is about a Hong Kong cop and an avid gambler that must team together, each for their own reasons, and take down the Chinese crime syndicate and its mysterious leader ‘The Matador’. It is a film that I, in all honesty, did not want to sit down and watch at first but did, due to unmentionable circumstances, and in my forced viewing of this easy-going and lighthearted film, I began to remember why Jackie Chan is one of the most beloved names in Hollywood.
A midlife crisis is roughly defined as a period of anxiety and disappointment reflecting on your past as you approach middle age. Those going through a midlife crisis are noted to act irrationally compared to their previous behaviour in a need to get out of a self-perceived rut. It has often been noted that no two people react to the dawning of maturity in the same manner, even if the cause of the anxiety is always the same.
It now appears to be a given that every few years, Woody Allen produces a film hailed by critics as a “return to form”. In keeping with relatively recent late period offerings such as Blue Jasmine, Midnight in Paris and Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Café Society has also been afforded that accolade. Is this lazy journalism or a concise way of communicating that he has again crafted a film that bears the hallmarks of this aging auteur’s better judgement?
Killer Friends is a short horror-comedy written by Zach Noe Towers and co-directed by Towers and Tina Carbone. The film stars Jenna-Lee Carreiro, Dave Racki, and Peggy Sinnott alongside Towers, who plays the indestructible jerk himself, Scott. With Friends Like This, Who Needs Enemies?
Sometimes when a movie starts off slow, it picks up and has a good pay off in the end which makes the slow and boring parts forgivable. That’s not the case for Detours, written by Mara Lesemann and directed by Robert McCaskill. The film stars Tara Westwood and Carlo Fiorletta with cameo appearances by Paul Sorvino and Phyllis Somerville.
There currently is a radical change in our political landscape. The United States has drawn worldwide attention on the upcoming decision between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump for the position of President. The United States is not the only country, either, as Austria is facing a similar conundrum.
Imagine you are given a TV remote that has the power to transport you into another dimension and back in time. Imagine you accidentally allow the remote to do it. Well, that’s exactly what happens in the 1998 film Pleasantville.
To title your film with the superlative ‘Fantastic’ is playing with fire. Firstly, in this age of Marvel’s silver screen domination and DC’s valiant attempts to catch up, it would be understandable for any jaded cinema-goer to skip this one, expecting another facile, spandex-clad superhero epic; secondly, if it fails the headlines write themselves, and every movie critic worth their salt would crowbar in a reference to the irony of the film’s title. Luckily, Matt Ross’ sophomore effort Captain Fantastic, following 2012’s 28 Hotel Rooms, will have few critics drawing knives, and anyone eagerly searching for an antithesis to the recent barrage of superhero blockbusters in cinemas will be satisfied, if not delighted, when the credits roll.
When I was younger and just starting to get into classic film, I found a copy of The General at a local DVD store. Watching it later, I still remember the exact moment when I was captivated by Buster Keaton’s unique charm and screen presence. In the film’s first extended action sequence, Keaton is chasing after a troupe of Union soldiers who had infiltrated and stolen his train, and in a series of fast-paced, whirring motions, he narrowly escapes one mishap after another.
Raj Kapoor, Dilip Kumar, Nargis, Dev Anand, Vyjayanthimala, Guru Dutt, Madhubala, Raaj Kumar, Rajesh Khanna, Meena Kumari, Shashi Kapoor, Hema Malini, Sanjeev Kumar, Amitabh Bachchan, Rekha, Anil Kapoor, Madhuri Dixit, Salman Khan, Shah Rukh Khan, Kajol, Aamir Khan, Aishwarya Rai, Hrithik Roshan, Kareena Kapoor, Priyanka Chopra, Ranbir Kapoor, Deepika Padukone. To a majority of westerners these names will have very little resonance, if any at all. For many cinemagoers on the Indian subcontinent, however, these highly-revered and much-followed household names together epitomise the most significant cultural product in the region:
Straight off a win from the 2016 Drunken Film Festival in Bradford, West Yorkshire, England, comes a quirky, well written short. Though bleak and serious in its setting, there are definitely lots of laughs here. Polterheist, written by David Gilbank and Paul Renhard, is an entertaining watch, with a nicely planned plot.
When I was seven years old, one of my best friends told me about a movie called Legally Blonde. “I think you would really like it,” she excitedly announced to me after school one day. “The main character is a girly girl who’s also really smart.
Screwball comedies came around in the 1930s, due to the Motion Picture Production Code. The genre is still popular today, and some filmmakers try to recreate the themes and techniques in modern films. By 1934, the production code was being enforced in the motion picture industry.
Like much of writer/director Taika Waititi’s other work, Hunt for the Wilderpeople finds humor in asking us to laugh at its characters. They all have some ridiculous traits, and we’re free to have fun at their expense. Some of them are delusional, some of them are myopic, and some of them totally lack self-consciousness.
Chevalier is the uncomplicated story of six men on a diving expedition in the Aegean sea, and how their competitiveness is almost the undoing of all of them. Named as Best Film at the London Film Festival in 2015, it is an extraordinary film and one that is unmissable for anyone who enjoys a deeply disturbing comedy. Despite having no female characters, Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Greek comedy speaks from an authoritative feminist voice, forcing hyper-masculinity under the microscope with hysterical consequences.