drama
“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.
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?
Le Havre (2011) is a still, quiet and dryly hilarious film. It has many of the qualities of a Japanese master like Mizoguchi, but if he had emigrated to a small French port and had been forced to make working class comedies. It focuses on a shoe shiner called Marcel Marx whose wife contracts a seemingly terminal disease.
If there is ever a fitting description for Arnold Schwarzenegger’s cinematic persona, then it is this: action film hero. Time and time again, we’ve seen the ex-California Governor’s face adorning several iconic titles, portraying mere mortals (or robots in Terminator’s case) possessing near-superhuman ability, an eye for supersized weapons and a knack for crisp one-liners.
Before it had even stepped into the ring, Southpaw was dead on arrival. After all, although boxing isn’t the sport that has generated the most movies, it is the sport that has generated the most beloved cinematic classics – from Rocky and Raging Bull to the more recent likes of Million Dollar Baby and The Fighter. At the screening I attended, I was far more likely to greet it as an unwelcome entry to the boxing movie pantheon, due to the fact that the last trailer before the movie started was for Creed, the new Rocky spin-off that benefits from having Sylvester Stallone yet again reprising his most iconic role.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hereafter is a short supernatural film written and directed by Johnny Kenton. The product of a Kickstarter campaign, the film is about a young woman named Katcher (Lydia Wilson), who is called up to try out for a group called ‘The Guardians’. Who are they guarding?
In recent years, the subject of artificial intelligence in movies has become more and more prominent, perhaps because our own technology has become increasingly advanced in that direction. It may not be long before we have created our own race of conscious, intelligent beings. Until then, though, it is always fascinating to surmise about the idea.
Every now and again, a movie adaptation of a novel is made by the perfect directorial fit for the source material, that helps it stay true to the original text and create a new visionary approach that helps it stand on its own two feet as a distinctive work of art. Danish director Thomas Vinterberg has had an eclectic career, yet is mainly renowned for his two emotionally fraught dramas about the devastating effects of child abuse, his 1998 debut Festen (The Celebration) and his previous feature, 2012’s magnificent The Hunt. These movies are excellent in how they don’t spare the viewer from the histrionic emotions that engulf the characters and completely ruin their lives – The Hunt, starring the always-fantastic Mads Mikkelsen as a primary school teacher wrongly accused of abusing a pupil, could easily draw comparisons with Thomas Hardy.