mystery
With the blockbuster success of Fifty Shades of Grey in cinemas worldwide, many pundits are claiming that this marks a new era for “sex positive” movies – and much more importantly, the basic idea of a woman being as sexually open as her male counterparts not being a source of cinematic shame, but one of pride. It has only been two decades since what I dub the “unofficial Michael Douglas misogyny trilogy” of Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct and Disclosure hit cinemas, films that (like Fifty Shades) were successful due to their frankness of sexuality. Yet those movies were inherently misogynist in suggesting that women were mentally unstable, or just plain evil for daring to be as open about their sexuality as men.
Nightcrawler, starring Jake Gyllenhaal, balances the crime thriller, dark comedy, and character study genres with ease. The film focuses on Louis Bloom, a mysterious young insomniac who takes to the nighttime streets of Los Angeles in an attempt to capture the most shocking breaking news. Armed with his video camera and sidekick, Rick, Louis turns real life car crashes and murders into exciting film clips to headline the morning stories.
If the media blitz preceding its release is anything to go by, Gone Girl is being pitched as brooding, twisty, and somewhat orthodox whodunnit. If you buy a ticket expecting just that, you won’t be disappointed. David Fincher’s film, based on Gillian Flynn’s novel of the same name, has all the shifty intricacies you’d hope for in a thriller.
One of the year’s most-anticipated films is Interstellar, and it is directed by acclaimed director Christopher Nolan. It will be the first film he does exploring space. He began his resume with a short film called Doodlebug, and since then, he has taken Hollywood by storm directing nine films that include Following, Memento, Insomnia, The Prestige, Inception, and the The Dark Knight trilogy.
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.
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).