Rooney Mara
An ambitious carny with a talent for manipulating people with a few well-chosen words hooks up with a female psychiatrist who is even more dangerous.
![Were you familiar with Mary Magdalene before you read the script? Garth Davis: Not in a deep, detailed way, but in the movies I have seen before and in the way everyone kind of understands. When I read this it was a completely different version, so that got me curious. I started to investigate it in a deeper way and found it astonishing it has taken us so long to put that story out there in a more popular light. Extraordinary really. It was definitely different than the story I grew up reading in the bible. I remember when the Passion of the Christ came out, an actor got struck by lightening during shooting. Anything like that happen on set for you? Garth Davis: There were a couple of pretty amazing moments. When we were shooting the scene of the exorcism, where the family was exorcising Mary in the Sea of Galilee, just before we were about to walk into the water the wind just completely stopped. Completely still, almost on cue, right? Then suddenly lightening appeared all over the ocean. It was unbelievable! So much so, that when shooting the scene I had to paint it out. It just felt like a trope, you know? People would have thought it was a visual effect. [laughs] Wow!Garth Davis: The other one was during a scene on the beach of Magdala. I did a drawing of the location and I wanted to add some smoke in the background. So we went down to the Recee, and as I was standing there, smoke emerged exactly where I was drawing it (laughs). It was one of those moments where you have to ask if something was guiding us in some way.](https://www.filminquiry.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/MV5BNDc5ODE4OTQxNl5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwODEzOTcyNDM_V1_SY1000_CR0014991000_AL_.jpg)
Garth Davis proves once again his skills behind the camera can help uplift middlebrow material, but only to a certain extent, Mary Magdalene significantly undercut by the increased familiarity and conventional storytelling.
Expertly performed by the dynamic duo of Rooney Mara and Ben Mendelsohn, Una proves to be a searing – though discomfiting – watch.
As given by its name, A Ghost Story is a supernatural tale, yet it touches on themes of love and grief in a uniquely beautiful way.
The Discovery dabbles in too many genres and never makes a compelling case for any of them, resulting in yet another lackluster Netflix film.
Song to Song brings A-game performances and an was aesthetically pleasing look, all that was missing was a strong plot.
Though its feel-good sentiments are hard to resist, there are simply too many tonal and structural issues that hold LION back from greatness.
Kubo and the Two Strings is a genuine masterpiece. The word “masterpiece” might be used carelessly and far too often these days when discussing contemporary movies. At the least, Kubo has fulfilled the conventional definition of “masterpiece” no matter how semantically satiated the word has become, if not entirely forging a new meaning altogether.
Most directors have a recognisable style that characterises their movies, giving them a distinctive visual stamp that claims it as wholly theirs. Todd Haynes is an unusual director in that his style differs from movie to movie, fully committing to replicating different genres and bygone fashions to the extent that he has no distinctive visual style that claims any movie as distinctively his. With Carol, he has made a period drama not entirely dissimilar from his early film, 2002’s Far From Heaven.
I love Joe Wright and while I was not overly interested in yet another version of the Peter Pan story, I was excited to see him take on Pan. But the very fact that it spent many more years in production than it probably should have, and the idea of Wright as a CGI movie director did make me uneasy. It turns out that I was right to feel that way, because while it must have been difficult to reinvigorate the Peter Pan story, the problematic production of Pan meant that this version of the story was always going to be something of a bust.
Side Effects is a movie about the business of psychiatric medications, fraud, insanity and the failure of the criminal justice system. It’s a complex movie with many plots and twists, and is captivating from start to end. From a very creepy, melancholic opening, we are taken three months earlier into the story.