thriller
In 1960, Alfred Hitchc*ck saw the future. The British director had been a force in cinema since silent films, but the 1950’s were by far his most successful decade at the movies. He churned out blockbuster after blockbuster, all filmed in gorgeous color with top Hollywood stars like James Stewart, Cary Grant, and Grace Kelly.
A great director can elevate a movie that is nothing short of trash cinema into something masterful. Throughout his career, Orson Welles repeatedly chose projects (most notably Touch of Evil) as a challenge to see whether he could make a good movie out of source material that was far closer to the gutter than the stars. A cursory glance at some of the best directors of all time, from Welles and Alfred Hitchc*ck to David Fincher and Steven Soderbergh more recently, reads like a list of directors who enjoy cinema at its silliest, yet are such technically skilled filmmakers with a clear love for genre filmmaking that their movies are only ever laughable in a knowing way.
After five movies and nearly two decades, you would think that the Mission: Impossible series would begin to lose its momentum. Remarkably, the series is still just as strong as ever, maybe even more so, with both Ghost Protocol and the latest, Rogue Nation now peaking as my top favorites.
“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’ve been toiling over this review for about a week now. A large portion of mainstream film criticism has shifted towards tearing down films, blatantly nit-picking all aspects of a movie and continuously shouting nasty adjectives which seemingly constitutes as a review of a film. I get why it’s so big nowadays, being angry at or disappointed in something will always get a more humorous and memorable responses.
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.
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?
Even though I may make it look like any idiot can do it, writing reviews is far from easy. The hardest things to review aren’t the plot-heavy science fiction movies or the obscure art house efforts with impenetrable plots like you would imagine – the most difficult movies to review are the films that are just plain boring. I watched Child 44 two days ago, where I made up 100% of the audience for that screening – in the two days since, I have found myself struggling to remember quite a lot of it.
Without trying to simplify the cinematic output of an entire nation, it could be argued that there are only two types of British independent films. There’s the prestige fare, that depicts the lives of the upper classes and the monarchy (notable recent examples are The King’s Speech and The Theory of Everything), that are almost always boring, a smash-hit at the international box office, and a major awards contender. The other example is the polar opposite – dark, gritty dramas about the working classes that are never boring, but also never in contention for box office or awards success.
I had read Veronica Roth’s Divergent before the adaptation sauntered onto cinema screens, heralded as the next The Hunger Games, and what I discovered was that I preferred the film to the book. There was more action on show, and I felt that the film fixed many of the things I found problematic with the book’s narrative. So when I discovered that the book of Insurgent didn’t impress, I decided to bypass it and wait for the film.
Although it may not be for everyone due to its pitch-black tone, Wild Tales is a film that I imagine everybody who sees it can relate to in some way. It is a film about one of the most basic human emotions, one that is rarely the central emotion of any movie: anger.
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.
2014 should really be known as “The Year of the Biopic.” There have been films this past year that were based on many world-reknown icons, from Martin Luther King to Stephen Hawking to pop singer James Brown. And somewhere in the midst of all those comes the story of Alan Turing, a British mathematician that almost single-handedly won World War II.
“If it’s in a word, or it’s in a look, you can’t get rid of The Babadook”. The mainstream horror genre is in a bad state at the moment. In the wake of the success of Paranormal Activity, Hollywood studios are taking advantage of the huge financial potential of the genre, and the fact that you can spend very little money on a horror film and make a huge profit off of teenage audiences.
A trio of rambunctious adolescents storm into a man’s house, steal his car, and then, just for the hell of it, beat his dog to death. Unbeknownst to them, the man they robbed is none other than John Wick, a former assassin who was so good at his job that he earned a nickname of “The Boogeyman.” Let’s just say that they pissed off the wrong guy.