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While being yet another in a long line of films about broaching adulthood, Girl Asleep addresses the awkward transition using fantastical elements, which just might be the best way to capture how foreign this period of life really feels. The film is adapted from a play staged by Adelaide’s Windmill Theatre, with many of the key players being more active in the theater than the film community. Director Rosemary Myers is Windmill Theatre’s artistic director and boasts no other film credits, as does costume/production designer Jonathan Oxlade.
It wasn’t a stretch for the Sundance Film Festival to include Other People in its opening night lineup. With a plot about a struggling writer returning home to care for his cancer-stricken mother, it ticks about as many indie trope boxes as you can without feeling like an overstuffed mess. Familiarity, however, does not make a film bad, and Other People has a solid backbone that should lift it above comparable films.
I know nothing of cultural revolution. I’ve only had a taste of the violence and hate-speech that must permeate such events, as the majority of Americans have turned their back on the presidential candidate that spews toned-down versions of such rhetoric. Still, it’s been a strange time, with acquaintances openly asking each other where we are going and what we are doing, with a fear that is barely veiled.
Film Inquiry compiles a list of the movies that are opening in cinemas every Tuesday. Opening this week: Morgan, The 9th Life Of Louis Drax, The Light Between Oceans, Zoom, Skiptrace, No Manches Frida and Yoga Hosers.
The universal praise and frenetic bidding war that enveloped the Sundance premiere of Manchester by the Sea was hard to miss. That Amazon (with Roadside Attractions) won out with a promised theatrical run and awards season push only heightened its profile, placing it squarely at the forefront of industry-changing conversations about the role of streaming companies in film production and distribution. Amazon publicly states that they’re targeting a void with the films they acquire, providing a home for quality, non-mainstream films that have been suffering since many indie labels closed their doors.
Like a cat, Louis Drax keeps surviving potentially fatal accidents. The latest is a fall from a seaside cliff, and while the boy languishes in a coma, the uncertain events leading up to the incident puts his parent’s culpability into question. His long history of accidents doesn’t reflect well on them, and the open-minded doctor treating the boy in The 9th Life of Louis Drax just might push himself too far to find the truth.
Something tells me that The Light Between Oceans won’t start with the opening and closing of a butterfly knife. No, this trailer feels like a departure for writer/director Derek Cianfrance, who previously wowed audiences with his ragged love story Blue Valentine and generational epic The Place Beyond the Pines. Those films took a toll on their audiences, and while The Light Between Oceans won’t cover easy material, it looks like it’s coming in a melodramatic package that will make it easier to digest.
What to do when the aliens arrive is one of the great questions before us, and I don’t just mean in the fictional realm. Humans have been thinking about our introduction since before we ventured into outer space, even going so far as to curate images and sounds of Earth, slap them on a couple gold records, and attach them on the space probes Voyager 1 and 2. The likelihood of these ever being found by intelligent life is minimal, but it’s a pleasant daydream to imagine the utter confusion of anything that might find them.
Film Inquiry compiles a list of the movies that are opening in cinemas every Tuesday. Opening this week: Mechanic:
The glossy biopic genre is getting yet another entry in Hidden Figures, which dredges up the forgotten story of African-American women in NASA and displays it with wit and verve. We’re only two years removed from the mathlete battle between The Imitation Game and The Theory of Everything, and while Hidden Figures has no clear rival this year, it will be hard not to draw comparisons to those two recent films. Why?
The largest oil spill in U.S. history isn’t the most obvious, or even the most appropriate, place to set a story about everyday heroes, but director Peter Berg and star Mark Wahlberg are doing their best to sell us on that version of events in Deepwater Horizon.
In 1974, TV news reporter Christine Chubbuck killed herself live on-air in Sarasota, Florida. She was 29 years old. As disturbing as the event was, it’s not the only time a suicide has been broadcast, and the memory of it has faded from public knowledge.
Film Inquiry compiles a list of the movies that are opening in cinemas every week. Opening this week: Kubo & The Two Strings, Ben-Hur, A Tale of Love & Darkness, War Dogs, Morris From America, Lo And Behold:
Clashing tradition with modernity is Ixcanul, a Guatemalan film that scooped up a variety of awards from its festival run but has struggled to find distribution in major markets. I suppose films from first-time feature directors that aren’t about people with paved roads and indoor plumbing seem like a hard sell, but I think that good stories can find audiences, and Ixcanul looks like a good one. Set in the shadows of a volcano and about something as basic as a girl’s transition into womanhood, the film takes a long look at 17-year-old Maria’s impending arranged marriage and her fling with a young local.
Brad Pitt’s doin’ one thing and one thing only in Allied… falling for Marion Cotillard. Yeah, he’ll kill some Nazis along the way, but it looks like the shady backwaters of the spy world is there to complicate their relationship instead of override the plot. It’s possible that will change in later marketing pushes, but for now, Allied is being pitched as another in a long line of wartime romances.
