It’s hard not to wince when you see Matt Damon striding down the Great Wall of China. The attempts by American companies to break into China’s growing film market has been a mess so far, plagued by lawsuits, awkward plot detours to the country, and flat-out whitewashing. So while it’s not surprising to see a white actor fighting monsters from the Great Wall, the image still makes people cringe.
Get ready for a division, because King Arthur: Legend of the Sword is directed by Guy Ritchie. I’m sure some of you have already left, siting the modernist spin and frantic energy that Ritchie injects into his films as turnoffs, while others are sitting there gleefully awaiting a good time at the theaters.
We’ve seen Robert De Niro in a boxing film before, right? Yeah, it was just a little movie called Raging Bull, so there’s no way his return to the cinematic ring will overshadow what Hands of Stone is actually about. Okay, so everyone’s focusing on De Niro’s return as legendary trainer Ray Arcel, but the film is really about Edgar Ramírez’s Roberto Duran, a Panamanian boxer who was part of the dominant Fabulous Four during the 1980s.
In this era of cinematic universes, branding is key. The goal is for audiences to recognize and become invested in the world being built, not necessarily the individual movies. Think about it this way:
A man and his dog come to the wrong town in writer/director Ti West’s In a Valley of Violence, but not because there’s ghosts or goblins running amok. The low-budget horror darling is leaving all the scary stuff behind for his western, providing him with brand new genre conventions to play with. The most obvious twist here is that the valley has some weird humor mixed in with its deadly reputation, which just might slow down the adversaries played by Ethan Hawke and John Travolta.
When a man exposes government programs that sound more like conspiracy theories than reality, you can bet that someone will make a movie about it. It only took three years for the story of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden to hit theaters, but that doesn’t mean that it was easy to do. Co-writer and director Oliver Stone has spoken very publicly about the struggle to get financing for Snowden, which he claims was turned down by every major studio in Hollywood.
The Space Between Us is the classic boy meets girl story, except the boy and girl are on different planets and the boy doesn’t know who his father is. It’s science fiction, romance, mystery, and medical drama all rolled up into one hopefully neat package. Admit it, if the film can pull off all these threads, it’ll be a pretty great movie.
I suppose the title A Monster Calls has a double meaning. It certainly refers to the tree-like monster that appears to young Connor, but it could also refer to the monstrous situation before him: the impending death of his mother.
Whistling in on a plaintive melody is La La Land, a musical so out of left field that it needs a gentle introduction for you to acclimate to. And so LA wipes in, Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling make their entrances, and it’s not until the trailer is over that you realize how far you’ve gone. Sure, it’s just a teaser, but it’s transportive in a way that cuts through the cliché of that word.
Mike Birbiglia examines the start of another comedy career in Don’t Think Twice, the second feature from the writer, director, actor, and all-around performer. He had a lot of support adapting his semi-autobiographical play and book into his first film, Sleepwalk with Me, but strikes out on his own with Don’t Think Twice, taking sole writing and directing credits. Still, it’s hard not to think of a film about an improve troupe as an ensemble, especially when it features of bevy of established comedians like Keegan-Michael Key and Gillian Jacobs.
If you were to ask me what genre of movie will never die, I’d probably put my money on boxing films. It’s already survived since 1894, when the first live fight was recorded by William K.L.
2016’s Sundance Film Festival was a splashy show of muscle from streaming leaders Amazon and Netflix, with early headlines being grabbed by the latter for its pre-festival acquisition of Tallulah. The film reunites Juno stars Ellen Page and Allison Janney for another movie that circles around a baby, but this time Page’s character isn’t as up front about the child’s origins. Tallulah is the kind of film that likely would’ve found a home with a major studio’s independent label, like Juno’s deal with Fox Searchlight, before the streaming companies pushed into feature distribution.
Daniel Radcliffe has certainly blazed his own trail post-Potter, but Imperium takes him out on a limb no one was expecting. Images of him as a white supremacist are certainly startling, so much so that the poster clearly puts his FBI badge front and center to soften the blow. Yep, Radcliffe’s character is only pretending to be Neo-Nazi, but that’s still enough to jar your Potter memories into nightmarish territory.
You may not have signed up for that astronomy 101 course, but you probably should get yourself to a movie theater for Terrence Malick’s universe epic Voyage of Time. It’s sure to be gorgeous, and whatever crazy dinosaur behavior Malick puts on the screen will (allegedly) be explained by Brad Pitt or Cate Blanchett, depending on which version you choose. That, or they’ll ramble existentially about the passage of time, because Malick doesn’t need your narrative clarity.
Sometimes the right person ends up at the right place at the right time. Whether you believe in chaos or destiny, it’s moments we all recognize as miraculous, and one of those moments happened when Sully Sullenberger safely landed a commercial jet on the Hudson River. People immediately pinned an exorbitant amount of hope on the incident, and Sullenberger unwittingly became an American hero.