While not the biggest hit at Sundance or Berlin, Indignation walked away from its festival showings with strong buzz for everyone involved, which should be considered a rousing success given the difficult material it’s based on. The narrative density of the average novel by acclaimed writer Philip Roth has long tripped up filmmakers, leading to outright disastrous adaptations like Portnoy’s Complaint and forgotten mediocrity like Elegy. Indignation, even if imperfect, is shaping up to be a rare Roth adaptation that isn’t brushed aside, if only for the crucial moments it falls on in the careers of its director and lead actor.
Bryan Cranston hops to the other side of the drug war in The Infiltrator, portraying a real-life U.S. Customs official working undercover to take down Pablo Escobar’s cartel.
Now that women can be as inappropriate as men, we get a comedy about bad moms. Or about raunchy moms? Or expectation-defying good moms?
Jason Statham is back, fighting and killing his way through another of his bread-and-butter action films. The man has established a firm place in the genre, appearing in some of the most violent, action-packed films of the last fifteen years, and Mechanic: Resurrection looks to be aimed right at his core audience.
Jack may be the perfect name for a Tom Cruise character. There’s something nondescriptly ubiquitous about him, a bit too scrappy for a John but matching nicely to the common but abrupt Jack. Jack Reacher:
The wide world of films have long held a place for the meandering soul-searcher. They’re characters that move aimlessly through the world with no end goal in sight. Perhaps they’ve become disillusioned with the world as it is, or perhaps, like in American Honey, they are too young to know all the directions they could go.
Captain Fantastic will likely live or die based on Viggo Mortensen’s performance, as his character is the only one that understands both the isolated world he established for his children and the regular world they must now enter. The hope of what he and his wife were trying to accomplish must be communicated through him, and whatever ramifications come from their decisions will fall squarely on his shoulders. It’s a lonely role in a movie populated by a ton of characters, and it’s hard to come up with a guy more likely to pull it off than Mortensen.
It’s been a while since the world checked in on David Brent, the self-described star of the documentary series The Office. Of course, we all know that Brent doesn’t exist and that his documentary was actually a mockumentary television series that aired in the U.K.
I first saw My Brief Eternity at the Wales International Documentary Festival, and such was its impact on me that after meeting the director Clare Sturges, and after writing up the festival itself, I resolved to review it so that others would come to know of it. The short documentary is a joint project between Maggie’s and Brightest Films, the former being a cancer charity, the latter Sturges’ production company. The film is about the Welsh artist; Osi Rhys Osmond.
How many people were having flashbacks to the Toy Story series during this trailer? I mean, the supermarket was very reminiscent of Al’s Toy Barn, and the whole premise of giving inanimate objects complex emotional lives that humans eventually wreck is Toy Story as a whole. Except the things we do to our food is way more messed up than simple abandonment, so I guess Jessie doesn’t earn a sad song until Emily pulls a knife on her now.
A new Disney princess is coming our way in Moana, and it looks like she’s continuing Disney’s efforts to make their female characters more reflective of modern women. The film is about Moana’s adventure to find a fabled island, and while she’s accompanied by her pet pig and the demi-god Maui, it’s her skills as a navigator that allow the journey to take place. This teaser, sadly, focuses more on Maui than Moana.
Returning to the bountiful setting of World War II era Europe is The Innocents, being released in a few countries under the title Agnus Dei. The latter is more indicative of its focus, following a French Red Cross doctor who must treat pregnant nuns near where she is stationed in Poland. It seems that no one was left unscathed in the war-ravaged country, hence the unwanted and potentially disastrous pregnancies that are based on real occurrences.
2016’s annual Woody Allen movie is Café Society, which kicked off this year’s Cannes Film Festival and drew more attention for a joke aimed at Allen than its middling reviews. This kind of reaction to his films isn’t uncommon. The last year he didn’t release a movie was 1981, and it’s more like clockwork than an event when another one comes out.
Before you start bemoaning the post-apocalyptic saturation of the movie world, let’s take a good, hard look at the trailer for Into the Forest. Yes, the power goes out and the grocery stores are emptied, but there’s no great battle against these events, no chosen person who must bring humanity back. Instead, there are two sisters who gather food and comfort each other as the world changes around them.
Well, you can’t say that Ben Affleck isn’t trying to capitalize on his success. Since winning his second Oscar for Argo, he’s famously taken over the role of Batman, including writing and directing the upcoming caped crusader’s first solo film in the DC Extended Universe. In addition to that commitment, he’s also peppered in several acting appearances in stand-alone thrillers.