Ah, the tantalizing ‘what the hell is this going to be?’ question. A passing glance at the trailer for Me Before You will cause many to dismiss it as romantic fluff, a rip-off of the Nicholas Sparks concoction of tragedy and smoldering love.
There’s only a handful of films capable of really surprising you, and 2014’s Neighbors genuinely surprised me. Its ad campaign focused on a brand of bawdy, immature humor that doesn’t work for me, and its poster’s implication of a Seth Rogen vs. Zac Efron battle didn’t add any appeal.
Oh, there’s plenty to be afraid of in The Invitation, the upcoming psychological pot-boiler from director Karyn Kusama. Any time paranoia works its way into a film the audience immediately loses its bearing, unsure of which character is lying, which is telling the truth, or if everything they’re seeing is just the fever dream of an ill mind. A blow could come from anywhere, and we humans are hard-wired to fear uncertainty.
All you should need to get excited for this film is the name Jeff Nichols. The writer/director of Mud, Take Shelter, and Shotgun Stories has made nothing but high-quality films, and his reward has been increasingly bigger budgets and bigger box office totals. Midnight Special is his first studio film, and while it’s being released on a crowded weekend led by Allegiant and Miracles from Heaven, I see no reason to think it won’t surpass Mud’s $21.
How far can wealth take you? Really far, it turns out. Loosely based on the true story of Florence Foster Jenkins, Marguerite follows a passionate but terrible opera singer who funds her own career.
This thriller has been winning over genre fans at festival screenings for months, boasting an impressive 8.2 rating on IMDB from the handful of people who’ve seen it. They say it’s a rather twisty tale, which to be honest the trailer doesn’t capture well, as the setup appears to be pretty basic for a traveling, backwoods horror tale.
I would buy Tilda Swinton as the woman of the century. She’s got a magnetic quality that the biggest stars share, yet there’s also an oddball sensibility to her. While not aloof, fame doesn’t seem to be a driving force in her career, as she seems to select whatever roles that piques her interest.
Let the Melissa McCarthy love recommence! Audiences have been shelling out money for the former Groundling ever since Bridesmaids, and The Boss marks her last outing before the much talked about Ghostbusters reboot. If the latter is a success then McCarthy will have a franchise on her hands (if she doesn’t already have one with Spy), and her career will be stabilized for years to come.
Remember when everyone fell in love with Once? Well, that was nine years ago now, and writer/director John Carney has yet to, and probably never will, produce another hit quite like it. Begin Again made more money, but the success of Once was a right-place-at-the-right-time sort of phenomena.
It’s a reunion on all fronts in the Forsaken trailer. Characters find each other after a long war, actors reunite with former co-stars, and, of course, Kiefer and Donald Sutherland play father and son for the first time onscreen. Anyone who’s entertained by meta-filmmaking should relish watching the two work through their characters’ broken relationship, but there’s plenty of other less obvious things to suss out from this trailer.
While watching the trailer for Get a Job, I actually found myself thinking about how young Anna Kendrick and Miles Teller looked. I initially chalked it up to excellent genetics, but then I read that the film was shot way back in 2012. It sat in the can for undisclosed reasons (not a good sign), and its director and writers haven’t had a single film credit since (really not a good sign).
A darling of the Cannes Film Festival, Apichatpong Weerasethakul has been mesmerizing western audiences for years now, most notably with his Palme d’Or winning Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. A feverish quality runs through both that and Cemetery of Splendour, which disregards any need for narrative clarity and dumps audiences into a world where life, death, and consciousness don’t have solid boundaries. The divide between eastern and western cinema runs deep, and while Weerasethakul is a straight up experimental filmmaker, his Thai roots add an extra layer of mystique to his movies.
If Jeff Goldblum’s character is to be believed, then we aren’t the ones making the resurgence. The aliens have outpaced us in the twenty years after their July 1996 attack, and it looks like that equates to bigger spaceships! Let’s face it, nobody’s going to a Roland Emmerich movie for Shakespeare-esque drama (unless you went to that movie he made about Shakespeare).
Oh boy, we’ve got a montage of grinning stars in this trailer, which means ensemble fun! A litany of familiar faces has always been a selling point for the Barbershop series, and since ten years has passed since the last entry, there’s been a big cast shake-up. Most notable is the steep increase in female roles, with the series welcoming Nicki Minaj, Tia Mowry, and Regina Hall into the shop.
Over fifty years ago, novelist Truman Capote narrowed in on the jewelry company Tiffany as the poster child for what would become one of his most famous pieces. “In Cold Blood” arguably brought him more fame, but “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” has lingered in the cultural zeitgeist longer thanks to its immaculate thematic work. The novella would have dimmed if Tiffany’s had faltered, but the store still stands tall in New York City, a bastion of hope that, perhaps one day, we can all have breakfast there.