2010s
Hollywood seems to be stuck in an age of remakes and sequels. Though original films do exist, they are never as popular or successful as the large-scale blockbusters, which are the only sure moneymakers for studios. Coming from this standpoint, it’s no surprise that Antoine Fuqua’s The Magnificent Seven exists.
The sincerity of The Homestretch is certainly never in doubt. Depicting the plight of three homeless teens in Chicago, Anne de Mare and Kirsten Kelly’s documentary interweaves the personal stories with various facts and statistics highlighting the widespread nature of the issue. Unfortunately, despite its pure intentions, The Homestretch never really manages to succeed to be truly engaging, regardless of the clear warmth of the three featured youths.
It is easy to see how The Girl With All The Gifts could have been toned down and transformed into a generic YA movie in its cinematic adaptation. In the 2014 best-selling novel, the story is told from the point of view of all five central character. Here, director Colm McCarthy focuses on the titular tween character Melanie, exploring this plague-ravaged world from her point of view.
When the title card appears in Daguerrotype, it announces the film as “Le secret de le chambre noire”. That title reflects the film’s goals as a dark, foreboding ghost mystery, and it probably does so better than the title “Daguerrotype” does. But what I like about the title Daguerrotype (misspelled though it might be), is that it refers to the most interesting part of the film:
Thought the buddy cop movie formula was tired? Well, it is a cinematic breath of fresh air in comparison to the “bad cop” movie. These movies are tiresome depictions of lawmen (and make no mistake, they are always men) who break every rule in the book whilst trying to enforce it – and even though there have been solid entries into the genre in recent years, it can’t help but feel worn out.
Killer Friends is a short horror-comedy written by Zach Noe Towers and co-directed by Towers and Tina Carbone. The film stars Jenna-Lee Carreiro, Dave Racki, and Peggy Sinnott alongside Towers, who plays the indestructible jerk himself, Scott. With Friends Like This, Who Needs Enemies?
Sometimes when a movie starts off slow, it picks up and has a good pay off in the end which makes the slow and boring parts forgivable. That’s not the case for Detours, written by Mara Lesemann and directed by Robert McCaskill. The film stars Tara Westwood and Carlo Fiorletta with cameo appearances by Paul Sorvino and Phyllis Somerville.
“Sure, I’ll see you again before either of us knows it”. It’s a sentiment resonating with most of us after the passing of a loved one. This line opens the beautiful, bleak, January Hymn, written and directed by Katherine Canty.
Preservation of the environment shouldn’t be a political issue, let alone a controversial one. Yet the right wing governments of the western world are frequently abandoning environmental and climate change issues, even building entire grand-standing platforms on how the entire act of climate change is a mere myth. The masses no longer trust “experts”, no matter how many facts they have on their side about the devastating realities of our changing environment.
The idea of the “secret sequel” seems to be a new marketing scheme in horror cinema as of late. Earlier this year, a sequel to the film Cloverfield came out, called 10 Cloverfield Lane, yet nobody knew it was a sequel until a couple months before its premiere. In similar fashion, Blair Witch, the sequel to 1999’s seminal horror The Blair Witch Project, was originally filmed under the fake title “The Woods” so as to hide its true intentions.
Do you know your neighbours? Even if you believe that you do, you might not actually know them. Although the person next door or across the street may seem normal, you only see the surface.
There currently is a radical change in our political landscape. The United States has drawn worldwide attention on the upcoming decision between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump for the position of President. The United States is not the only country, either, as Austria is facing a similar conundrum.
First published in 2000 under the pseudonymn JT LeRoy by author Laura Albert, “Sarah” became a transgressive fiction literary sensation. After holding court with such seminal writers of the sub-genre such as Bruce Benderson and Dennis Cooper, the rising writer of American letters seemed destined for superstardom. Whisked away on the coattails of celebrities impressed with her abilities on the page, Jeremiah “Terminator” LeRoy become the queer it lit boy of a generation.
When we think of documentaries about North Korea, it is usually with an eye toward illuminating what to this day remains cloaked in self-imposed mystery. As it has always been an excessively reclusive nation, this state of unknowing has been the primary trait most of the West associates with the DPRK. As a young country, that means most of its brief history is known only to itself, and even then there are probably only a few at the government’s upper echelons that are privy to details not disseminated to a populace fed on propaganda.
I still fondly remember the day that was subsequently christened the “Miracle on the Hudson”, when it was discovered that a plane successfully landed on the Hudson River after an incident in the air when both engines were destroyed. Amazingly, everyone on board survived. It was one of the first times I had heard of something like this happening, and I would say that most of America, if not the world, was equally spellbound.