2010s
According to my personal checklist, the extent to which a film can affect a viewer is a mark of its quality. Pioneer must have done something right, because it absolutely wrecked my sense of calm. A full 24 hours after watching director Erik Skjoldbjærg’s thriller for the first time, I still find myself feeling strangely uneasy – stealing glances over my shoulder, eyeing my friends and family with icy distrust…I even threw out a plate of unattended food on the off chance it had been poisoned by the shady agents of a deep-sea drilling conglomerate.
Calvary chronicles a week in the life of Irish Catholic Priest, Father James Lavelle (Brendan Gleeson). When we meet him, Father Lavelle hears a haunting confession: the man was abused by a priest in his youth.
Last year, Denis Villeneuve directed one of the most pleasant surprises of the year with Prisoners, an unrelentingly tense film about child abduction that presented intriguing moral questions while also providing satisfying twists and turns throughout. That filmed starred Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenhaal. Gyllenhaal has teamed up with Villeneuve again in Enemy, a much smaller and much, much more mind-bending film than Prisoners.
The Quiet Ones director John Pogue took a risk – inviting the viewer to follow along with Professor Joseph Coupland’s (Jared Harris) “experiment” to prove that the supernatural is simply a manifestation created in the minds of the mentally disturbed. What Professor Coupland and his team didn’t expect was a genuine haunting. The Quiet Ones was unexpected, different.
Wow. I didn’t go into How To Train Your Dragon 2 expecting my world to be rocked, but… it sort of did.
Here at Film Inquiry, we were quite excited about The Rover. The trailer looked very promising; moreover, the movie was directed by famous and notorious director David Michôd. Famous for his hauntingly emotional scripts, notorious for the amounts of violence he tends to feature.
In Edge of Tomorrow, Earth is hit by a meteor infested with a strange and highly violent alien species called the Mimics. They immediately start to destroy the world, and everything the humans do is futile. The alien species is strong and fast, and more importantly, has control over time – though no one (aside from a very select few) is aware of it.
X-Men: First Class wasn’t necessarily designed to be part of the original trilogy’s continuity. X-Men:
Maleficent is the latest addition to the Disney legacy that tells the story of the 1959 animated classic Sleeping Beauty, but this time from the perspective of the story’s villain, Maleficent. Maleficent is played by Angelina Jolie and Princess Aurora, the Sleeping Beauty, is played by Elle Fanning. The movie also marks the directorial debut for visual effects producer Robert Stromberg.
For anyone who hasn’t noticed yet, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is getting destroyed by critics.It’s currently got a 54 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. Not only is that nearly 20 points down from the first installment, it’s less than the critically reviled Spider-Man 3 or X-Men:
The long anticipated 2014 edition of Godzilla has not been hailed too positively by the critics. I recognize its flaws, but ultimately, I found the movie to be an enjoyable and entertaining ride. Godzilla – or Gojira – is originally a Japanese concept within the Kaiju (“monster” or “strange creature”) genre.
Healing is an Australian movie about the people in a low-security prison, who are all trying to find their ways in life. The main character, Viktor Khadem (Don Hany), killed his best friend when he was drunk and has been in prison for over sixteen years. Finally, he has made his way into a low-security, pre-release prison, where he will be trained and prepared or return into the real world.
This movie is part of the Spanish Film Festival, which takes place during May. As one of the many films chosen to play at the Spanish Film Festival in 2014, Three Many Weddings (original title Tres Bodas De Mas) is a wild Spanish-language romantic comedy following a month in the life of Ruth (Inma Cuesta), the puppy-eyed lab scientist longing for love. When Ruth wakes up one morning from a drunken night of random love-making, she is faced with three wedding invitations – all from ex-boyfriends.
This movie is screened during the Spanish Film Festival in Australia, taking place all May. In Ariel Winograd’s To Fool A Thief, we’re often reminded to think upon the kind of screwball comedies that made romance the immaterial ideal that critics so often found unbearable for its overtly fictitious realities – It Happened One Night, My Man Godfrey, The Great Ziegfeld and on and on the list goes. It’s not surprising during the course that Winograd’s film should reprise these classical thematic structures, but it’s presented in a fashion which is ultimately a distraction from the main action.
“Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” – Horace “It is sweet and right to die for one’s country”. Most famously, and aptly, used by the World War I era poet Wilfred Owen in his poem, “Dulce Et Decorum Est-,” about knock kneed soldiers slogging through dirt and grime within dangerous trenches on the European front. The quote is haunting in both Owen’s and Horace’s context, even if it also belies a satirical edge.