death
The right to die debate is treated with great dignity in Youth in Oregon, which is also buoyed by Frank Langella’s sensitive performance.
Admirably performed, It’s Only the End of The World suffers from underwritten characters and a refusal to bring his trademark widescreen scope
2016. A year that will live in infamy. A year shaken by unexpected celebrity deaths, an unnerving election cycle, and unsuspecting twists waiting around every corner.
A Monster Calls is an entertaining and beautifully presented fantasy, which also imbues deeper universal themes of grief and loss.
Manchester by the Sea is a subtle, nuanced story of loss and grief, brought to life through restrained direction and powerful performances.
“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.
With the DVD/Blu-Ray release of The Invitation, I was able to snag a quick interview with the film’s director, Karyn Kusama. Taking place in a Beverly Hills mansion in L.A over the course of an evening.
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.
Ryan and Amy are sitting nervously on a sofa in a nondescript room. A doctor addresses them, “Mr and Mrs Green, I’m sorry, it’s not good news”. The doctor continues to tell them that their one year old son’s chemotherapy has not worked.
Joel and Ethan Coen’s No Country for Old Men is a unique genre mash-up that contains elements of western, horror, drama, and crime films. The film follows the interwoven arcs of several characters in West Texas in the early 1980s. While hunting, Lleyelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) comes across millions of dollars at the bloody scene of a drug deal gone awry.
It’s October, so things are getting pretty spooky here at Film Inquiry HQ. Pretty sure I saw a ghost in the water cooler the other day. We don’t have a water cooler, but that’s neither here nor there (though it does lead me to suspect that the water cooler itself was the ghost).
In this darkly comic short film, director Jackson Mullane explores the age-old question of ‘would you live your life differently if you knew you had two weeks to live?’ Red Nuts features Kevin MacIsaac as Sam, a thirty-something ginger-headed nobody watching helplessly from a rut in his life as his marriage falls apart. But when he is diagnosed with a terminal illness, he embarks on a night of debauchery and anarchy, sticking his middle finger up at the rules and living his life to the full.
Having recovered from the shock upon discovering that summer 1990 was a quarter of a century ago, I recently reacquainted myself with one or two of the cinematic treats that I first enjoyed at the tender age of 15. Darkman got a repeat viewing, as did the sorely underappreciated Quick Change with Bill Murray. I was especially pleased to find that my personal favourite alumni from the class of ’90 had aged so well:
45 Years is unquestionably well-written and well-acted, to such a high degree that is literally impossible to argue otherwise. To say that Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay give two of the most emotionally effective performances of their long and illustrious careers is equivalent to saying that the sky is blue and the world is round; it is so plainly obvious, arguing in its favour seems like a waste of time, as the greatness is clearly there for all to see. Emotionally engaging from the opening minutes On paper, the film feels like the opposite of director Andrew Haigh’s previous film Weekend; that film was about two men who meet and fall in love over the course of (you guessed it) a weekend, after a one night stand turns into something deeper.
Although not without empathy, it is hard to argue against the statement that teenagers are some of the most self-centred people alive. I know this from being a particularly self-centred teenager, who at thirteen regularly made statements of self-loathing in order to gouge sympathy and attention from my peers. It was an attention seeking phase that I mercifully grew out of very quickly, but I can at least be forgiven for it for being young and stupid.