directorial debut
A great director can elevate a movie that is nothing short of trash cinema into something masterful. Throughout his career, Orson Welles repeatedly chose projects (most notably Touch of Evil) as a challenge to see whether he could make a good movie out of source material that was far closer to the gutter than the stars. A cursory glance at some of the best directors of all time, from Welles and Alfred Hitchc*ck to David Fincher and Steven Soderbergh more recently, reads like a list of directors who enjoy cinema at its silliest, yet are such technically skilled filmmakers with a clear love for genre filmmaking that their movies are only ever laughable in a knowing way.
More than 150 years after the old West faded into legend, the western genre is still very much alive and well. Slow West is the feature debut of writer-director John Maclean. Although it contains some clear watermarks of a first-time director, it is also among the more unique modern westerns in the way that it plays around with traditional western tropes and conventions.
Inside Out is the latest in a long line of Pixar films that deal with the personification of something that you may have thought to be emotionless. Rather than bugs, toys, or fish this time, though, it is dealing directly with emotions themselves. What if the inner workings of our head were similar to an operational business, where our emotions literally guide and influence the actions in our daily life?
Testament Of Youth is based on Vera Brittain’s memoir of the same name. Her book pays homage to her own losses while growing up during World War I, but also the great loss felt by her generation. Brittain’s book is perhaps unique in that in the UK we are often told about the loss of life during the war.
In recent years, the subject of artificial intelligence in movies has become more and more prominent, perhaps because our own technology has become increasingly advanced in that direction. It may not be long before we have created our own race of conscious, intelligent beings. Until then, though, it is always fascinating to surmise about the idea.
The problem with award shows of any kind is that you’ll always find yourself comparing the nominees to each other, regardless of how different they may be. However, this is infinitely more true of awards with tied winners. The two victors may be different in every conceivable way, but the fact that we have been told they are not just equally good, but equally the best, leads our minds directly to compare the two.
Without trying to simplify the cinematic output of an entire nation, it could be argued that there are only two types of British independent films. There’s the prestige fare, that depicts the lives of the upper classes and the monarchy (notable recent examples are The King’s Speech and The Theory of Everything), that are almost always boring, a smash-hit at the international box office, and a major awards contender. The other example is the polar opposite – dark, gritty dramas about the working classes that are never boring, but also never in contention for box office or awards success.
About 20 minutes into A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, the local drug dealer, Saeed (Dominic Rains), takes a girl (Shelia Vand) back to his flat. His place is pretty pimped out. Think a toned-down version of Alien’s crib in Spring Breakers – the mounted animal heads, the fur carpets and nice furniture, the suitcase filled with drug money and coke lined up on the glass table next to it.
“If it’s in a word, or it’s in a look, you can’t get rid of The Babadook”. The mainstream horror genre is in a bad state at the moment. In the wake of the success of Paranormal Activity, Hollywood studios are taking advantage of the huge financial potential of the genre, and the fact that you can spend very little money on a horror film and make a huge profit off of teenage audiences.
Nightcrawler, starring Jake Gyllenhaal, balances the crime thriller, dark comedy, and character study genres with ease. The film focuses on Louis Bloom, a mysterious young insomniac who takes to the nighttime streets of Los Angeles in an attempt to capture the most shocking breaking news. Armed with his video camera and sidekick, Rick, Louis turns real life car crashes and murders into exciting film clips to headline the morning stories.
A trio of rambunctious adolescents storm into a man’s house, steal his car, and then, just for the hell of it, beat his dog to death. Unbeknownst to them, the man they robbed is none other than John Wick, a former assassin who was so good at his job that he earned a nickname of “The Boogeyman.” Let’s just say that they pissed off the wrong guy.
Dracula Untold tries to be a lot of different things – a PG-13 horror movie, a historical epic, a Gothic romance, a superhero origin story – and it does it all while at the same time trying to kick start an Avengers-style shared movie universe. Whether you call that ambitious or just the obvious product of too many cooks in the kitchen, it doesn’t succeed on every front. But remarkably enough, as a pure popcorn movie, it doesn’t completely fall apart, either.
Escape From Tomorrow is a nightmare in black and white. From the opening moments to the final scene, the story unfolds in the most mind-bending ways. I grew up with very little black and white film.
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.
Christopher Nolan, Wally Pfister, Johnny Depp, Morgan Freeman… The big names attached to this film as well as the potentially great story all promised a pretty awesome movie. The movie, however, did not live up to the promise, at all. Transcendence tells the story of the great, famous computer scientist Will Caster (Johnny Depp) and his wife, Evelyn Caster (Rebecca Hall).