drama
Most directors have a recognisable style that characterises their movies, giving them a distinctive visual stamp that claims it as wholly theirs. Todd Haynes is an unusual director in that his style differs from movie to movie, fully committing to replicating different genres and bygone fashions to the extent that he has no distinctive visual style that claims any movie as distinctively his. With Carol, he has made a period drama not entirely dissimilar from his early film, 2002’s Far From Heaven.
More so than not, it seems that movies based on actual events have a tendency to romanticize their stories. Or, in the hopes of emotionally prodding their audience, they present an overly sappy version of those events. Thankfully, Spotlight doesn’t fall victim to either of these two trends.
Knight of Cups is the first film I’ve ever seen where over a third of the audience left the theatre during the film. Without any context, I understand why this film would drive people to leave the movie. The film is an artistic montage, never stopping to deliver any linear narrative or dialogue scenes, continuing its visual poetry.
Many filmmakers have made movies about the Holocaust, yet so few are able to portray the atrocities without either becoming exploitative by staging fictionalised versions of some of the worst scenes in recorded history, or by sanitising the events in order to ensure that audiences aren’t left shocked and devastated. Austrian director Michael Haneke has frequently gone on record to claim that the idea of making a film about the holocaust is “unspeakable”, criticising the way a movie like Schindler’s List emotionally manipulates the audience when the subject matter alone should leave every sane person feeling depressed that something like this happened in recent history. Haneke argues that Steven Spielberg staging a sequence where concentration camp prisoners are marched to the shower and then building suspense from whether or not water will come out of the shower heads is the most offensive kind of exploitation; it trivialises a shocking moment of history in order to create nothing more than an action set piece.
There are two thoughts that go through your head when you hear about a Romanian film which won the Silver Bear for its director Radu June (at the 2015 Berlin Film Festival), and which has been earmarked as the country’s entry into the Foreign Film category at this year’s Oscars. The first is that this must be a very good film indeed. The other is that this is the sort of film that groups of people gather around and agree is an artistic and important film, but ultimately it’s not very entertaining.
The fast-paced life of the food industry is a modern miracle that is rarely appreciated. Any waiter or cook will tell you that no matter the level of industry, be it a McDonald’s or a steakhouse, creating food quickly and to customer satisfaction is a daunting task. Burnt attempts to take this one step further by exploring the mind of someone who loves the fast-paced nature of the business.
I’m a big fan of a well-made sports biopic. Not being very athletic myself but fascinated with the world of sports science and laws of probability, I find I have a great interest in ‘the field’. That is why I was very excited to see that a biopic was being made of Lance Armstrong’s doping scandal and much heralded fall from grace.
The tale of survival is a common one in the world of film. These stories present harrowing experiences that an individual or group must overcome before finally seeking rescue by the end. What these films rarely discuss, though, is the aftermath of the experience:
I can’t think of any other couple that exemplified the pure nature of an old Hollywood romance other than Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. If you take a quick glimpse at their history together, the love they shared was palpable. Bacall was only nineteen when they met (twenty when they married), and Bogart was old enough to be her father.
You would be right in thinking with a title like this The Boom Boom Girls Of Wrestling would be a lot of fun even if it wasn’t very good. Made by independent filmmaker Carolin Von Petzholdt, The Boom Boom Girls Of Wrestling claims to be inspired by true events (but I’m pretty sure this is just a gimmick), and tells the story of a group of out of work actresses who train to be wrestlers as part of some kind of reality show. However, on their way to their first event in Las Vegas their bus breaks down and they are stranded in a ghost town where a mysterious slasher (dressed as chicken, because, why not?
Beasts of No Nation made headlines before even a trailer dropped early in 2015. The Cary Fukunaga drama about child-soldiers in Africa was bought for $12 million by the streaming powerhouse Netflix. This meant that it would be the first time in history a potential Oscar-nominated film would be available online to Netflix subscribers the same day it would be released in theaters.
Remember when 3D movies dominated our cinematic landscape? No, not the 1980’s, where blurry red and blue glasses gave way to gimmicky horror films such as Jaws 3D and Amityville 3D. I’m also not talking about the early 2000’s, where 3D was turned over to children’s films, producing flops like Spy Kids 3 and The Polar Express.
Bridge of Spies is not what I would call a happy film. Gray snow envelopes the dilapidated East German cityscape and we find Tom Hanks’s character interacting with others primarily in poorly lit, often dank rooms. Nearly all of the characters are entirely self-interested with blinders positioned perfectly to block out the undesired effects their actions can have on others.
Technology has made finding relationships easier than before, yet also far more difficult to sustain. Less than a day before writing this review, my boyfriend broke up with me. It took eight months to realise that we are completely different people with different interests, with the realisation of our incompatibility unwelcome but inevitable.
Suffragette has been grabbing the attention of the media and public long before it was even released. First, there were rumours that there were to be no women of colour in the film (this is true). Then there was the at best ignorant, at worst painfully offensive campaign led by Meryl Streep and the rest of the cast, featuring photos of them wearing t-shirts stating ‘I’d rather be a rebel than a slave’.