drama
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’.
Fingers, the Indiegogo-funded short film from writer/director Alex Marx and producer Savannah James-Bayly, is a slick and stylish crime drama that blends Biblical themes with 1960s London glam. From the filmmakers’ own mouths: Fingers is a short crime drama based on the Biblical story of Salome and the martyrship of John the Baptist, reimagined in the murky underworld of a 1960s nightclub in London’s East End.
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.
A Syrian Love Story is the latest investigative documentary from award winning filmmaker-journalist Sean McCallister. Renowned for his hard-hitting documentaries which go further than others dare to, McCallister follows a Syrian family over a 5 year period – through love, separation, prison, war and freedom. Beginning an extra-ordinary journey, activists Raghda and Amer meet in their youth in a Syrian prison, detained for their positions as high profile anti-Assad activists.
The time has come to continue the series on the best knockout films of all-time. The goal is to share my ten favorite movies of this genre, which may include boxing, mixed martial arts, and wrestling, to name a few. If you are just joining the discussion, the series started with a review of the 2004 Best Picture winner Million Dollar Baby, and a review of the 2014 Best Picture nominee Foxcatcher.
Some of the very best films are those that are immersive experiences. You immediately know after leaving the theater that you have witnessed something special, and for anyone to even suggest otherwise just seems inarguably wrong. The Martian is one of the few films that I have seen this year that has left such an impact.
Most of us are familiar with the story of Macbeth by William Shakespeare, a story so prevalent that people will not utter the name of ‘the Scottish play’ whilst in the theatre, as by ancient tradition it is said to be cursed. For those of you who are not familiar with the story, it is a tale of one man’s hunger for power in a tyrannical society, and how he is pushed further and further down a descending path of hopelessness and insanity by his wife, a group of witches, and his own consciousness. There have been many recreations of the play on stage and on screen, and this 2015 cinematic depiction of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, directed by Justin Kurzel and starring Michael Fassbender and Marion Contillard, is on a platform so high that the other depictions are unable to reach it.