drama
A young Montana boy named T.S. Spivet leaves his rustic home and heads to Washington D.
A few years ago, I heard about two films going in to production, both on the subject of Mount Everest. The biopic of Mallory fell by the wayside and is still languishing in pre-production. However, the other soared, for about a moment.
There is a right way and a wrong way to tell a gangster story. Some of the very best have utilized inventive camera techniques, are fueled by impressive acting talent, and are backed by an engaging, well-written screenplay. Black Mass attempts to be something great; yet, when thinking back to it, it’s likely only the acting that will be remembered.
Low budget productions always have to come to terms to the fact they are not going to be able to offer proper cinematic spectacle on a minuscule budget. A Dozen Summers instead opts to be as deliberately amateurish as possible, giving it the distinctive feeling of a movie that the twelve year old protagonists would not only wish to make, but would be capable of making. It feels aimless, rambling at even a brief 82 minutes (eight of which are dedicated to elongated end credits), but proves near impossible to dislike despite all of its clear faults.
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.
Paper Towns is an adaptation of John Green’s book of the same name. You may already have read or watched his highly successful The Fault In Our Stars, and have come back for more. Why wouldn’t you, he’s John Green?
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.
Here is an interesting thought: Al Pacino is having something of a career renaissance. His last three major roles, including this year’s Manglehorn, are as far away from the go-to gangster’s early movies as can be.
If it were not for Paul Thomas Anderson, there is a (very) good chance I wouldn’t be interested in writing about movies. It is because of his films that I take time to write for this humble little website. When I was a high school senior in 2009, my interest in movies inflated dramatically, and I watched a movie just about every night.
The film Ida by Pawel Pawlikowski is admired by critics and viewers around the world. The movie won awards at important international festivals and it was nominated for an Academy Award in the category for Best Foreign Language Film. A glimmer of hope woke in the Poles after winning a golden statue:
“A Cajun devil hunter goes to the crossroads and meets the devil’s attorney”. The compelling summary of Chasseur had me hooked before I even started watching, let alone the mesmerising central performance from the film’s writer and director, Christopher Soren Kelly. An unconventional structure, perhaps, but a successful one.
I was having a conversation recently with a friend who complained about how he gets annoyed when he sees child celebrities, as “they’ve already achieved more in life than I ever will and they are younger than me!” As a recent university graduate, without a firm footing into the grown-up world of work, I’m increasingly empathising with this statement, whilst also increasingly acknowledging how ridiculous it is. Why should I be bothered that people who are more talented than me are going places, just because they are younger?
Le Havre (2011) is a still, quiet and dryly hilarious film. It has many of the qualities of a Japanese master like Mizoguchi, but if he had emigrated to a small French port and had been forced to make working class comedies. It focuses on a shoe shiner called Marcel Marx whose wife contracts a seemingly terminal disease.
If there is ever a fitting description for Arnold Schwarzenegger’s cinematic persona, then it is this: action film hero. Time and time again, we’ve seen the ex-California Governor’s face adorning several iconic titles, portraying mere mortals (or robots in Terminator’s case) possessing near-superhuman ability, an eye for supersized weapons and a knack for crisp one-liners.
Before it had even stepped into the ring, Southpaw was dead on arrival. After all, although boxing isn’t the sport that has generated the most movies, it is the sport that has generated the most beloved cinematic classics – from Rocky and Raging Bull to the more recent likes of Million Dollar Baby and The Fighter. At the screening I attended, I was far more likely to greet it as an unwelcome entry to the boxing movie pantheon, due to the fact that the last trailer before the movie started was for Creed, the new Rocky spin-off that benefits from having Sylvester Stallone yet again reprising his most iconic role.