family
Is it selfish for adults to demand more from children’s entertainment? Adults have access to a wealth of different mediums of entertainment to enjoy, so should we crave animated films, mostly intended for a younger audience, to cater towards adult audiences? Indicators of these include dealing with deeper and darker themes, adult-only jokes/pop culture references and generally being an entertaining film that doesn’t go for the lowest common denominator.
What a relief Creed is. With a current cinematic landscape dominated by remakes, reboots and sequels, the initial idea of Creed just sounded so unnecessary. A pseudo-combination of a Rocky reboot that is a sequel whilst also working as a remake just felt like something we really didn’t need.
In the very North of England, settled into the cinematic hillside of the North Pennines, there lives a family of sheep farmers. Amongst the snow, the wind, and the dying local farm industry, this small family battles every day to rear the perfect sheep and to pursue the life they have always dreamed of. Meet the Hutchinsons – the stars of quirky documentary Addicted to Sheep.
One of the hardest things to decide when reviewing a film is if the intentions behind the production feel genuine. One aspect that always arises during the Oscar/Award periods is actors doing roles or movies being made purely for “Oscar bait”. The idea of making a movie purely for the sake of gaining awards attention is somewhat cynical, but the transparency of movie production nowadays makes this something that sadly may have some truth behind it.
As the Western world is finally starting to make significant strides towards sexual orientation equality, it is easy to forget that in most of the rest of the world homosexuals are less than accepted in their respective societies. LGBT people in such countries face discrimination, social exile and physical beatings as punishment for their existence, and as such have largely been forced to stay closeted. But Love is one of those things that is hard to keep hidden, and as one wise man once said about Life, Love too often “finds a way”.
In What Our Fathers Did: A Nazi Legacy two sons are brought together by a shared legacy, the legacy mentioned in the title. Both are the sons of high-ranking Nazi officers.
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.
The first I heard of No Escape was in a radio interview with Lake Bell. I’d been a fan of hers for a while, and being still in awe of her performance in Man Up, I was enthralled by her explanation of why she had taken on an action film. She talked of how it was important to her to gain new experiences so she could learn more about herself and her craft.
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.
To put it bluntly, Ricki and the Flash is a film which feels unfinished. It’s not a poorly made film, everyone involved seems to be at least putting in some effort, it’s just that between the script and overall editing, large chunks of the film seem to be missing and the film feels like it doesn’t deliver a full story. This is quite surprising, as the cast and crew behind the film are quite talented.
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?
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.
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?