Staff Inquiry
The Film Inquiry team discusses their favorite film adaptations, whether they’reb ased on books, comics, plays or short stories! Share your favorite adaptations in the comments.
The latest Staff Inquiry is about our favorite opening credits, and how they manage to set the style and tone for the film that follows.
The Film Inquiry team present a rundown of all nine Best Picture nominees, and why they each might deserve the most prestigious award.
The Film Inquiry team went back through the history of the Academy Awards, and selected our personal favorites out of the many nominations.
2016 was a great year for film. Our Film Inquiry writers submitted their top ten lists, along with their pick for best film of the year.
Halloween – the season of ghouls, screams and tricks or treats. It’s the time of year when scares of all kinds are acceptable and even welcomed. We become the creatures of the night, in search for something to satisfy our yearly holiday craving.
When the BBC polled an international array of critics, producers and filmmakers for their greatest films of the 21st century, there was naturally an outpouring of frustration on social media. The list was naturally derided for being elitist, not featuring any comedies and for featuring few works by female directors; textbook stuff when it comes to polls of greatest films. When the list was announced earlier this summer, the Film Inquiry team initially agreed on doing our own gigantic top 100 to rival the BBC’s official findings.
Though film is an inherently collaborative medium, requiring careful cooperation of dozens of individuals, there are two roles that get singled out as being most responsible for the final product. Representing the technical marvels behind the camera and the beauty in front of it, directors and actors are Hollywood’s lifeblood, providing a face for the art that took the efforts of countless unseen. Sometimes, a director/actor tandem proves so gripping or successful, that a personal and professional bond is forged, and the two continue to work together; sometimes it’s a brief burst, while other times it’s a career-long relationship, but often the familiarity working teams have with one another results in a film of elevated artistic achievement.
One annoying trend nowadays is for people to mix their genuine reactions to a film with the hype and varied opinions of others, judging it not on its content, but what you thought it was going to be. Quentin Tarantino flipped heads last year with The Hateful Eight, a considerably slower but angrier entry into his filmography, which caused anger amongst many filmgoers who were expecting another Spaghetti Western tribute that mixed modern music and quick-paced action. This highlights the problem with auteur theory and the reliance of marketing in the current movie climate, where many movie marketeers either must spoil an entire film within the trailer to gain the audience’s confidence to go see it or mismarket a film because they’re unsure on how to sell a unique/niche product to a broad audience.
In the beginning, there was light. It moved, it danced, it enthralled, but in the end, it was just light. Even in the silent era, exhibitors recognized the value of sound, coming up with a wide array of live and pre-recorded solutions to the problem of representing reality with only one of our five senses (and drained of color at that).
Taste is a fluid thing, though we seldom view it as such in the moment. For many, our cultural tastes define us and they are as solid and inscrutable as a pope made out of granite. Yet this is something that is often felt even bereft of the experience required to discover, explore and refine what kinds of cinema to which one really responds.
One of the few common experiences not only among different cultures, but different species, is the act of eating. We all just have to do it, and we don’t have a say in it. Food unites high and low, left and right, young and all, through necessity and playful manipulation of our senses.
Christmastime. Is Here. ‘Tis the season of light and gift-giving, but also of nostalgia and tired holiday classics (I imagine that this is the one time of year many of you find the need to break out the VCR).
A few weeks back the Film Inquiry team vented their rage at the films we felt have undeservedly found a home in the good graces of both critics and audiences. This week, as we gear up for the good nature and cheer of the holidays, we thought we would go the other way and make cases for those films which though finding little love upon their theatrical releases, have managed to make themselves comfy in the warmth of our hearts. It doesn’t matter that critics, audiences and the film culture at large more or less forgot about these films the week after they were released, we know that everyone else is just making a terrible misassessment of work that is of undeniable quality.
It’s been a week now since the world was shocked by a string of attacks throughout the city known world over as the civic symbol of love. Paris is many different things to many different people, and whether or not one has had the occasion to even visit, it is likely that they at least hold some associations with it, something representative of its ranking it among the world’s top tier metropolises. With Paris, as with most things, there is no better window into the place it holds in the hearts of those looking both from the outside as well as within as the frame of the movie screen.