Eddie the Eagle Written by Sean Macaulay and Simon Kelton Directed by Dexter Fletcher U.K., 2016 Fresh off of the success of Kingsman: The Secret Service, few would have expected Matthew Vaughn to pluck the young star from that film (Taron Egerton) and produce a film about Great Britain’s first Olympic ski-jumper. Yet as an …
Pan Written by Jason Fuchs Directed by Joe Wright USA, 2015 Peter Pan gets the Star Wars treatment by way of Baz Luhrmann in Joe Wright’s Pan, an attempt at putting a somewhat original spin on a children’s classic. In true Hollywood style, however, the film is so hampered by studio notes that it almost …
Last night on late night, Tom Hanks and Dave talked dodging drones with Ron Howard, a “sex mathematician” explained hormones to Conan, Hugh Jackman and Nick Offerman were on The Tonight Show, Mariah Carey went on Kimmel, and The Men in Blazers broke down Premier League relegation battle drama.
Me and Earl and Wolverine and Lisbeth Salander? Maybe another time. Alfonso Gomez-Rejon, director of the Sundance darling Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, has snagged Hugh Jackman and Rooney Mara for his follow-up, Collateral Beauty. According to Variety, the emotional drama comes from an original screenplay by Allan Loeb (21, Rock of Ages). …
This week brought us another update on the Richard Jewell thriller that would reportedly re-team Leonardo DiCaprio and Jonah Hill following their work together on The Wolf of Wall Street. Deadline is reporting that Clint Eastwood is now circling the project. Jewell was a police officer who discovered a backpack with a bomb inside at …
UPDATE 3/30: James Mangold now confirmed via Twitter that he will be directing Jackman in The Wolverine 2, and that that film, not X-Men: Apocalypse, would be his last time. “@RealHughJackman: WOLVERINE …ONE LAST TIME. HJ https://t.co/vlqMyFchGx” Can’t wait to make this, HJ! Been toiling quietly a while now! — Mangold (@mang0ld) March 29, 2015 There …
Writer-director Neill Blomkamp pushes all his chips onto the table with this fascinating sci-fi gamble that dares you not to be entertained. Derivative, ultra-violent, and completely baffling, Chappie also manages to be insightful and sweet at times. This technically-accomplished and thematically-suspect robot melodrama has something for everyone to love (and hate). Mostly, it offers the giddy exhilaration of a movie that’s determined to tell its story, no matter how bat-shit crazy it is.
Step right up and see the greatest wonders of the world! Like a man with iron claws growing out of his hands! Or a multi-talented Australian actor who can sing, dance and kick your ass! Hugh Jackman is about to become The Greatest Showman on Earth by starring as P.T. Barnum in a new, original …
X-Men: Days of Future Past Written by Simon Kinberg Directed by Bryan Singer USA, 2014 It may be a slightly ominous sign that the best scene in X-Men: Days of Future Past features a totally new character to the infinite universe of mutants, who then all but vanishes from the rest of the film. Still, …
X-Men: Days of Future Past Written by Simon Kinberg Directed by Bryan Singer USA, 2014 The key virtue of the X-Men films has been their mutant-like ability to seamlessly blend with other genres. The Wolverine worked as samurai cinema. First Class played well as a Cold War-era Bond thriller. Since the comic’s inception, X-Men has been the “…in bed” fortune …
The upcoming X-Men: Days of Future Past motion picture directed by Bryan Singer bridges the time line between X-Men: First Class starring James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender and the earlier X-Men films starring Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan. If its trailers are any indication, it promises to be an epic event and the “biggest” X-Men film to date. Its story is lifted from the seminal story arc “Days of Future Past”, created by Chris Claremont and John Byrne and published in January-February 1981.
Christopher Nolan has earned carte blanche by dint of not just vision and execution but depth; he always buries material under the surface. Are you watching closely?
Overstuffed with an A-list cast, Denis Villeneuve’s (Incendies, Polytechnique) Prisoners is a funereal and often shocking meditation on what people are capable of doing for their loved ones. Permeated with savagery and blood, this is a film that forces ghastly situations on the audience which they’ve likely seen before but are hopefully not entirely numb to processing from a victim’s point of view. The drive behind what holds a family together for better or worse is showcased in painful detail. Gruesome, agonizing, and distressing, Prisoners goes for the jugular and leaves everyone wincing at the hideous view of the human condition that it leaves in its wake.
As fancy as it may feel, and as stacked as its ensemble is, Prisoners is pretty much a very well-acted and technically proficient feature-length episode of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. To be as generous as possible, you might simply take out that NBC drama and insert the grimmest crime procedural on the air you can think of. Like the best cop dramas, Prisoners is compelling and twisty, red herrings planted with care throughout.
It would seem that Hugh Jackman has come full circle. When he appeared as Wolverine in 2000’s X-Men, he wasn’t a big enough star to carry the film by himself; he needed a quality picture around him to bear the load of audience expectations. Now, in this weekend’s The Wolverine, Jackman has become such a star — and so attached to this role in particular — that he is able to pull the audience through the film’s rough spots and ultimately make it entertaining.
Based on the celebrated comic book arc, this epic action-adventure takes Wolverine, the most iconic character of the X-Men universe, to modern day Japan. Out of his depth in an unknown world he faces his ultimate nemesis in a life-or-death battle that will leave him forever changed. Vulnerable for the first time and pushed to …
Now that we are nearing the big awards of the season, it is time to revisit the nominations and predictions for the 2013 BAFTAs. Part 2 will cover the following categories: (see part one here) Best Film Best British Film Leading Actor Leading Actress Best Supporting Actor Best Supporting Actress Best Director The EE BAFTA …
Movie anthologies have seen a rise in recent years, with several filmmakers collaborating on a series of short films, often with a common theme running through them, such as all being set in the same city, or all belonging to the same genre. The latest addition to this entry is Movie 43, which features a …
For better or worse, films don’t exist in a vacuum. If literature derives from itself, and, according to Marshall McLuhan, the content in any new medium is always the same as in the old, then films don’t exactly have a wealth of opportunities to be original. You can always compare a film to one that …
Les Misérables Directed by Tom Hooper Written by William Nicholson, Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg, and Herbert Kretzmer United Kingdom, 2012 At some point in cinema history, it became bad form to make movie musicals without being self-aware or self-referential. The concern must spring from the perceived stumbling block people have when they watch musicals, …
Les Misérables Written by William Nicholson Directed by Tom Hooper UK, 2012 Verisimilitude can be a terrible trap. Film is an inherently contrived medium, one nevertheless capable of insinuating itself into realms real, imaginary and psychic through cunning, trickery, and time-honored craft. But, for better and (usually) worse, the existence of the medium’s hidden powers …
Butter Directed by Jim Field Smith Written by Jason Micallef USA, 2011 The new independent comedy Butter has a lot of intriguing ideas floating around, but is never content to latch onto just one and see it through to completion. Or, maybe the issue is that Butter would need to be about 30 minutes to …
