Search Results for: get out

The Wave (2015) starts as a tsunami and turns into a washout

 

You may remember Dennis Gansel’s The Wave (Die Welle), a fictionalised take on The Third Wave, which saw a group of high school students established their own fascist dictatorship as part of a social experiment.

A complex study of the evil that can occur as a result of social pressure and groupthink, it missed out on Germany’s 2008 submission for Best Foreign Language to The Baader Meinhof Complex.…

Suffragette is a worthy but overly respectable

 

As with The Imitation Game, which kicked off last year’s London Film Festival, Suffragette — another period drama — is a quintessential work of British cinema. It too tells an important story.

Instead of the huts of Bletchley Park, we find ourselves at an East End laundry circa 1913, the workplace of Maud Watts (Carey Mulligan) and dozens of other industrious women.…

Sicario is a moody, sun-bleached thriller set south of the border

Somewhere between the Wild West and Iraq lies Juarez, Mexico.

A brightly colored urban sprawl with a population of just over 1.3 million, in 2008 its murder rate was the highest in the world: 130 per 100,000. According to Sicario, the latest film from director Denis Villeneuve, it’s a city where mutilated corpses hang from overpasses, a warning from the cartels.…

Z For Zachariah gets a B+ in the post-apocalypse stakes

 

Craig Zobel’s Z For Zachariah may have the same PG-13 age rating as the bloodless Terminator Genisys1, but there’s more to this adaptation of Robert C. O’Brien’s classic junior sci-fi than just The Road for kiddies.

While Cormac McCarthy’s famously grim work of fiction is structured around, well, the road, Z For Zachariah concerns staying put.…

Pete Docter proves just the tonic for Pixar with Inside Out

 

Say what you want about the superhero genre, over the past twenty years Pixar has turned our childhoods into a cottage history.

From the animated playthings of Toy Story to the night terrors of Monsters, Inc., with the occasional sequel and prequel thrown in, no studio has displayed such consistent inventiveness and insight into the processes of growing up.…

Mommy: a love-hate experience I had mixed feelings about

 

Right, where to begin. Mommy, the latest work of French-Canadian filmmaker Xavier Dolan, plays like a hyper-saturated soap opera underscored with Greek tragedy and just a dash of plot-convenient alternate universe social community.

Set in a Canada where its legal to indefinitely commit problem kids at the age of sixteen, Mommy revolves around Diane “Die” Després (Anne Dorval), a gutsy, sometimes glamorous single mum who, first we see her, is stepping out a car wreck; a few minutes later Die’s smacking gum and staring down a teacher who questions her ability to look after her troubled son, Steve (Antoine-Olivier Pilon).…

For a film about a haunting, Poltergeist (2015) is very much a non-entity.

How do you one-up Steven Spielberg?

Rumors have circulated for years that he was the creative force behind Poltergeist, as opposed to director-for-hire Tobe Hooper; perhaps not surprising given the ‘Berg’s reputation as arguably the foremost American director of all time.…

Get lost in the grounded transcendentalism of Wild

 

A life-affirming tale of finding yourself amidst nature, based on a best-selling memoir, Wild follows Cheryl Strayed, an aspiring writer whose life falls apart upon the death of her mother.

Having sought refuge in sex and drugs, Cheryl decides to repair her life by walking the 1,200 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail, from the US-Mexican border, through California, Oregon, and Washington, all the way up to Canada.…

Foxcatcher is a frigid masterpiece about the pursuit of championship

 

Of all the things to confront in life, failure is perhaps the hardest.

How it reflects on us, and we on it, and our desperation to avoid it are universal facts of human existence. Foxcatcher is the second title to feature at this year’s London Film Festival that can be aptly summarized as a “psychotic coach drama” – the first being Whiplash; though the two films are in many ways polar opposites.…

Paddington gets right more than the bear necessities

 

How exactly do you go about adapting a classic children’s character to the big screen?

Stay too true to the source material and you’ll miss out on the audience of hyperactive tweens; stray too far, however, and you end up with a soulless “product”.…