Deceptively simple, but effective on the surface, Mama has a lot more depth than one would expect thanks to sharp writing and a great lead performance from Academy Award nominee Jessica Chastain. It revives the "creepy child" horror movie from the jaws of tedium.
In the best film of her already great career, Kathryn Bigelow and a thoroughly excellent Jessica Chastain create the ultimate impartial treatise on modern warfare with Zero Dark Thirty.
Lawless feels like a film compromised somewhere in the editing process with long passages awkwardly truncated and the director’s patented slow, thoughtful pacing replaced with a more action-centric aesthetic, but the film still works reasonably well as an entertaining gangster yarn filled with the performances you get as a prestigious director working with his pick of the top actors around.
DA DA DA DA DA DA DA DA CIRCUS DA DA DA DA DA DA DA DA AFRO CIRCUS AFRO CIRCUS AFRO POLKA DOT POLKA DOT POLKA DOT AFRO
Of all the months this summer, June has become so stacked that we had to divide our summer movie preview up into two parts! Today, we take a look at Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted, Magic Mike, That's My Boy, Safety Not Guaranteed, Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, and G.I. Joe: Retaliation!
Dork Shelf talks to Texas Killing Fields director Ami Canaan Mann about preparing and authentic feeling true crime drama, working with heavyweights like Sam Worthington and Jessica Chastain, and what it was like learning filmmaking from her father, Michael Mann.
While there probably hasn’t been much clamouring for another modern Shakespearian adaptation – meaning the dialog stays nearly word for word the same, but the setting is present day – the fact that actor and first time director Ralph Fiennes has made one of the Bard’s lesser noticed plays, Coriolanus, into such a film, seems oddly okay. With a genuine passion for theatrics and bloodlust that the world’s most noted playwright would approve of, Fiennes delivers an engrossing tale of betrayal, hatred, and revenge that manages to overcome any shortcomings he has as a novice film director.
There’s a moment when Michael Shannon, chaperoning his sleeping family across the dark flooded highways, pulls over and steps out of his car. Off in the distance, crackles of lightning tear apart the sky, pounding the earth below it in fury. Looking around while cars behind him continue to drive by and his family rests undisturbed, he asks aloud, to the world, if he’s the only one seeing this apocalyptic sight. Jeff Nichols’ second feature Take Shelter has been conjuring its own storm on the festival circuit, a study of a humble man who suffers against an behemoth enemy only he can see.
