After 22 years and two middling sequels, we’ve finally gotten what feels like a natural successor to Steven Spielberg’s 1993 dino-centric classic. While Jurassic World doesn’t conjure the same magic as Jurassic Park, it taps into a lot of the same themes and appropriates several action beats. Oftentimes the reverence is detrimental, but there’s enough distinction and forward momentum in this adventure to make it one worth taking.
If I told you that there was a premise for a movie about seven children who were locked in a Lower East Side apartment for their whole lives who then finally decide to break out and see the world, you might think that it sounds like a lovely piece of fiction. But the kicker about Crystal Moselle’s The Wolfpack is that it is a factual documentary that is truly stranger than fiction.
In Jon Long’s visually stunning new documentary The Search for Freedom, we explore the lives and philosophies of some of the world’s most successful action sports athletes. Rather than presenting a film just about skating or surfing, Long attempts to cover a wide array of sports, including mountain biking and climbing, snowboarding, motocross, base jumping and more.
Let’s get this out of the way right off the bat: If you aren’t a fan of Wes Anderson’s catalogue of films, you’ll have problems with Oliver Thompson’s Welcome to Happiness. Stylistically and tonally, this is an Anderson clone, from the slow-motion walks to the quirky sets and camerawork. If this is something you can look at as homage, rather than cloning someone else’s voice, then you’ll have a good time with this film.
Figuring out how to get an audience to see a film that viewers may have preconceived notions about can certainly be a challenge, and it rests in the hands of the filmmakers and promoters to do just that. Hello, My Name is Frank… – a coming-of-age, road-trip film that features a developmentally disabled individual – appears on the surface to be exploitative in the worst kind of way. However, this film is filled with endearing characters on a journey that isn’t at all exploitative and has plenty of heart, laughs and cussing.
Rodney Ascher, director of the Stanley Kubrick conspiracy theory doc, Room 237, is back tackling another interesting subject in The Nightmare, a look at the phenomena of sleep paralysis, wherein those afflicted often wake up in their beds and witness shadowy figures hovering over them. It’s a creepy topic to be sure, but the film does little to explore or explain this strange ailment.
When you hit the proverbial wall, it seems like the next logical step would be to go backward. In the case of the hit supernatural franchise Insidious, it seemed like there was nowhere else to go after two films covered the events of the Lambert haunting.
In fact, the route filmmakers eluded to at the end of the second film just felt tacked on and pointless, such that the franchise would have become a parody, no matter how scary and creepy they tried to make the third installment. So having hit the logical end of the Lambert story, the filmmakers decided to go back to the beginning in this less-than-inspiring prequel to the Insidious saga.
The setup for Dylan Narang’s feature debut, All I Need, is simple enough: a girl awakes, tied up in a room with multiple other girls – some dead, some unconscious – and she’s unaware of how she got there. Now she must escape before a masked killer comes back and kills her.
Sound familiar? Where this film slightly deviates from those like it is that there’s another story unfolding while the girl, Chloe (Caitlin Stasey), is trying to make her escape. The perspective randomly shifts to a guy being sent on seemingly random errands by a seemingly random Russian man over the phone. The two stories appear to have nothing to do with one another, but guess what? They eventually converge.
When people call films “formulaic,” they are undoubtedly referring to the fact that those films follow the same structure as many that have come before it – predictable, unoriginal, not very compelling or even boring. Movies have been around for more than a century now, and it goes without saying that, at some point, one film is going to look like another you may have seen before.
About five minutes into my screening of San Andreas a ceiling tile in the auditorium popped loose right in front of the screen and obstructed the projection. The film was stopped, an employee wielding a large pole appeared, and he knocked the intrusive object out of the way. The loud, effects-filled earthquake disaster movie was promptly fired back up. The few moments spent watching that ceiling tile flutter several feet to the floor were the most thrilling of my two-plus hours in the theater.
Often narrative films will strive to convey a realistic approach to storytelling, drawing inspiration from real-life scenarios and using non-actors to bring the viewer a documentary-like experience.
In Heaven Knows What, directors Ben and Joshua Safdie blur the lines between narrative and documentary even more by crafting a film based on the life of a young homeless girl named Arielle Holmes and then having her star in the movie as herself. This alone makes the film instantly more compelling to watch and greatly compounds the impact of Arielle’s tragic life, making this a movie you will never forget.
The restless souls of 2015’s version of Poltergeist have upgraded their method of communication to HDTV, but the film as a whole does little to repackage or freshen-up the 1982 original. This update is a half-hearted and half-baked retread that coasts on straight mimicry rather than tweaking the now well-worn formula for supernatural intrusions into suburbia.
In 2009, a little horror film – The Human Centipede (First Sequence) – broke onto the scene and became a notorious sensation. In the film, a mad scientist creates the first “medically accurate” human centipede, where three individuals’ digestive systems are fused together into one gruesome tract.
You don’t need to have seen the first Pitch Perfect film to appreciate Pitch Perfect2, which easily stands alone as a great comedy that appeals to a broad audience. Elizabeth Banks' first feature-length film is a serviceable companion to the franchise’s 2012 original, bringing back the outstanding musical numbers that were injected with plenty of humor that made the first one so appealing.
In addition to being loosely tied to a Disney theme park attraction, Brad Bird’s Tomorrowland attempts to bring back the science fiction of yesteryear, focusing on bright futures and the infinite imagination of man and our unwavering ability to reach for the stars.
In theory, a movie celebrating old-school sci-fi themes sounds refreshing and fun, especially given the Disney spin, but the film falters by constantly condemning modern sci-fi for its dire outlook on the future of civilization, all the while becoming the exact thing it’s criticizing.
The secrets of Every Secret Thing should feel bigger. There’s lots of talent behind and in front of the camera, working with potentially deeply affecting, relatable material, but the drama is flat. The subject matter of the crimes at the center of the film is horrific and stirs emotions on premise alone, though that’s not enough to make up for pedestrian execution.
7
