My Life as a Courgette Uses Stylized Animation To Make Something That Taps Into Reality

More live-action filmmakers should give animated filmmaking a try. After all, animation isn't a filmmaking technique from another planet, it's just another way to tell a story. When masters of live-action cinema give animation a spin such as with Gore Vebrinski with Rango or Steven Spielberg with The Adventures of Tintin, the results can be dynamite. The imagination of these auteurs can be fully unleashed in the limitless domain of animation. See also Celina Sciamma, the writer/director of Portrait of a Lady on Fire, who penned the screenplay for My Life as a Courgette. Her gift for exploring people's internal struggles is utilized poignantly here in a tale that fully takes advantage of the unique aspects of animation.

Mermaids! Monstrous Murder! Musical Numbers! It's All Here In The Lure!

Remember that brief period in the early 2010's when we had gritty reimaginings of fairy tales? It didn't last long, mostly because more classical retellings of those fairy tales proved to be far more financially lucrative, but for a moment, we got just enough of these titles to qualify as a mini-trend in American cinema. Jack The Giant Slayer, Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters and Snow White & The Huntsman all emerged as attempts to rework children's fairy tales into dark PG-13 or R-rated cinema. In the end though, most of these attempts to be "adult" just ended up feeling derivative of other movies or tv shows and resulted in lackluster motion pictures (I do remember Giant Slayer being decent, to be fair).

John Boyega Excels In The Grueling Lead Role of Imperial Dreams

"Pull yourself up by your bootstraps". That famous phrase gets touted a lot in regards to someone not being able to live up to their full potential or realizing their goals as if saying such a phrase will immediately spark in a person the idea to finally go out there and live out the idealized version of their own life. But for many, it's not as simple as just "pulling yourself by your own bootstraps", there are more complex issues, both large and small in scale, to face on a daily basis that hinders one's ability to complete even the most basic tasks of trying to improve one's station in life. How can one even begin to pull themselves up by their bootstraps if their arms are being so heavily weighed down?

I Don't Feel At Home In This World Anymore Starts Out Strong & Gloomy But Can't Sustain Its Momentum

For his first feature-length project as a director (and his second foray into such a field as a writer), Macon Blair quickly establishes a glib view of humanity that's dragging the lead character of I Don't Feel At Home In This World Anymore, Ruth Kimky (Melanie Lynskey) down. Every day she see's people polluting the environment with their cars, random strangers acting cruel to one another and everyone around her constantly acting so so selfish. Her idea that everyone else on this planet is just selfish and cruel gets reinforced when her home gets burglarized and the law enforcement officers in charge of the case don't seem to be in too much of a hurry to solve the burglary.

Rings Is the Most Disposable Kind Of Low-Quality Horror Fare

I feel like if we took a public poll on whether or not there was a new Ring movie released earlier in 2017, not a single soul would be able to say "yes". 2017 has certainly felt like a year that's just stretched onward into forever with its nonstop torrential downpouring of misery, but I doubt people even remember this thing came out, let alone that Rings came out not as long ago as they might think. For this newest entry of the Ring saga, the attention turns to Julia (Matilda Lutz), whose boyfriend, Holt Anthony (Alex Roe), has gone off to college and left her. They keep their relationship going via Skype chats, but it ain't easy doing the whole long distance song-and-dance.

Collide Isn't All That Special But It's Got Moments Of Entertainment In It

Some movies set the right kind of box office records, others...don't. The latter case befell Collide, an action movie that had suffered numerous setbacks in its domestic release due to its original distributor, Relativity Media, going bankrupt. An original planned October 2015 release date faded away though Open Road Films picked up U.S. rights to the film shortly thereafter only for further release date delays (it was originally set for an August 2016 date before its eventual final February 2017 release date) to occur. Once it finally got released, it had the sixth worst opening weekend in history for a movie debuting in over 2,000 theaters and had the biggest second-weekend decline of any movie opening in wide release in North America.

The Space Between Us Gets Lost In Space

How come more of these romantic dramas aren’t from a female perspective? Like, any person of any gender can enjoy a romantic movie but these particular movies do have a notable female fanbase and are typically marketed towards women, not to mention that the most famous of these features (The Notebook, Twilight and The Fault In Our Stars for instance) are told through the prism of women. It’s kind of odd to me then that so many of these movies go for an overtly male perspective that relegates women to the sidelines as thinly sketched romantic interest material. Wouldn’t you be better served getting a woman as the face of the project and tying the premise into issues facing specifically women instead of treating your target audience as just a poorly defined object for your male protagonist to covet?

Rock Dog Is A Bad Boy

Are the various animation studios now just playing Mad Libs with these computer-animated movies? Inspired by the success of Ratatouille and Kung Fu Panda a decade ago, are they just now taking random animal names and random occupations that would juxtapose against the aforementioned animal and just calling that a plot? We've seen this phenomenon with the likes of Turbo and Norm Of The North and now a plot device intended to drum up an underdog story (that can be used well in the right circumstances it should be noted) that's easy to get invested in just feels stale at this point. The newest entry in this trend is Rock Dog, which is, as the title suggests, about a dog who wishes to be a rock musician.

(A United) Kingdom Hearts

No romantic relationship comes without its own set of hurdles, and for many individuals in society over the ages, such struggles go well beyond "communication difficulties" or similarly mundane ordeals. Same-sex couples and interracial couples particularly have found a great amount of strife in attempting to have the same marital rights as white heterosexual couples. For the two lead characters in the romantic drama A United Kingdom, the complications associated with interracial couples in the late 1940's are further complicated by the fact that one of the two individuals is the prospective king of Bechuanaland.

Good Wall Hunting

For those hoping The Great Wall turned out to be a big-budget misfire diamond in the rough ala the highly underappreciated John Carter, alas, it is not. For those curious if The Great Wall is a big budget colossal failure like Batman v. Superman: Dawn Of Justice or The Last Airbender, it is also not fitting of that description. Instead, what we get here is a mostly boring result of being merely a forgettable motion picture with decent production value found in the myriad of colorful costumes and some actually decently well-designed monsters while its scattershot script lets those positive elements down big time.

Believe The Hype Folks, Get Out Is Sublime Horror Movie Cinema

Hollywood absolutely loves to imitate whatever's popular and making money and the genre of horror is no stranger to this rule. Because horror movies tend to be made on the cheap, it's way easier to crank out films in this genre that imitate whatever spooky motion picture is raking up big bucks. Thus, slasher movies like Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Friday The 13th begat numerous slasher movie knock-offs in the 80's while Paranormal Activity spawned countless found-footage movies that heavily featured possessed people. Lately, it feels like The Conjuring, and its emphasis on old-timey objects being creepy and chilling sound effects, has been the one many recent horror fare have been imitating.

The End Is Nigh In The Engrossing Apocalypse Now

Sight & Sound Voyage Entry #9
Placement On Sight & Sound 50 Best Movies List: #14

Every single war in human history is a brutal affair from which no participant in it comes away unscathed. But the Vietnam War took on a whole other life of its own that made it a particularly gruesome affair. New innovations in cameras and TV news allowed people to see grisly first-hand footage directly from the battlefield, once that footage was actually allowed to be aired on TV that is. People were getting an up-close glimpse at the harshness of war for the first time and the fact that the Vietnam war ended in a loss for America only added a further layer of tragedy to what was already a cataclysmic affair.

Someone Find A Remedy For The Story Problems That Plague A Cure For Wellness

It's fairly obvious that director Gore Verbinski carries a soft spot for the twisted and morbid. His debut directorial effort, Mouse Hunt, was a family movie obviously intended to be just a Home Alone knock-off, so of course, he starts off the feature with a funeral procession and a separate on-screen heart attack in short order. His Pirates Of The Caribbean movies frequently diverged into spooky terrain and don't forget about the random cannibal elements (including ravenous rabbits) in The Lone Ranger. After nearly fifteen years of playing in the real of PG & PG-13 fare, Gore Verbinski's newest movie, A Cure For Wellness, offers him the chance to just go nuts with all the twisted story content he can imagine.

Go On A Thoughtful & Beautiful Journey Out To Sea With The Red Turtle

We've all heard the phrase "A picture's worth a thousand words" ad nauseum in our lives at this point, but there's really no better axiom to pull out in order to really pinpoint why The Red Turtle works so well. This newest feature hailing from Studio Ghibli is a hand-drawn animated feature (with computer animation embellishments) that is an entirely dialogue-free affair, instead choosing to tell its original story solely by way of boatloads of gorgeous animation. Without verbal communication at its beck and call. The Red Turtle creates something extraordinarily unique with a remarkably potent emotional center.

Fist Fight Is About As Painful As A Punch In The Face

Charlie Day is funny. Ice Cube is funny. Jillian Bell is funny. Tracy Morgan is funny. Kumail Najiani is funny. Dean Norris was awesome on Breaking Bad. Christina Hendricks is....I actually haven't watched Mad Men, so my only prior exposure to her has been in two Nicolas Winding Refn movies and her brief cameo in Zoolander 2, so I'm unclear on her talent levels right now but I've heard phenomenal things about her role on Mad Men. Anywho, put all these people in a movie together and you're bound to get something remotely resembling a fun comedy, right? Not quite, what we end up with instead is kind of sort of the exact opposite of that.

What Lies Beneath Review

What Lies Beneath is a departure for Robert Zemeckis, a director whose inhabited many different genres in his multiple decades as a filmmaker, but only delved into the world of horror two other times in his career, with the 1992 horror/comedy Death Becomes Her and the feature that traumatized me as a youth, The Polar Express. What Lies Beneath may not be as terrifying as his 2004 Christmas-themed motion picture, but hey, it works on its own merits as a spooky ghost story with some appropriately bombastic twists that feel like they should be told around a campfire via an adult holding a flashlight under their face.

"DARKNESS!" and "NO PARENTS!!" Inform The Incredibly Fun LEGO Batman Movie

With The LEGO Batman Movie, we've now had eleven theatrically released movies starring Batman (the number goes up to twelve if ya wanna count Batman: The Killing Joke, which received a limited two-night long theatrical run last summer). Considering the characters been romping around in comics for nearly eight whole decades now, you can imagine there's plenty of fodder in the universe of Batman for way more than just eleven movies, but a large portion of his mythos has been swept aside in recent theatrical film depictions of the character, namely the presence of the Bat-Family, which consists of characters like Robin and Bat-Girl.

Looking For An Action Movie Sequel With Fun To Spare? John Wick: Chapter 2 Is Just What You've Been Looking For!

There are a couple things you need in an action movie to succeed. A good grasp of the language of how to shoot action sequences is vital, since a cohesive visual style is crucial for the audience to even get anything out of the extended shoot-outs or fistfights. Understanding how to keep bringing new elements to the table in each of your action sequences so they don't get repetitive is a great choice, ditto for getting editors who know how to make all of these scenes flow naturally. John Wick: Chapter 2 understands all these crucial rules as well as one other truism of life: it never hurts to have an adorable pit bull around.

Justice League Dark Is Scarily Forgettable Fare

TV seems to be the one spot where DC Comics isn't going for solely grim n' gritty fare, with some more darker programming like Gotham being heavily outnumbered by the likes of Justice League Action, Supergirl, The Flash, etc. But in the likes of film, comics and video games, grittiness seems to be the primary name of the game, which isn't in and of itself a bad thing, it's just that so many of these grimmer fare feel like they're being more "adult" for mere shock value instead of doing what's best for their stories. At least it's understandable why Justice League Dark would go in a grim direction since it deals with more ominous superheroes like Constantine, Deadman and the other mystical horror-centric realms of the DC universe.

The LEGO Ninjago Movie Trailer Has Some Serious Daddy Issues

Considering how franchise crazy Warner Bros. is these days, you'd have to be crazy to think they were only gonna follow-up their smash hit feature The LEGO Movie with only one or two direct sequels. They're going spin-off crazy with this one, with this Friday bringing The LEGO Batman Movie and this September unleashing the LEGO Ninjago Movie on the populace. Now, I'm completely unfamiliar with the LEGO Ninjago franchises history beyond knowing that it was a TV show on Cartoon Network and also knowing that my younger brother was obsessed with it for a brief period. It appears the movie version of that property is giving itself its own mythology, so check out the first trailer for it below to get a first glimpse of this new take on the Ninja LEGO characters.