Film

The Coen Brothers return with the 1960s-set Inside Llewyn Davis, a delightful tragicomedy about a musician just trying to get a break. Oscar Isaac plays the titular Llewyn and this is very much his show from beginning to end. That's a good thing, too, as the very talented Isaac imbues Llewyn with just the right amount of crassness to make him an interesting character without making him unlikeable. It's a virtual cavalcade of talented actors of whose life Llewyn floats in and out. The most notable is Carey Mulligan whose turn as a folk singer with plenty of attitude shows us a side of Mulligan we haven't often seen. Fans of Girls will also love Adam Driver's small but hilarious role. Those expecting a... [Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]

It was all the way back in November of 2005 that Twitch first wrote about Russian horror film Viy, a remake of one of that nation's earliest horror films which is itself an adaptation of a story by Nikolai Gogol. The years since have not been kind to Viy. Massive delays, multiple reshoots, the apparent failure of more than one company involved in the film - at least in part due to massive budget overruns - the creation of an international framing story involving Jason Flemyng and Charles Dance in an attempt to broaden the international appeal and make their money back, more reshoots, more delays, more companies cycling through, etc etc etc ...But after all of that the film is now, apparently, nearing completion... [Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]

If ever there was an art film open to the masses this may be the one. The Coens have nailed mood, character and atmosphere with Inside Llewyn Davis and I dare anyone to watch it and not come away with at least a little something to appreciate if not a whole bag full of things to love and talk about.

The Fast & The Furious was kicked up a further notch with the release of Fast 5, and more importantly the casting addition of Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson’s Interpol Agent Hobbs. But after Dom Toretto (Vin Diesel) and the …

0 0 1 1513 8630 Susquehanna University 71 20 10123 14.0 Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} “One false move and you’re in over your head” I tend to steer clear of prestige noir — there just isn’t much new to say about such films, and more often than not they wrap up in too neat a package. But in revisiting Where the Sidewalk Ends after a two-decade hiatus, I discovered a far better picture than I remembered — surprisingly post-modern in its depiction of a murky gray world where it’s difficult to tell right from wrong, with characters neither entirely good nor entirely bad, for whom just getting by is all that can be rightfully hoped for. In Dana Andrews’s detective Mark Dixon I found a man wracked by the human imperfections that compel us to watch film noir, deeply flawed yet nurturing a private hope that somewhere, somehow, in some unexplored place out beyond the neon signs and the never-ending warren of streets, there might be a chance at grace, at a better kind of life. Through the course of the film, Dixon comes to finally understand what such a chance demands of a man, and he gives it. Any way you look at it, Where the Sidewalk Ends is a plum of a movie. Released by Fox in that most noirish of years, 1950, it reteams director Otto Preminger with stars Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney, the key players from the 1944 hit Laura. And while a comparison of the two films would make for a meaty essay in its own right, here I’ll just note that while Laura, with it’s shakier claim at noir status, is concerned with human weakness in the New York glamour set, Where the Sidewalk Endspresents a more frightening — and far more exhilarating — version of the big city. The tall buildings, bright lights, and chic glamour of Laura are present, but seem forever lost in the distance. The world Preminger depicts here is bleak and gritty, strewn with trash, where predators lurk around the next street corner, and hopelessness blights each back alley. It’s a night-world, as different from the previous Preminger-Andrews project Fallen Angel as it is from Laura. Look in the window of a cheap basement flat and you’ll find Mrs. Tribaum, sleeping the years away at her kitchen table, waiting patiently for death to recall her address. Hail a taxi and you’ll meet Jiggs Taylor, who dreams that his fares are dignitaries to be shuttled from one party to the next, so beaten down by a dreary existence that he has trouble separating reality from fantasy, and worships the cop who once used his cab to chase down a petty thief. That clean-cut guy with the dice? That’s Kenneth Paine, an ex-war hero who took off his uniform only to discover that there weren’t any jobs after all, no matter what they said in the Stars and Stripes. Now he’s a degenerate gambler who drinks and smacks his wife. And then there’s the cop. Where the Sidewalk Ends serves up one of film noir’s most finely drawn anti-heroes. Dana Andrews is hard-boiled detective Mark Dixon, enigmatic poster boy for loneliness and alienation. Like many other noir protagonists, Dixon can’t escape his past. He is further complicated by the f

In 2009 JJ Abrams unleashed the prequel/sequel/reboot that reinvigorated the Star Trek franchise, bringing it greater critical and commercial success than it had ever seen at the multiplexes. To mark the occasion Movie-Moron has been honouring the age-old theory amongst …

Watch a new Anchorman 2 teaser trailer featuring Will Ferrell, Steve Carell, David Koechner and Paul Rudd.

Besides the fact that I doubt we'll see a more deft, thrilling genre film this year, I'm very pleased that Jeremy Saulnier's Blue Ruin addresses a number of issues that revenge films have been overlooking for decades. For example, after you've been irrevocably wronged and made it your mission to set that right, what if you can't afford a gun? Guns are expensive. If you get a gun, which one do you get and how long do you need to spend learning to shoot it? Okay, screw the gun, let's go with a knife... but if you kill one person with a knife, won't there likely be others who want to kill you back? I'd like to go on about the ways that Charles Bronson... [Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]

With the new trailer for Mark Hartley's remake of Australian cult classic Patrick only launching yesterday, it's time for more news of the highly-specialised 'remake of Aussie exploitation movie that everyone remembers thanks to Not Quite Hollywood' variety. Today's news concerns Turkey Shoot, which apparently was also called Escape 2000 and - my favourite - Blood Camp Thatcher when released outside Australia.Tony Ginnane who produced the original 1982 cult classic Turkey Shoot (and who produced both the original Patrick and the recent remake) has got together with director Jon Hewitt, who made the fantastic Acolytes and X, to bring this remake back to big screens. With The Hunger Games being a monster success there's no better time to revisit the terrifying year 1995! Where hunting is the... [Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]

Looks like casting famous Brits in big Aussie movies is the new black. Or rather it was the old black, but once again has become so pronounced as to be worth commenting on. In the past 12 months we've had Rob Pattinson out for The Rover, Ewan McGregor for Son of a Gun, Tom Hardy was in Mad Max (although is that even really Australian anymore?), Colin Firth came out for The Railway Man and even Patrick managed to import its own British luminary of sorts, Charles Dance.Now comes news that Kriv Stenders has cast Simon Pegg in his new noir thriller Kill Me Three Times, a directing gig he inherited when original helmer Greg Mclean went off to make Wolf Creek 2. Whether or... [Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]