Film and TV news and reviews
From unseen forces to dangerous desires, from the remorseful living to the remorseless dead, from under the earth to creepy closed doors, Arrow Video FrightFest 2019 continues the festival’s fine tradition of showcasing the best in global genre short filmmaking.
Comments closedIn his new historical drama The Current War, director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon (Me and Earl and the Dying Girl) charts the destructive rivalry between inventors Thomas Edison (Benedict Cumberbatch), George Westinghouse (Michael Shannon) and Nikola Tesla (Nicholas Hoult) as they battle it out to see whose electrical system will illuminate America.
Comments closedDirected by Catherine Hardwicke and written by Gareth Dunnet-Alcocer, based on the 2011 Mexican film of the same name. Miss Bala stars Gina Rodriguez, Ismael Cruz Córdova, and Anthony Mackie, and follows a woman who trains to take down a Mexican drug cartel after her friend is kidnapped.
Gloria (Gina Rodriguez) finds a power she never knew she had when she is drawn into a dangerous world of cross-border crime. Surviving will require all of her cunning, inventiveness, and strength.
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Ten Questions with Justin P. Lange, director of THE DARK
THE DARK is based on your Columbia University thesis short film. Was it a difficult process expanding it into a full-length feature?
I never really saw this as a traditional short-to-feature type of deal, to be honest. My thesis film was my first real foray into genre filmmaking, so it was very much a trial-and-error process for me, almost like a sketch, in which I wanted to see what my version of a horror film would look like. Luckily, the short had some success on the festival circuit, which gave me the confidence I needed to launch into writing the feature. Some of the ideas from the short definitely carried over, but ultimately it feels like a totally different film to me.
Comments closedARROW VIDEO FRIGHTFEST 2018
10 Questions with Johnny Kevorkian
What was it about Gavin Williams’s script for AWAIT FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS you liked so much, and what did you add to make it more personal to you?
Well, when I first read the script I thought: “How the hell am I going to make this!” It was like nothing I had ever seen before. I knew it was going to be a massive challenge in every way possible. Overall, this was a very unusual script and that also appealed to me. My main addition to the script was to push it in a much darker and serious tone overall, which is more my style of filmmaking. I’m pleased that I managed to retain the dark humour at the start but then move into a different and much more serious realm as things start getting nastier for the family.
The trailer for Mike Leigh’s dramatisation of the 1819 Peterloo Massacre is here. The film which is part of the official selection at Venice Film Festival,…
Comments closedThis year’s Opening Night gala will be Academy Award- winner Steve McQueen’s WIDOWS. The International premiere will take place on Wednesday 10th October at the Cineworld, Leicester Square. Co-written by McQueen and best-selling novelist and screenwriter Gillian Flynn and starring Academy Award®- winner Viola Davis, WIDOWS is a complex thriller about a group of women with nothing in common except a debt left behind by their dead husbands’ criminal activities. A star-studded ensemble cast includes: Viola Davis, Michelle Rodriguez, Elizabeth Debicki, Cynthia Erivo, Colin Farrell, Daniel Kaluuya and Jacki Weaver with Robert Duvall and Liam Neeson.
Comments closedBack in 2013, James DeMonaco’s The Purge presented us with nightmarish vision of America in a near future in which crime has been made legal for 12 hours every year, leaving people free to commit the most unspoken atrocities without suffering the consequences. After two more lucrative sequels which failed to live up to the original film’s brilliant high concept premise, this week sees the release of a The First Purge, a prequel which is surprisingly far more engaging and politically sound than one might expect from a franchise which was in danger of losing its purpose.
Comments closedWe speak to P. David Ebersole and Todd Hughes, the married couple behind the intriguing new documentary about Hollywood camp legend Jayne Mansfield.
One of the most talked about stars of the classical Hollywood era, Mansfield was at one time as famous and as sought after as Marilyn Monroe. Regarded by many as one of the most recognisable sex symbols of the studio era, Mansfield had it all, fame, money and a solid Twentieth Century Fox contract, but it was her dealings with infamous Church Of Satan leader Anton LaVey and her consequent violent death in a car accident which has turned the former starlet into the stuff of legend. In their film Mansfield 66/67, directors P. David Ebersole and Todd Hughes attempt to get behind the legend and the legacy she left behind.
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