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Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics In one of the strangest yet most fascinatingly visionary films of an already bizarre year for movies shuttered on and off by the COVID-19 pandemic comes the long delayed and eagerly anticipated debut of commercial Japanese-Brazilian writer-director Edson Oda, Nine Days. Initially premiering at the Sundance Film Festival in February 2020 before being pushed all the way back to July 2021, this surreal paranormal yet quiet and painterly drama offers a new look on the afterlife, reincarnation and what it means to live in general. Think of it as a live-action Soul of sorts aimed at adults keen on peculiar, idiosyncratic imaginings of what a soul might experience before the moment of conception. Within the midst of a vast desert landscape
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Courtesy of Wandering Dragon Productions You probably haven’t heard the name of first-time writer-director Peter ‘Drago’ Tiemann or his production company Wandering Dragon Productions. With a limited one-night-only Fathom Event screening as the only viewing option amid the ever-unfolding COVID-19 pandemic your chances of seeing his first movie, the supernatural woodsy low-budget practical effects driven creature-feature The Stairs, are next to nil for the moment. That’s a shame because as it turns out, Mr. Drago is a twenty-year plus industry veteran working on-set as a stunt-coordinator and second-unit director before mounting his first picture which echoes the drive-in homegrown old-school horror qualities of the recently released Pierce Brothers monster movie The Wretc
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Courtesy of Magnet ReleasingRemember Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio? That surreal psychological horror film about a British sound engineer tasked wit mixing a 1970s giallo film starring Toby Jones. Initially the film begins as an homage before midway unraveling into a kind of hyperkinetic influx psychodrama in which neither the protagonist or the viewer are sure of their senses of reality anymore. That’s important to consider when assessing Irish newcomer Prano Bailey-Bond’s new debut horror film Censor, a film that is as much of an homage to the era of British video nasty horror movies on cassette tape as it is a sensory freakout concerning the unresolved disappearance of a young girl. Just when you begin to think you know what it is really about, you f
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Courtesy of A24 FilmsOn October 27th, 2015, Detroit based exotic dancer Aziah “Zola” Wells posted a Twitter thread recounting a wild larger-than-life tale of a road trip taken with fellow stripper Jessica which went to Hell and then some really fast. The thread went viral worldwide and spawned an in-depth Rolling Stone article Zola Tells All: The Real Story Behind the Greatest Stripper Saga Ever Tweeted examining the events unfolding as well as attracting the attention of Hollywood. In the article, Zola admitted to embellishing some of the more outlandish elements of her account. Now, six years later due to COVID-19 delays, here is writer-director Janicza Bravo's lush and deliriously entertaining adaptation of the story Zola (or @Zola) which plays even faster and l
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Courtesy of Vivo FilmsBronx based gritty urban provocateur turned independent artiste Abel Ferrara, like Werner Herzog before him, has carved out his own niche and operated outside of the studio system on his own terms for years, churning out everything from sleazy exploitation trash ala Driller Killer to his eloquent Pasolini biopic. His latest venture and sixth collaboration with actor Willem Dafoe, Siberia, is a weird foray into madness through self-examination in the frozen mountains of Siberia involving a snowbound bartender named Clint (Willem Dafoe) serving Inuit patrons speaking a language outside his understanding. Previously premiering at the 70thBerlin International Film Festival right before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, delaying the US theatrical release for an
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Courtesy of Walt Disney Pictures As the Disney machine presses onward with their impetus to remake each and every animated property of theirs into a live action shot-for-shot repeat with absolutely no risks or new directions tried out, something strange happened with the arrival of I, Tonya director Craig Gillespie’s Cruella. A prequel of sorts to the 101 Dalmatians films from 1961 as well as the live action films from 1996 and 2000 starring Glenn Close in the titular role of the villainess, comes as a shock from a company ordinarily known for committee meddling and wiping out any and all traces of an original personality behind the camera. After delivering their divisive remakes of The Lion King and Aladdin, the Disney company alas has wisely kept out of the way an
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Courtesy of NEON Mexican writer-producer-director-editor Michel Franco’s New Order, being released stateside by Neon, is the most horrendously violent, cruel and nastiest film to be released in theaters this year. Already sparking a backlash in it’s own country over perceptions of racism stemming from the film’s trailer, this hard hitting and unrelenting drama thriller also went on to generate further controversy in the United States over the film’s level of violence and nihilistic, bleak outlook. Told in flashback, this science-fiction dystopian nightmare concerns one day in the wedding of wealthy light-skinned upper-class elites whose happy occasion is cut short by the arrival of darker-skinned lower class members of society who violently stage a coup d'é·tat, spa
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Courtesy of Warner Bros.Crazy Rich Asians director Jon M. Chu’s big screen adaptation of Quiara Alegria Hudes and Lin-Manuel Miranda’s 2008 Tony Award winning off-Broadway urban Latin-American musical is without question the first major film of its kind since Robert Wise’s 1961 film West Side Story. Arguably even more Spanish in form than Wise’s seminal classic, currently being remade by Steven Spielberg, Chu’s film arrives after nearly a decade of development Hell tied to the now defunct Weinstein Company before Warner Brothers swooped in after the smash-hit success of Miranda’s Hamilton. An ensemble hip hop infused musical rags-to-riches story sporting brilliant choreography and a magnetic central performance from the film’s hero Usnavi (Anthony Ramos), a bodega owner s
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After his sleeper hit directorial debut Wind River alongside an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay with Hell or High Water, Taylor Sheridan has proven himself to be at the forefront of a new emergence of neo-western moviemakers. His latest effort Those Who Wish Me Dead, released simultaneously in theaters and HBO Max, continues in that genre but moves the setting deeper into woodsy terrain, making for a tense, predictable but nonetheless satisfying action suspense vehicle. Based on the novel by Michael Kortya co-written for the screen by Kortya and producer-director Sheridan, the film follows in the footsteps of Peter Weir’s Witness involving a child who witnesses a murder before going on the run from two assassins who hunt for him in the Montana
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Russian cult director Timur Bekmambetov’s follow up to his 2016 commercial bomb Ben Hur (the third remake), a webcam thriller called Profile involving a journalist who goes undercover investigating ISIS recruiters, is another one of those movies shelved for years before being dumped into theaters amid the COVID-19 pandemic ala The Empty Man. Completed in 2018 the film comes to theaters now through Focus Features and is a loose docudrama adaptation of Anne Erelle’s nonfiction book In the Skin of a Jihadist through the computer chatroom lens of Unfriended. Despite strong performances from the film’s two leads, Valene Kane as the journalist Amy Whittaker who creates a new fake Facebook profile of a woman who recently converted to Islam and Shazad Latif as the charismatic bu
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The first time I heard about the idea of George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead being remade in 2004 I was predisposed against it. Why fix what isn’t broken or take away from what was accomplished in the past? Then upon seeing the film I was introduced to what is now regarded as the directorial debut of one of Hollywood’s biggest and most divisive original filmmakers: Zack Snyder. In the years since, Snyder’s adaptation of 300 as well as his adaptation of Watchmen before going on to take on the DCEU with Man of Steel and Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice saw Snyder swinging hard in the big leagues brushing shoulders with the likes of Christopher Nolan. Then tragedy struck when his daughter took her own life and he pulled out of the third DCEU film Justice Leag
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Writer-director Neil Burger started out strong with his magician romance The Illusionist before moving onto young adult science fiction thriller fare with the first Divergent film. His latest cinematic venture Voyagers, a kind of Lord of the Flies meets Passengersthriller, finds the director returning to young adult sci-fi as well as writing, directing and even producing the project. Starring Colin Farrell, Tye Sheridan, Lily-Rose Depp and Fionn Whitehead, the film stars a largely young adult cast and concerns an Interstellar-like premise involving young astronauts searching for life off of a dying Earth. To keep the next generation of artificially inseminated youths under control until they reach their intergalactic destination, they’re administered drugs to
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The fates haven’t been particularly kind or fair to Nicholas Jarecki’s ensemble opioid epidemic drama Crisis. Shot in early 2019 in Detroit and Montreal, the film was delayed for a year due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic followed by a still developing scandal involving one of the film’s principal actors. That’s a real shame because at the end of the day, Jarecki’s film is a quite good offering in the drug war subgenre of films as well as prominently featuring yet another stellar performance from the gifted actor Gary Oldman. The film isn’t quite up to par with Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic but finds its own footing in the genre anyhow. Concerning three interlocking stories, Crisis follows a drug trafficker/federal agent named Jake Kelly (Armie Hammer) who arranges a
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Writer-director Jacob Chase produced and directed a number of short films over the last decade before unleashing the terrifying 2017 short horror film Larry about a parking lot attendant who one night receives a mysterious children’s book on his cellphone that seems to summon a demon. As the pages turn, lights flicker in the booth and a shadowy silhouetted figure begins to appear in the parking lot. So effective was this little five-minute short film, it was only a matter of time before the film’s writer director would inevitably reshape this short film into a feature. That feature, now including newly added supporting characters and a fully fledged plotline which still includes but expands upon the ingredients of the short film, ultimately became the 2020 PG-13 ra
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We’ve got some movie release news for you today as Dazzler Media presents the epic, action-packed and suspenseful new war film Torpedo U-235 on Blu-ray, DVD & Digital from 8th March. In this epic cinematic adventure, resistance fighters accept a suicide mission to deliver uranium from the Belgian Congo in a stolen Nazi submarine to […]
The post Get Ready for a Cinematic Adventure as TORPEDO U-235 Launches on to Blu-ray, DVD and Digital appeared first on Blazing Minds by Karen Woodham
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The graphic novel has generally made for some incredible and daring big screen cinema or televised adaptations over the last decade, including but not limited to A History of Violence and Oldboy. Nine times out of ten a hit comes out of the illustrated book form. In the case of The Empty Man, however, based on the Boom! Studios graphic novel of the same name by writer Cullen Bunn and artist Vanesa R. Del Rey, the film which came of it was completed in 2017 only to sit on the shelf for another three years before being dumped into empty theaters in 2020 amid the COVID-19 pandemic. What happened here? On the surface it looks like another modern supernatural thriller about an ex-cop named James (James Badge Dale) still coping with witnessing the death of his wife
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Prolific character-actor/part-time writer-director Harry Macqueen first burst onto the indie drama scene with his 2014 road trip tale of longstanding friendship Hinterland. Roughly six years later, Macqueen returns to the director’s chair with another road movie of a different sort. The aptly named Supernova (not to be confused with a really bad 2000 sci-fi/horror film of the same name) presents Same (Colin Firth) and Tusker (Stanley Tucci), a middle aged gay couple on a cross country trip across England to the Lake District to reunite with friends and family. Initially a talky but sweet road picture, the film shifts gears when it becomes apparent Tusker is diagnosed with early onset dementia, forcing the couple to come to grips with the gravity of their situation
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Terrence Malick is and always will be an important contributor to the cinematic medium to learn from and respect. He has also arguably hit a bit of an artistic rut in recent times following the heights defined by his still divisive Palme d’Or winner The Tree of Life. With his sprawling and abstract last three films Knight of Cups, Voyage of Time and Song to Song, we saw the once patiently planned and precise filmmaker rapidly churning out films whose signature style bordered on self-parody at best and indulgent at worst. While not overtly bad (I enjoyed all three), for a filmmaker of Malick’s caliber the films presented for fans as well as detractors what appeared to be a moment of artistic crisis for the director. Even publications such as Cineastecouldn’t help bu
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“I want to do something splendid...something heroic or wonderful that won't be forgotten after I'm dead. I don't know what, but I'm on the watch for it and mean to astonish you all someday.” Steeling her resolve with a sharp breath and a self-assured nod of the head, Jo March (Saoirse Ronan) gathers her nerves and confidently struts headlong into a den of vipers, that parlor of patriarchy known as the publishing house. Her ink-stained hands give the lie to her claim that she's shopping around stories "for a friend," and she squirms uncomfortably while the myopic editor (Tracy Letts) slashes her story to ribbons, only to offer her $20 for his final cut. Knowing better than to look a gift horse in the mouth, she takes the offer, as that's the best a young woman of her station is
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CG animated films are a dime-a-dozen these days – littered in between the big Pixar or DreamWorks releases are generally far less ambitious films from smaller studios, generally short on story and with the barest hint of character development and seemingly extant only for marketing potential (which usually ends up relatively nonexistent anyway). So, it’s difficult to get excited when yet another animated family film hits theatres, particularly around the holidays. 20th Century Fox’s Blue Sky Studios, the creators of the Ice Age and Rio franchises, is banking on its newest release, Spies in Disguise, to work up some hype this holiday season.There have been plans to flesh out Lucas Martell’s 2009 animated short, Pigeon: Impossible for several years, but the resulting feature has very little
