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  • Ash Sarkar Edition: Bits & Pieces

    Ash Sarkar Edition: Bits & Pieces

    Ash Sarkar Edition: Bits & Pieces – Battle-hardened mercenary Samantha O’Hara (Megan Fox) leads an elite squad of soldiers on a daring mission to rescue a hostage from a group of violent terrorists in the plains of Africa. But when the mission goes wrong, the team is stranded, Samantha’s squad must face a bloody, brutal encounter with the ferocious gang of rebels, and a ravenous, enraged lioness that is baying for their blood after escaping from an illegal lion farm. 

    Saturday Night Live’s Andrew Diskmukes and Christina Parrish star in CALL ME BROTHER, a coming-of-age romantic comedy about a brother and sister in their late teens who are reunited after years of separation only to discover intimate feelings they struggle to confront. Between immature friends and dysfunctional parents, they find comfort in each other over a wistful and awkward summer weekend. From director David Howe, and written by Christina Parrish, CALL ME BROTHER opens in virtual theaters Nationwide November 6, 2020.

    Get fired up for the ultimate action-fest Skyfire, a thrilling new disaster moviefrom lauded director Simon West (Con Air, Expendables 2, Lara Croft:Tomb Raider, Gone in 60 Seconds).

    With the spookiest day of the year nearly upon us, a new report by thortful.com uncovers the top 10 scariest (and least scariest, if you’re a bit of a wimp, easily scared), films of all time…

    Charming and ambitious art critic, James Figueras (Claes Bang), has fallen from grace. He spends his days in Milan lecturing witless tourists about art history. His only glimmer of hope is a newfound love interest, the enigmatic American, Berenice Hollis (Elizabeth Debicki). An opportunity strikes when he is contacted by wealthy art dealer Joseph Cassidy (Mick Jagger) who summons James to his villa on Lake Como and asks him to steal a painting from the legendary reclusive artist, Jerome Debney (Donald Sutherland). Soon, James’ greed and ambition get the better of him, and he finds himself caught in a web of his own making.

    As the 1970s are drawing to a close, Queen Elizabeth (Olivia Colman) and her family find themselves preoccupied with safeguarding the line of succession by securing an appropriate bride for Prince Charles (Josh O’Connor), who is still unmarried at 30. 

    Exhibition on Screen are delighted to announce that their latest film, Frida Kahlo will be released in UK Cinemas from 20th October. Initially planned for release earlier in the year, Exhibition on Screen’s latest film Frida Kahlo will be one of the first Event Cinema films to be seen in cinemas as they reopen this Autumn, and the first Exhibition on Screen film based on the work of a female artist.

    Dystopian Films’ Las Vegas darkly-comic crime caper STEALING CHAPLIN is released this friday 16th October in cinemas across the UK. Inspired by a true story, STEALING CHAPLIN tells the story of two brothers who steal and hold to ransom the silent film stars body. 

    Behind our world, there is another: a world of dangerous and powerful monsters that rule their domain with deadly ferocity. When an unexpected sandstorm transports Captain Artemis (Milla Jovovich) and her unit (TI Harris, Meagan Good, Diego Boneta) to a new world, the soldiers are shocked to discover that this hostile and unknown environment is home to enormous and terrifying monsters immune to their firepower. In their desperate battle for survival, the unit encounters the mysterious Hunter (Tony Jaa), whose unique skills allow him to stay one step ahead of the powerful creatures. As Artemis and Hunter slowly build trust, she discovers that he is part of a team led by the Admiral (Ron Perlman). Facing a danger so great it could threaten to destroy their world, the brave warriors combine their unique abilities to band together for the ultimate showdown.

    In Sylvie’s Love, the jazz is smooth and the air sultry in the hot New York summer of 1957. Robert (Nnamdi Asomugha), a saxophonist, spends late nights playing behind a less-talented but well-known bandleader, as member of a jazz quartet. Sylvie (Tessa Thompson), who dreams of a career in television, spends her summer days helping around her father’s record store, as she waits for her fiancé to return from war. When Robert takes a part-time job at the record store, the two begin a friendship that sparks a deep passion in each of them unlike anything they have felt before. As the summer winds down, life takes them in different directions, bringing their relationship to an end. Years pass, Sylvie’s career as a TV producer blossoms, while Robert has to come to terms with what the age of Motown is doing to the popularity of Jazz. In a chance meeting, Sylvie and Robert cross paths again, only to find that while their lives have changed, their feelings for each other remain the same. Writer/director Eugene Ashe combines romance and music into a sweeping story that brings together changing times, a changing culture, and the true price of love.

    In the 1840s, acclaimed self-taught paleontologist Mary Anning works alone on the wild and brutal Southern English coastline of Lyme Regis. The days of her famed discoveries behind her, she now hunts for common fossils to sell to rich tourists to support herself and her ailing widowed mother. When one such tourist, Roderick Murchison, arrives in Lyme on the first leg of a European tour, he entrusts Mary with the care of his young wife Charlotte, who is recuperating from a personal tragedy. Mary, whose life is a daily struggle on the poverty line, cannot afford to turn him down but, proud and relentlessly passionate about her work, she clashes with her unwanted guest. They are two women from utterly different worlds.

  • Summer Of 85: The BRWC Review

    Summer Of 85: The BRWC Review

    By John Battiston.

    The jarring transition from the broodingly dour opening of Summer of 85 into the thick of its titular milieu is only the first of the film’s many overtly purposeful choices. By smash-cutting from the aftermath of sixteen-year-old Alex’s (Félix Lefebvre) ostensible arrest — overlaid with aloof, resigned narration and capped by a baggy-eyed fourth-wall break — to an airy synthpop track and a sun-dappled beachscape, writer-director François Ozon presents a barefaced harbinger of the film’s juggling act between hypnagogic teen romance and sullen coming-of-age tragedy.

    From there, Alex’s arrest and the lead-up to any potential disciplinary action act as a framing device for the preceding six weeks, when he develops an intense summer romance with eighteen-year-old fishing-shop operator David (Benjamin Voisin). Their meet-cute, in which David swoops in to the rescue after Alex’s sailboat capsizes off the coast of Normandy, plays out beneath an obsidian thunderstorm, yet another in a series of portents that remind us — along with the peppered-in fast-forwards to Alex’s contemplation of events we have yet to witness — that imminent doom and gloom await.

    As the main narrative continues, Alex and David begin to not-so-gradually integrate into each other’s lives, working together in the fishing shop by day, hitting the boardwalk and discotheques by night. Friendly ribbing quickly turn into longing glances, which soon give way to behind-closed-doors trysts. But while Alex’s borderline iambic narration illuminates just how deep his infatuation with his newfound paramour runs, David’s noncommittal, laissez-faire approach to romance becomes increasingly evident, telegraphing an inevitable schism. And judging by the future events we’ve been clued in on, that schism can’t end up being pretty.

    While Summer of 85 sets itself up as a blend of Call Me by Your Name and The Talented Mr. Ripley, Ozon really only succeeds at evoking the dreamy patina and extreme sensuousness of the former, while his attempts to inject tension or mystery go frustratingly unrealized. The chemistry between Lefebvre and Voisin is too palpable to dismiss as maudlin, surface-level romance, their characters too expertly constructed as congenial foils to one another. In particular, Lefebvre’s embodiment of disillusioned, starry-eyed desire goes beyond the eye-rolling naiveté similar characters invoke, rather earning our fullest sympathy for simply not knowing any better when it comes to the weight of love. (He’s sixteen; why should he?)

    But while Ozon excels at exploring the complications of teen sexuality (as he previously did with Young and Beautiful), the sinister expectations he sets for the latter half of the narrative are such that the culmination is, to say the least, underwhelming. This is not to say the plot itself — adapted from Aidan Chambers’s novel Dance on My Grave — is poorly conceived; rather, Ozon’s sequencing and presentation of that plot as a nonlinear thriller (complete with corny bass rumbles during weightier moments) is tremendously ill-advised. Summer of 85 hinges on an eventual tragedy, to be sure, but both the tragedy itself and the manner in which it occurs cast shadows that neither warrant the ominous foreshadowing that riddles the script nor manage to leave a mark that lasts to the final cut-to-black.

    While gorgeously composed and boasting two excellent performances, Summer of 85 is a tragic romance that simply overplays its hand.

    Summer of 85 – released in cinemas and on Curzon Home Cinema 23rd October.

  • The Others, Taylor-Joy, Buck Rogers: Weekly Round Up

    The Others, Taylor-Joy, Buck Rogers: Weekly Round Up

    The Others, Taylor-Joy, Buck Rogers: Weekly Round Up – Another week, another round-up, and boy is this one a doozy. We’ve got post-apocalyptic shenanigans, Egyptian epics, and sci-fi classics to get through. But first, let’s talk about The Others.

    Released in 2001, the Nicole Kidman starring Gothic ghost story, The Others, fell into that sort of early 2000s Shyamalan trend of slow, melodramatic movies built around atmosphere and a twist. Of course, it’s not really a spoiler at this point to mention the twist in The Others, but I’m reluctant to anyway in case you’re one of those lucky people who gets to experience it unsullied. Suffice it to say that it’s a great one.

    Calling back to classic ghost stories like Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw or the works of M R James, The Others has the feel of a classy movie with the thrill of some great genre scares, and it boasts a fantastic central performance from the then top of her game Nicole Kidman. Although it was generally well received on release, it did have its detractors, but in more recent years the movies had become somewhat highly regarded, at least in certain corners of the horror community.

    It’s no surprise then that a remake is on the cards. Afterall, the film is nearly twenty years old. Universal studios have partnered with Sentient Entertainment, the studio behind TV’s Feud: Bette and Joan, to begin work developing the project, and there have been reports that this will be a modernized take on the material.

    Quite what modernized means, or indeed how it fits into the concept of the film, I don’t know. One of the key things that makes The Others work so well is that it plays with the audiences’ expectations and knowledge of traditional ghost story tropes. Setting it in the present day seems sort of counter-productive to me. It’s also unknown what the creatives behind this reboot intend to do about the twist, given how well known it is at this point. Nonetheless, I’m watching this one curiously (and with warning – haha. M R James fans will get it) to see just where it all winds up going.

    Now, speaking of reboots to beloved properties, is there a better example of one that has been handled so well and so successfully as George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road? The film was an Oscar darling, did big bucks and the box office, and wowed critics and audiences alike. Rightly so, too. It’s a crazy good movie.

    Since its release, however, things have been rather quiet on the Mad Max front. At one point we were supposed to be getting two sequels to the thing, but these seemed to disappear into nothingness. So, if you’re like me, and were somewhat disappointed we weren’t able to dive straight back into the mad world Miller created, then this week’s news that prequel film, Furiosa, which we first learned about back in March and is centered around Charlize Theron’s character from the aforementioned Fury Road, is that much closer to going in front of the cameras.

    First up, Anya Taylor-Joy has been confirmed as taking over the title role from Theron (this is a prequel, after all), while the God of Thunder himself, Chris Hemsworth, has reportedly been cast as a character called Dementus (yep! More Miller craziness already), who has a large silver scar on his face. Taylor-Joy and Hemsworth are to be joined by Aquaman’s Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, who is reportedly playing a character called Pretorian.

    This is probably one of my most anticipated movies at this point. Miller plans to begin filming in 2021, which suggests we likely won’t be seeing the film until 2022 or, even, 2023, but I’m pretty sure he’s got something absolutely batshit planned to wow all of us, so let’s go!

    Wowing audiences has become more and more difficult in recent times, and that is something that Paramount Pictures will no doubt be mulling over given this week’s announcement that Gal Gadot will be reteaming with her Wonder Woman director Patty Jenkins for a new movie based on the life of Cleopatra VII, the final ruler of the Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt.

    Cleopatra is no stranger to the movie treatment and has been a favorite subject for historical epics, from the iconic 1934 movie starring Claudette Colbert and directed by Cecile B. DeMille, to the extravagant Elizabeth Taylor starring 1963 film. Gadot and Jenkins will, reportedly, be reteaming for this project before then combining forces again on a third Wonder Woman outing, although we’re yet to see the second one.

    Another classic property looking for a big budget update this week comes in the form of Legendary Productions’ announcement that they plan to reboot the classic character of Buck Rogers for modern audiences. Buck Rogers has been rebooted several times since his first appearance in 1928, including as a popular comic strip and serial star in the 30s and 40s, and as a beloved cult TV series in the early 80s entitled Buck Rogers in the 25th Century.

    Nothing much is known about this proposed reboot at the moment, but it will likely take the central concept of a man frozen in suspended animation for several years being awoken in the future. There’s no word on what version this movie will be adapting, nor whether it will feature any of the other famous characters from the various adaptions, but I think this had the potential to be a lot of fun.

  • Cicada: LFF Review

    Cicada: LFF Review

    Matt Fifer’s feature debut (co-directed with Kieran Mulcare) is a deeply personal one; a semi-autobiographical story about a bisexual man who struggles with intimacy due to a traumatic childhood experience and is forced to confront his past in order to move on from it. In Cicada, Fifer plays Ben, a lonely New Yorker who goes from job to job, fling to fling, and spends his free time regularly getting checked for STDs. His life is fairly empty until he meets Sam (Sheldon D. Brown, who co-wrote the screenplay) at a bookshop and forms an instant connection with him worth building on. 

    After Sam opens up about not coming out to his devout father and being randomly shot by a homophobe a few years prior, Ben finally feels able to discuss his own baggage, having been sexually assaulted as a young boy (set in 2013, this all plays out over the backdrop of the trial of football coach Jerry Sandusky, occasionally overheard on the news). Ben says at one stage, ‘I always thought if I ended up with a man, it would mean I lost.’ But together, Ben and Sam soon find themselves in a strong, healthy relationship, built on mutual trust and respect. 

    At the heart of Cicada is two compelling and passionate central performances. Brown is certainly the most natural in front of camera, but Fifer conveys Ben’s sadness skilfully enough, likely owing to his own relationship with the material, and the two share a natural chemistry that more than sells their affection for one another. 

    Thematically rich, this film not only focuses on homosexuality, childhood trauma and PTSD, but also on the challenges of an interracial relationship. Sam’s discomfort when meeting Ben’s friends for the first time draws a barrier between two men who had previously felt so equal. It’s a story of intersectionality and of otherness, in its many forms, and of finding the courage to own how you feel and work through it. 

    It’s clear that Ben has never really discussed his past before, but he’s encouraged to do so by Sam, and soon seeks out a therapist (awkwardly played by Cobie Smulders), and even opens up to his closest friends and family about it for the very first time. These are two lost souls who really needed a nudge, and their love for one another proves to be enough. 

    It definitely tries too hard in places, commonly turning to evocative montages and slo-mo as a means of conveying emotion, and it undoubtedly has issues with its pacing, but it’s also a film born of such passion and heart that it more than holds your interest. It’s a moving study both of personal identity and of past trauma, and a romantic, honest, personal tale of two men who find solace with each other in their time of need and learn to face their past together. 

  • Redwood Massacre: Annihilation – Review

    Redwood Massacre: Annihilation – Review

    A few years after the events of The Redwood Massacre, Max (Damien Puckler) has become obsessed with them, even influenced by them. So, when he meets Laura (Danielle Harris) and Tom Dempsey (Jon Campling), a family affected by the Redwood Murders, he sees his chance to take them on a hunt to bring the Burlap Sack Killer to justice.

    After a while trekking through the woods to get to their destination, they see the entrance to an underground bunker and without thinking twice, the gang comprising of Laura, Tom and their friends Gus (Gary Kasper) and Jen (Tevy Poe) venture into the bunker to find the killer. Little do they realise that their guide has led them right into his trap.

    Redwood Massacre: Annihilation is the sequel to The Redwood Massacre released in 2014. Following its predecessor also written and directed by David Ryan Keith, Redwood Massacre: Annihilation sets its horror in an enclosed space where the killer picks them off one by one, whereas the original did the same, but with a group of campers.

    However, the familiar settings of the Redwood Massacre movies may be a bit more satisfying if along with its classic tropes, it tried to do anything engaging with the story and characters. Instead Redwood Massacre: Annihilation just does what it feels it needs to do in order to qualify as a horror movie.

    Fans of the original (wherever you are) will be met by the same kind of knowingly cliché horror that the first one provided albeit with a new cast of characters and a new kill list in order to watch them all die in various horrible ways.

    The problem is that newcomers who may not even realise that this is a sequel may not be all that impressed as the characters and plot are put together so lazily that they won’t care about anyone.

    There are some attempts at a bond between the characters which includes a mild flirtation between Gus and Jen, but by the end the audience will just see the movie for what it is and wish they were watching something with more imagination.