Another classy Chinese action thriller whose dazzling style seems to take place in a deliberate narrative void, Cliff Walkers (previously titled Impasse) marks leading Chinese director Zhang Yimou’s first foray into the espionage genre.
08.04.2021 - 17:18 / hollywoodreporter.com
Writer-director Neil Burger's visually alluring but dramatically underpowered sci-fi thriller about an interplanetary mission blitzed by a hormonal explosion, Voyagers, is basically Lord of the Flies in space. Or Passengers without hypersleep pods.
Either way, it's not terribly original. A solid cast and stylish design work in a spacecraft whose endless corridors become sprint lanes for cinematographer Enrique Chediak's invigorating camerawork make the Lionsgate release an easy watch and a big
.Another classy Chinese action thriller whose dazzling style seems to take place in a deliberate narrative void, Cliff Walkers (previously titled Impasse) marks leading Chinese director Zhang Yimou’s first foray into the espionage genre.
A quarter-century has passed since Hollywood first adapted the arcade classic Mortal Kombat, with a film that launched newcomer Paul W.S. Anderson into his career making bad but extremely profitable movies full of CG mayhem (and a side career flummoxing those casual moviegoers who confuse him with two similarly named but slightly more brilliant auteurs).
th century master ninja Hanzo Hasashi (Hiroyuki Sanada, “Avengers: Endgame”), who was murdered by the evil Bo-Han (Joe Taslim, “The Raid”). (Bo-Han, still around in the 21st century and now hip to the importance of branding, has renamed himself Sub-Zero because of his abilities to create ice spontaneously.
My Wonderful Wanda takes its title (zingier in the original German: Wanda, Mein Wunder) from a line of dialogue, an affectionate and somewhat deluded exclamation by a 70-year-old bedridden Swiss man to his 30-something Polish caretaker. The two have a secret, a side deal, that will disrupt the already shaky serenity of the man's family and draw hers into a clash of cultures and classes.
It's a wonder that anyone is still interested in becoming an astronaut after the procession of cinematic calamities that have befallen space travelers over the years. Netflix seems to be pursuing a specialty in the genre, with Stowaway arriving shortly on the heels of the apocalyptic George Clooney starrer The Midnight Sky.
A lot of primo animation talent is assembled for The Mitchells vs. the Machines, including producers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, who were behind The Lego Movie and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, and writer-directors Mike Rianda and Jeff Rowe, late of the popular Disney Channel toon series Gravity Falls.
There's no such thing as a human chimp, but half a century ago a chimpanzee's conditioning by her human "parents" famously blurred the lines. Lucy Temerlin lived in the suburbs with a psychologist and his wife, went for rides with them in the station wagon, and enjoyed the occasional gin and tonic.
Also Read: Where Are the Latinos at Sundance - and How Can Hollywood Really Help? | PRO InsightThey live in a small, southern town, the kind where everyone knows everyone, where the days are tranquil and lives go on as scheduled. But when night falls, teens will be teens, and they find various forms of amusement and trouble.Krista is joyful and dreams of being an actress one day.
An invaluable addition to our still-developing understanding of an artist whose fame raises thorny questions, Jeffrey Wolf’s Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts introduces a man whose distinctive drawings depict life during the final years of slavery and the decades that followed.
"I hear you kill more people than Quentin Tarantino," observes one of the many dispensable villains in the new action-thriller directed and co-written by George Gallo. It's an unfortunate line.
Sergio De La Pava's PEN prize-winning debut novel, A Naked Singularity, is a messy, maximalist slab of stream-of-consciousness prose in which the main storyline is a perfect crime, wrapped in digressions on countless subjects, among them astrophysics, philosophy, boxing and the deeply flawed American justice system.
If Thunder Force will be remembered for anything, it might be this bizarro footnote: The movie marks the second time, after The Shape of Water, that a character played by Octavia Spencer learns her best friend has had life-changing sex with a fish-man. Which makes it sound a lot more interesting than it is.
A married couple endure a particularly horrific form of relationship therapy in the new thriller directed by Chris Lofing and Travis Cluff, the team responsible for the surprise low-budget horror hit The Gallows. Cannily exploiting #MeToo themes and the opportunities for cinematic mayhem provided by technology-driven smart homes, Held proves an uncommonly thoughtful and provocative suspenser.
Dead children, democracy being crushed, senseless Nazi atrocities —there's not much happiness in this year's collection of Oscar-nominated short documentaries, unless you count the man who actually survived racism and homelessness to become a proud, successful grandpa. Each of these long "shorts" finds protagonists to root for; some contain seeds of hope; all boast polish and relevance that make them awards-ready.
Imprisonment, in many senses of the word, is at the center of each of the five nominees for this year's live-action short film Oscar, which is not to say they're a homogenous bunch: Though all have political undercurrents and speak to present-tense issues, their moods and styles vary enough that their one big (mostly) common theme —cops, and how they wield power —stands out only because we've already been thinking about it every day for what feels like forever.
A couple of truly daring visions spice up the expected fare in this year's crop of Academy-honored animated shorts — one of which would be as at home in an art gallery as in the theaters, which, pandemic be damned, will still showcase nominees as a big-screen event. Each candidate has something to offer, including those non-nominees that have been added (as "highly recommended") to stretch the program's running time to feature length.
Just in time for Easter, The Unholy offers up satanic counter-programming to sate the appetites of the religious horror faithful. Almost a decade after getting drawn into a dybbuk haunting in The Possession, Jeffrey Dean Morgan reteams with Sam Raimi's Ghost House Pictures, this time switching from Jewish folklore to Catholic demonology in a tale that tills the soil of Massachusetts for its history of charred witches.