We all know that guy - the one who hovers at the edge of the party, with a too-broad grin and awkward posture; the one who manages to find the strangest way to look at any one conversation topic, then suggests even stranger ones; the one who would be nice enough if he didn't seem so off.
Mad Max: Fury Road is a masterclass in how to make an action movie. Anarchic, over-the-top, wildly ambitious, aesthetically insane and absorbing from first frame to last, it's a post-apocalyptic masterpiece that hits you like a runaway train. But even as the visuals more than live up to the adjectives of the title, with cacophonous, vividly rendered battle sequences that outdo perhaps any road movie in history, it's also a savagely intelligent watch, packed with fascinatingly complicated characters, a fierce feminist thrust, an unusually well-realized setting and a deceptively simple narrative that just plain works on every level.
There's a reason audiences can't get enough of the apocalypse. Stories about the end of days, about how men and women would fare in the face of societal collapse, compel for reasons both modern and ancient. How would people raised on easy access to technology survive if the power went out? Would a new stone age be the death of us, or would we resentfully learn to readjust? And what would that loss of connectivity mean for the fabric of civilization itself? Would humanity in isolation regress into savagery, or would we cling to our moral compasses with all our might?
The immediate question you're asking may be this: wait, is Show Me A Hero basically a six-hour movie about politicians in turmoil over government-mandated housing units? Yes, it is... and it's superb.
Let's get this out of the way immediately - Return to Sender, a so-called "thriller" that exists solely to capitalize on the icily serene beauty of star Rosamund Pike, is no Gone Girl. Artless, queasy and agonizingly dull from first frame to last, it's more akin to a particularly ugly Lifetime Original Movie than that delectably vicious cult phenomenon or really anything with which you'd expect to see a star of Pike's caliber associated.
Marvel and Sony made headlines recently when they tapped little-known helmer Jon Watts to direct the next Spider-Man movie, so it's unfortunately inevitable that the bulk of attention afforded to Watts' sophomore feature, indie thriller Cop Car (his first was under-the-radar horror Clown), will take the form of one simple question: what did the studios see in the director that they didn't in more accomplished contenders like Warm Bodies' Jonathan Levine?
Don't pay any attention to its baffling, boring title - Two Step is actually a nasty and riveting little flick that, thanks to its excellent execution and fine performances, should land at the top of any self-respecting thriller junkie's watchlist.
Animation is traditionally considered a tyke-targeted genre, but films like Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet, an uneven but unassailably ambitious adaptation of the Lebanese author’s classic prose poetry collection, challenge that perception. After all, it's hard to imagine that the children who would be enraptured by the movie's often gorgeous visuals would find themselves equally stimulated by its dense meditations on life, death, love and the ties that bind us to the natural world. Maybe that's short-changing the more astute young'uns out there, but there's no denying that The Prophet, with its steadfast devotion to Gibran's verse, is layered in the extreme.
The Los Angeles setting of AMC's Fear the Walking Dead is not the glitzy, Hollywood Hills paradise of super rich kids and Aviator sunglasses. Instead, well before any zombies start prowling the streets, this L.A. is a tougher, grimier version of the oft-filmed locale, populated by normal individuals who have long since had their bubbles burst by all manner of hard knocks. The city is certainly pleasant enough, with manicured middle-class houses and an urban appeal, but it's rough around the edges.
Conspicuously absent from the Toronto and Venice lineups was Truth, the star-studded journalism drama starring Robert Redford as reporter Dan Rather and Cate Blanchett as CBS News journalist Mary Mapes, and now Sony Pictures Classics has confirmed that the film will indeed enter the Oscar race with a newly set October release.
