Post by Deleted on Mar 2, 2020 6:35:46 GMT 10
Ten films to watch this March
By Nicholas Barber
28 February 2020
A Quiet Place Part II
A Quiet Place was one of the most commercially successful, critically adored and downright terrifying horror movies of recent years. Its devilish premise was that the world had been over-run by sightless alien monsters with hyper-acute hearing, so if you made a sound, they would tear you to pieces a moment later. Never before had cinema audiences been so silent. Two years on, writer-director John Krasinski returns for the sequel, and his real-life wife, Emily Blunt, once again plays a woman who has to stop her children talking, sneezing or dropping their cutlery. When she ventures out of the family’s fortified farmhouse, she discovers that some of her fellow survivors (including Cillian Murphy) are just as menacing as the aliens.
On general release from 18 March
Mulan
Yes, it’s another live-action remake of a classic Disney cartoon, but Mulan looks as if it could be worlds away from Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast. Based on the Chinese legend of a girl (Liu Yifei) who disguises herself as a man so that she can join the imperial army, it doesn’t have any of the songs from the terrific 1998 film, let alone a wisecracking dragon voiced by Eddie Murphy. Instead, director Niki Caro (Whale Rider) and the cast – which includes Jet Li, Donnie Yen and Jason Scott Lee – have staged massive battle scenes and gravity-defying martial-arts bouts reminiscent of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. No wonder it’s the first of these Disney remakes to be given a PG-13 certificate in the US.
On general release from 25 March
Military Wives
Need someone to direct an inspiring ensemble film about a ragtag group of Brits performing with more gusto than talent? Look no further than Peter Cattaneo, who pretty much invented the sub-genre with 1997’s smash hit, The Full Monty. His new project, inspired by a true story, stars Kristin Scott Thomas and Sharon Horgan as the women who form a choir on an army base while their husbands are serving in Afghanistan. Leslie Felperin admits in The Hollywood Reporter that this “eminently entertaining” comedy drama is “more than a little manipulative and formulaic”. But, she says, “it’s hard not to warm to a film that features an a cappella version of Yazoo’s Only You... and Kristin Scott Thomas having a verbal catfight in a parking lot”.
Released on 6 March in the UK and Ireland, 12 March in Australia and 27 March in the US and Norway
The Hunt
This satirical thriller from Blumhouse Productions, the studio behind Paranormal Activity, Get Out and Ma, was due to be released last September. Its release was postponed after the shootings in Dayton and El Paso in August 2019, when pundits (who hadn’t seen the film) denounced it as a divisive disgrace. Even President Trump got into the act, opining on Twitter that “the movie... is made in order to inflame and cause chaos”. Now, at last, we can see what all the fuss was about. Directed by Craig Zobel and co-written by Damon Lindelof, the plot appears to revolve around 12 strangers who are kidnapped and released in the grounds of a private estate, where they are picked off by a group of super-rich hunters. But it could be that nothing is what it seems ...
Released on 11 March in the UK and 13 March in the US and Sweden
Onward
Dragons, unicorns and other fairytale creatures are usually consigned to a mythical past resembling Ancient Greece or Medieval Britain, but the big idea behind Pixar’s latest animation, Onward, is that they are all still alive and kicking in the US today. Tom Holland and Chris Pratt (better known as Spider-Man and Star-Lord) provide the voices of two elf brothers who go on a road trip – or a magical quest, depending on how you look at it – in an attempt to bring their father back from the dead. Ben Travis writes in Empire that Onward is “pure, perfect Pixar – a film with such warmth, whip-smart humour and creative energy that it’s a sheer joy to spend a few hours in its presence”.
On general release from 4 March
The Roads Not Taken
The tender and mystical new drama from Sally Potter (Orlando) offers viewers three lives for the price of one. Javier Bardem stars as Leo, a man who has lived in New York since he moved from Mexico 30 years earlier. Now, though, he is suffering from dementia, and while his daughter (Elle Fanning) and ex-wife (Laura Linney) care for him, he dreams of two other lives he could have led, as an author on a Greek island, and back in Mexico with his first love (Salma Hayek). According to David Ehrlich at IndieWire, Potter “draws from her personal experience of caring for her younger brother as he died from early onset Alzheimer’s… she captures the inner tension of loving someone in that state – the heart-breaking friction between presence and absence”.
Released on 13 March in the US and 26 March in Argentina
Bacurau
Believe it or not, there are two films released this month in which the rich take pot shots at the poor, The Hunt and Bacurau. You can bet that Bacurau is the weirder of the two. Winner of the Jury Prize at last year’s Cannes film festival, Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles’ contemporary Western seems at first to be about political corruption in a remote Brazilian village, but when heavily-armed tourists arrive, it mutates into something far more surreal. Barry Hertz at the Globe and Mail sums up the film: “part siege movie, part rural drama, part gore-soaked freak-out,” as “a fiery anti-colonialism polemic with so much on its mind that you’ll likely come out of it feeling as dazed as the titular village’s people, who frequently ingest psychotropic drugs”.
Released on 6 March in the US and 13 March in the UK and Ireland
Radioactive
Radioactive is what you get when one female pioneer directs a biopic of another. The director is Marjane Satrapi, the Iranian-French graphic novelist who found fame with her autobiographical comic, Persepolis, and the animated film adapted from it. The other pioneer is Marie Curie, the Polish-French scientist who won the Nobel Prize twice but was ultimately killed by the radiation she studied. In Satrapi’s film of Lauren Redniss’s graphic novel, Curie is played by Rosamund Pike alongside Sam Riley as her husband Pierre Curie and Anya Taylor-Joy (star of Emma) as their daughter Irene. “Compelling, creative, thoughtful and undeniably beautiful,” says Alexandra Heller-Nicholas of AWFJ, “Radioactive confirms Satrapi’s status as one of the most original and important filmmakers working today.”
Released on 1 March in Norway, 20 March in the UK and Ireland and 25 March in France
The Truth
Hirokazu Kore-Eda has been writing and directing insightful human dramas for 20 years, to greater and greater acclaim: Shoplifters won the top prize at Cannes in 2018. Now comes the first film he has made outside Japan, The Truth (or La Verité), a wistful French comedy built around two glorious performances. Catherine Deneuve stars as an iconic Parisian actress who has just written a self-serving memoir, and Juliette Binoche plays her daughter, who isn’t too pleased about how her childhood has been reimagined in the book. “From first shot to last,” says Owen Gleiberman in Variety, “it’s a film of high wit and confidence and verve, an astonishingly fluid and accomplished act of boundary-leaping.”
Released on 5 March in Germany, 13 March in Sweden and 20 March in the UK, Ireland and the US
Misbehaviour
The Miss World beauty contest may be an anachronism, but it used to be one of television’s biggest draws. Misbehaviour, directed by Philippa Lowthorpe, recounts what happened when the event was staged at the Royal Albert Hall in London in 1970. Feminist activists (Keira Knightley and Jessie Buckley) plan a flour-throwing protest, but Miss Grenada (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) argues that her inclusion represents a step forward for black women. Meanwhile, the organisers (Rhys Ifans and Keeley Hawes) just hope to keep the event going, and the host, Bob Hope (Greg Kinnear), worries that his sexist humour is slipping out of fashion. There could hardly a more topical subject for a film, even if it is set 50 years ago.
Released on 13 March in the UK and Ireland
ARTICLE @ THE BBC
www.bbc.com/culture/story/20200227-ten-films-to-watch-this-march
[ NOTE: Looks like its open season on the poor this year LOL. Feel free to grab a trailer and throw it in here ]
By Nicholas Barber
28 February 2020
A Quiet Place Part II
A Quiet Place was one of the most commercially successful, critically adored and downright terrifying horror movies of recent years. Its devilish premise was that the world had been over-run by sightless alien monsters with hyper-acute hearing, so if you made a sound, they would tear you to pieces a moment later. Never before had cinema audiences been so silent. Two years on, writer-director John Krasinski returns for the sequel, and his real-life wife, Emily Blunt, once again plays a woman who has to stop her children talking, sneezing or dropping their cutlery. When she ventures out of the family’s fortified farmhouse, she discovers that some of her fellow survivors (including Cillian Murphy) are just as menacing as the aliens.
On general release from 18 March
Mulan
Yes, it’s another live-action remake of a classic Disney cartoon, but Mulan looks as if it could be worlds away from Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast. Based on the Chinese legend of a girl (Liu Yifei) who disguises herself as a man so that she can join the imperial army, it doesn’t have any of the songs from the terrific 1998 film, let alone a wisecracking dragon voiced by Eddie Murphy. Instead, director Niki Caro (Whale Rider) and the cast – which includes Jet Li, Donnie Yen and Jason Scott Lee – have staged massive battle scenes and gravity-defying martial-arts bouts reminiscent of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. No wonder it’s the first of these Disney remakes to be given a PG-13 certificate in the US.
On general release from 25 March
Military Wives
Need someone to direct an inspiring ensemble film about a ragtag group of Brits performing with more gusto than talent? Look no further than Peter Cattaneo, who pretty much invented the sub-genre with 1997’s smash hit, The Full Monty. His new project, inspired by a true story, stars Kristin Scott Thomas and Sharon Horgan as the women who form a choir on an army base while their husbands are serving in Afghanistan. Leslie Felperin admits in The Hollywood Reporter that this “eminently entertaining” comedy drama is “more than a little manipulative and formulaic”. But, she says, “it’s hard not to warm to a film that features an a cappella version of Yazoo’s Only You... and Kristin Scott Thomas having a verbal catfight in a parking lot”.
Released on 6 March in the UK and Ireland, 12 March in Australia and 27 March in the US and Norway
The Hunt
This satirical thriller from Blumhouse Productions, the studio behind Paranormal Activity, Get Out and Ma, was due to be released last September. Its release was postponed after the shootings in Dayton and El Paso in August 2019, when pundits (who hadn’t seen the film) denounced it as a divisive disgrace. Even President Trump got into the act, opining on Twitter that “the movie... is made in order to inflame and cause chaos”. Now, at last, we can see what all the fuss was about. Directed by Craig Zobel and co-written by Damon Lindelof, the plot appears to revolve around 12 strangers who are kidnapped and released in the grounds of a private estate, where they are picked off by a group of super-rich hunters. But it could be that nothing is what it seems ...
Released on 11 March in the UK and 13 March in the US and Sweden
Onward
Dragons, unicorns and other fairytale creatures are usually consigned to a mythical past resembling Ancient Greece or Medieval Britain, but the big idea behind Pixar’s latest animation, Onward, is that they are all still alive and kicking in the US today. Tom Holland and Chris Pratt (better known as Spider-Man and Star-Lord) provide the voices of two elf brothers who go on a road trip – or a magical quest, depending on how you look at it – in an attempt to bring their father back from the dead. Ben Travis writes in Empire that Onward is “pure, perfect Pixar – a film with such warmth, whip-smart humour and creative energy that it’s a sheer joy to spend a few hours in its presence”.
On general release from 4 March
The Roads Not Taken
The tender and mystical new drama from Sally Potter (Orlando) offers viewers three lives for the price of one. Javier Bardem stars as Leo, a man who has lived in New York since he moved from Mexico 30 years earlier. Now, though, he is suffering from dementia, and while his daughter (Elle Fanning) and ex-wife (Laura Linney) care for him, he dreams of two other lives he could have led, as an author on a Greek island, and back in Mexico with his first love (Salma Hayek). According to David Ehrlich at IndieWire, Potter “draws from her personal experience of caring for her younger brother as he died from early onset Alzheimer’s… she captures the inner tension of loving someone in that state – the heart-breaking friction between presence and absence”.
Released on 13 March in the US and 26 March in Argentina
Bacurau
Believe it or not, there are two films released this month in which the rich take pot shots at the poor, The Hunt and Bacurau. You can bet that Bacurau is the weirder of the two. Winner of the Jury Prize at last year’s Cannes film festival, Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles’ contemporary Western seems at first to be about political corruption in a remote Brazilian village, but when heavily-armed tourists arrive, it mutates into something far more surreal. Barry Hertz at the Globe and Mail sums up the film: “part siege movie, part rural drama, part gore-soaked freak-out,” as “a fiery anti-colonialism polemic with so much on its mind that you’ll likely come out of it feeling as dazed as the titular village’s people, who frequently ingest psychotropic drugs”.
Released on 6 March in the US and 13 March in the UK and Ireland
Radioactive
Radioactive is what you get when one female pioneer directs a biopic of another. The director is Marjane Satrapi, the Iranian-French graphic novelist who found fame with her autobiographical comic, Persepolis, and the animated film adapted from it. The other pioneer is Marie Curie, the Polish-French scientist who won the Nobel Prize twice but was ultimately killed by the radiation she studied. In Satrapi’s film of Lauren Redniss’s graphic novel, Curie is played by Rosamund Pike alongside Sam Riley as her husband Pierre Curie and Anya Taylor-Joy (star of Emma) as their daughter Irene. “Compelling, creative, thoughtful and undeniably beautiful,” says Alexandra Heller-Nicholas of AWFJ, “Radioactive confirms Satrapi’s status as one of the most original and important filmmakers working today.”
Released on 1 March in Norway, 20 March in the UK and Ireland and 25 March in France
The Truth
Hirokazu Kore-Eda has been writing and directing insightful human dramas for 20 years, to greater and greater acclaim: Shoplifters won the top prize at Cannes in 2018. Now comes the first film he has made outside Japan, The Truth (or La Verité), a wistful French comedy built around two glorious performances. Catherine Deneuve stars as an iconic Parisian actress who has just written a self-serving memoir, and Juliette Binoche plays her daughter, who isn’t too pleased about how her childhood has been reimagined in the book. “From first shot to last,” says Owen Gleiberman in Variety, “it’s a film of high wit and confidence and verve, an astonishingly fluid and accomplished act of boundary-leaping.”
Released on 5 March in Germany, 13 March in Sweden and 20 March in the UK, Ireland and the US
Misbehaviour
The Miss World beauty contest may be an anachronism, but it used to be one of television’s biggest draws. Misbehaviour, directed by Philippa Lowthorpe, recounts what happened when the event was staged at the Royal Albert Hall in London in 1970. Feminist activists (Keira Knightley and Jessie Buckley) plan a flour-throwing protest, but Miss Grenada (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) argues that her inclusion represents a step forward for black women. Meanwhile, the organisers (Rhys Ifans and Keeley Hawes) just hope to keep the event going, and the host, Bob Hope (Greg Kinnear), worries that his sexist humour is slipping out of fashion. There could hardly a more topical subject for a film, even if it is set 50 years ago.
Released on 13 March in the UK and Ireland
ARTICLE @ THE BBC
www.bbc.com/culture/story/20200227-ten-films-to-watch-this-march
[ NOTE: Looks like its open season on the poor this year LOL. Feel free to grab a trailer and throw it in here ]