Skip to content

MostlyFilm

“A Blog Mostly About Film”

Category Archives: Future Releases

May 14, 2013 Why you need to watch Fast & Furious 6 this weekend

By Fogger

fast_and_furious_six_ver7_xlg

It had to happen eventually. Hollywood, or more accurately the half-dozen or so studios that make up the majority of its output, has seemingly realized that there might, just might, be more to life than turning every comic book that’s ever been doodled into a vacuous, overwrought blockbuster. The sixth installment of the Fast & Furious franchise is out this week. It will be a vacuous, overwrought blockbuster, too – but the right kind. And it could represent the rebirth of action cinema.

I say ‘could’, because it needs to make a giant pile of money first – and that’s why you need to go and watch it. Don’t go begrudgingly, though. If it’s anything like its predecessor, it promises to be an awesome, hair-raising mixture of preposterous car stunts, oiled muscly bodies and random bouts of artillery fire. And for some of us, that’s what cinema is all about.

Continue reading this article ›

Tags: ,

January 4, 2013 2013: Smaller Films

zero-dark-thirty

by Ron Swanson

Last year saw new films from Wes Anderson, the Dardenne brothers, Paolo Sorrentino, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Werner Herzog, Paul Thomas Anderson, David O. Russell, Steven Soderbergh, Andrew Dominik, Mia Hansen-Love, Bela Tarr, Leos Carax, Giorgos Lanthimos, Ben Affleck, Michael Haneke, Jacques Audiard  Thomas Vinterberg and Rian Johnson.

How does 2013 compare?

Continue reading this article ›

January 2, 2013 2013: Busting Blocks

by Ron Swanson

2

2012: The year in which Batman, Marvel’s Avengers and James Bond broke box-office records (Skyfall is about to be the first film to ever pass the £100m box-office barrier in the UK, grossing almost as much as Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace combined).

2012: The year of Ted, The Hunger Games and The Woman in Black spawning new franchises as breakout hits,

2012: The year that the Twilight saga finally ended.

2013: What have you got? Let’s start with Marvel, whose Avengers Assemble movie last year was an enormous, genre-defining hit. They have two films slated for release in 2013, a pair of sequels: Iron Man 3 and Thor: The Dark World. Both franchises have a new director on board, with Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang‘s (2005) Shane Black taking the helm from Jon Favreau for the third Iron Man movie and Game of Thrones director Alan Taylor taking over from Kenneth Branagh for Thor: The Dark World.

Continue reading this article ›

October 18, 2012 London Film Festival 2012 reviews II

Hot off the press, a fresh new batch of reviews from the London Film Festival. 

Rust and Bone

Reviewed by Ron Swanson

Rust and Bone is the quintessential festival film: French, with a ‘name’ director, a rising star and an art-house darling. It’s also muscular, brutal and frequently beguilingly beautiful. Jacques Audiard’s follow up to A Prophet was conceived as a response to that film; all open spaces and romantic entanglements.

Continue reading this article ›

Tags: , , , , ,

October 17, 2012 Attack of the Killer Brummies: Ben Wheatley’s Sightseers

Steve Oram and Alice Lowe in Sightseers

Ben Wheatley’s eagerly anticipated new film, Sightseers, is a black comedy about a couple on a caravanning holiday across England who start a killing spree.  Written by its two stars, Steve Oram and Alice Lowe, the film is receiving regular comparisons to Mike Leigh and Natural Born Killers.  What’s interesting is that, although he did not originate the project, the film is so clearly the work of the man who last directed Kill List.

In September, Mostly Film’s Gareth Negus attended a press conference with Ben Wheatley, Alice Lowe and Steve Oram, who talked about the creation of the film, its production and their choice of eccentric tourist spots.

Continue reading this article ›

Tags: , , , ,

October 9, 2012 Ten of the Best Films From the 2012 San Sebastian Film Festival

by Matthew Turner

As regular readers of Europe’s Best Website may remember, this time last year I attended the San Sebastian Film Festival and had such a great time that I vowed to go back every year until death. Well, so far, so good. For the truly curious, pictures and a tweet-by-tweet account of the entire festival can be found here and here respectively, but let’s keep this blog post mostly about film. Here, then, are some  notes on the ten best films I saw at San Sebastian this year (out of a total of 35). Note that a) I would have included The Imposter on this list if I hadn’t already seen it at Edinburgh and b) I deemed retrospective films ineligible for the top ten, otherwise Franju’s Judex would have been on the list too.

Continue reading this article ›

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

September 5, 2012 Monoglot Movie Club: Pining For The Fjords

Part of an occasional series in which Spank The Monkey travels to foreign countries, watches films in unfamiliar languages, and then complains about not understanding them

Like any regular business traveller, I have a checklist that I work through whenever I enter a new hotel. Does the room have tea and coffee making facilities? Is there enough soap in the shower? Are the tissues within arm’s reach of the bed? Once I’ve confirmed all those, it’s time to turn on the TV to get a quick overview of the local culture, in what I’ve only just realised is a smaller-scale and cheaper version of what I regularly do here in Monoglot Movie Club.

On my first night in Oslo, I was already slightly on edge after I discovered that my hotel failed on all three points on the checklist. And then I started watching the TV. Of the 13 channels available in my room, all of them bar one were showing English language programmes with subtitles. By the time I’d found out that the most interesting thing on telly that week was a subtitled episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, I had to wonder: if there’s so little Norwegian language material on television, what must Norway’s cinemas be like?

Continue reading this article ›

Tags: , , , ,

June 8, 2012 If My Calculations Are Correct: The Next Generation

by Ricky Young

If MostlyFilm was a giant robot, and the 1983 BBC2 Sci-Fi season was an unsuspecting Californian coastal town, then the former’s recent march through the latter may have left some wreckage behind.

‘Curse you, M05tlyF1lm!’ the surviving townspeople would shout at the departing metal colossus, fists aloft. ‘These were good ideas you’ve just trashed! Some of them were great ideas! Yes, not every production was a gem, granted, but how will we nourish our imaginations now?’

M05tlyF1lm would stop in his tracks, swivel his giant robot bonce around 180°, and bark out an order in a distressing grate:

###-REMAKE THEM-###

‘But there are surprisingly few straight remakes of the fifteen films on the list, M05tlyF1lm! Alright, Invasion of the Body Snatchers has been remade three times, and some argue that Innerspace could be regarded a technical remake of Fantastic Voyage, but we tried sitting through that recently and there’s no way it’s going on the list. It’s actually nothing like the original’

###-ALSO, SCHTICK OF MARTIN SHORT TOO TOXIC TO TOLERATE ON BIG SCREEN-###

‘Phew, ain’t that the truth. So, that’s the only way to rebuild our town, is it? By taking a discursive and flippant look at how three of our cherished sci-fi landmarks were later treated by other film-makers? Because, I have to say, this metaphor’s stretched enough as it is.’

###-IT IS EITHER YOU OR IAIN LEE-###

‘Really? Christ, better get on with it then.’

Continue reading this article ›

Tags: , ,

March 27, 2012 Nuking From Orbit

by Thomas Pratchett

'Last one to the top's a rotten xenomorph egg!'

In 1979, Ridley Scott made a film about a bunch of people who find an alien spaceship and discover that the long dormant life inside isn’t so dormant, and in fact wants to kill them. In 2011, Ridley Scott made a film about a bunch of people who find an alien spaceship and… you can see where this is going. By now, everyone knows that Prometheus is a (so Scott claims) tangentially related prequel to Alien, although exactly how related they are is still to be seen. We’ve got the same Giger-esque architecture, milk-filled androids, stark white interiors played against grimy steam-filled corridors and pods filled with slimy things that want to hug our faces. If anyone else had come up with such a scenario and claimed it had no real links to the Alien franchise, 20th Century Fox’s lawyers would have moved faster than you can say ‘minimum safe distance’.

Continue reading this article ›

Tags: , , , , ,

January 11, 2012 Preview of 2012 – the Best of the Rest

by Ron Swanson

Over the last couple of days we’ve looked at some of the biggest blockbusters, and potential art-house hits that will go a long way towards defining 2012 as a cinematic year, but it would be silly to underestimate the importance of those films that sit somewhere between those two camps – be they high-profile films made by talented, respected and acclaimed directors, or vanity projects for big stars…

Most of these films will be released in the latter half of 2012, but one movie that will receive plenty of attention on its release in May is the Dictator. The latest project of Sacha Baron Cohen, the Dictator looks set to change his established formula somewhat, mixing in other high-profile actors like John C. Reilly and Curb Your Enthusiasm veteran J.B. Smoove for more of a scripted feel. Regardless of the film’s quality, expect the Dictator to generate plenty of interest.

Continue reading this article ›

Tags:

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 101 other followers