What if M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening was a pretty good movie, instead of a laughably bad one? A question like that is posed by the trailer for Spanish thriller The End, directed by Jorge Torregrosa and scripted by Jorge Guerricaechevarría (The Day of the Beast, Cell 211) and Sergio Garcia Sanchez (The Orphanage) based on the novel by David Monteagudo.
In this teaser we see a few people coming together in a world that is strangely empty. Soon, as they wander, they encounter both remnants of society, and nature unbound by man. The events look as if they might make for a good post-apocalyptic thriller. Check out the teaser below. Read More »
.
Please Recommend /Film on Facebook
Nacho Vigalondo‘s name comes up so often that it’s hard to believe the majority of people have only seen one of his movies. Of course, that movie is Timecrimes, which ranks up with Primer as one of the best time-travel, sci-fi movies in recent memory. He’s currently working on Supercrooks, a big superhero movie with Mark Millar and his sophomore film now finally has a release date.
The film is called Extraterrestrial and it’s wonderful. You can read my positive review here but the film takes the sci-fi setting of an alien invasion and uses it to make a screwball comedy that would make Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn proud. Focus Features’ off shoot Focus World will release the film on June 15 on VOD and select cities across the country. Plus, other cities can request the movie on Tugg.com. Read more after the jump. Read More »
Odds are, if the insanely excellent action film The Raid: Redemption isn’t yet playing in a theater near you, that’ll change on Friday. Sony Pictures Classics is opening the film in almost 700 theaters this week enabling fans from all over to see a film that reminds us what action films can be.
Directed by Gareth Evans, The Raid: Redemption is a non-stop roller coaster of chaos following an elite squad of police who enter a drug dealer’s sky rise strong hold. Adding to the visceral feel of the movie are the live-action stunts performed on set and, in this /Film exclusive featurette, Evans and his co-composers Mike Shinoda discuss one of the most memorable. Check it out after the jump. Read More »
We’ve occasionally followed the development of 7 Days in Havana, an anthology film in which seven directors each chronicle one day in Havana, Cuba. The attraction is the set of directors, which includes Benicio Del Toro, making only his second time in the director’s chair (with Josh Hutcherson from The Hunger Games in his cast) and Argentine firebrand Gaspar Noe, who last made Enter the Void and is generally associated with French cinema thanks to his films Irreversible and I Stand Alone.
We know that Noe’s movies are often quite visually distinctive, so here’s your test for the day: can you watch the trailer below and guess right off which footage comes from Noe? (Answer: probably not.) Read More »
We were a bit surprised — only a bit — when it was announced that Juan Jose Campanella, director of the Oscar-winning Secret in Their Eyes, would make an animated film called Metegol, or Foosball. Only a bit surprised because there was that one great sequence in Secret that takes place at a soccer match, suggesting that Campanella evidently has more than a passing interest in the sport. But foosball is something else altogether, and not a thing that is often chronicled on screen. (Who knew this teaser would hit so close to a foosball-themed Community episode?)
The film is reportedly about ” an underdog who, with the help of foosball figures that come to life, must take on a star soccer pro to save their village.” We’ll have to wait to see more of that, but for now there is a one-minute teaser that starts to give us an idea of what the animation will look like. Check it out below. Read More »
Outside a select few titles, Hollywood really hasn’t been doing too well releasing bad-ass, critically-acclaimed action films. For those, smart moviegoers are looking overseas to films like The Raid: Redemption and the film you’re about to watch the trailer for, Sleepless Night. Directed by Frédéric Jardin, the festival favorite (read our reviews from Toronto and Fantastic Fest) is about a compromised police officer who undergoes a hellacious night in a French nightclub trying to rescue his kidnapped son. Blending the tropes of the TV show 24 with the action of the Bourne movies, it’s a ton of fun. The film hits theaters May 11 and VOD April 17 and you can watch the official United States trailer below. Read More »
Iron Sky, the jokey movie in which Earth is invaded by a Nazi colony that hid for decades on the dark side fo the moon, is finally out in the wild. Or in nature preserves, at least: it premiered at the Berlin Film festival, and then played SXSW in the past week. Reviews haven’t been great so far, with The Guardian delivering a real blow: “not terrible, by any means: just not nearly as funny or cruel as its killer premise suggests.” For a film based on an outrageous premise and with the promise of real lunacy, that’s not a good note.
We’ve seen trailers and small clips, and now the first four minutes have been released online. The scenes show how a lunar expedition stumbles across a Nazi mining effort on the moon, and leads into the introduction of the massive Nazi base. Check out the clip below to get a better idea of what the movie looks like. Read More »
We all have our favorite “so bad they’re good” movies. They’re films with poorly written scripts and terrible performances, but huge entertainment value due to, or in spite of, near-total incompetence. Casa de mi Padre, Will Ferrell‘s Spanish-language comedy, was conceived and executed to be one of those films. It’s filled with totally self-aware mistakes in editing and production design. It has wooden performances and crappy dialogue. The idea was those gags, coupled with the fact that everyone is speaking Spanish, should be funny.
What Ferrell, director Matt Piedmont and writer Andrew Steele neglected to realize, though, is the reason “so bad they’re good” films usually gain that moniker is that the filmmakers crafted every moment with the best intentions… they just failed miserably. The Casa de mi Padre team is making a bad movie on purpose so those “best intentions” aren’t there. That, in turn, sucks the heart out of the film. As a result, it just lays on the screen lingering in mediocrity. And there are no “so mediocre they’re good” movies. Read More »
