The end of big-screen cinema? What Netflix hopes to achieve by buying Warner Bros | Andrew Pulver

IP success stories such as Barbie and the DC Universe? That elusive best picture Oscar? Or perhaps the main goal is a good old-fashioned blockbuster Corporate Hollywood has undergone huge upheavals in recent years – as consequential, perhaps, as the 1970s and 80s, when the studio marques that had made their names in the movies’ golden age were being bought up by international conglomerates. The acquisition of Warner Bros – legendary for crime pictures in the 40s and 50s, and Batman movies in the 90s and 00s – by a streaming service feels particularly significant, coming as it does on the back of the merger of Paramount with Skydance Media earlier this year and, in 2019, Disney’s purchase of fellow studio 21st Century Fox . What is most evident in all these deals is how streaming services have changed the game. Disney’s buying spree – which had previously included Marvel, Star Wars and Pixar – in retrospect looks essentially like preparatory positioning to increase the marketability ...

End of Term review – art-school horror is fusion of slasher and country-house whodunnit

Weird goings-on in a basement lead to Cluedo-ish suspects and piecemeal flashbacks, but here it is the audience that suffers in the name of art

‘So, you call yourself conceptualists, do you?” says the straight-arrow detective quizzing Melissa (Chelsea Edge), a cool-customer art student with three long lacerations on her face. “Mostly. Ashley wasn’t,” Melissa replies. “Unless anti-conceptualism is a concept. She was always about being in the moment. Expressionism. Impressionism.” End of Term has a fondness for bandying around the art-theory big talk, but this silly but stolidly genre project could sorely use a conceptual cutting edge itself.

Melissa is getting questioned after being found strapped to a chair in the blood-splattered basement of Ford Barrington art school. Strangely, there are no bodies – except for that of snooty art critic Damian Self (Ronald Pickup) in the nearby space for the students’ end-of-term exhibition. In Usual Suspects-style piecemeal flashbacks, Melissa fills in the police on the buildup to the butchery and the halls of residence gallery of Cluedo-ish suspects, including her vampish one-time lover Ashley (Nicole Posener), the suave Professor Leigh (Peter Davison, a former Doctor in Doctor Who), and wild card Garth Stroman (Ivan Kaye), a rumoured ghost of a Byronic artist obsessed with a credo that art must involve pain.

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