The Thicket review – Peter Dinklage is a bounty hunter in harsh western with unusual chill

-
Peter Dinklage and Juliette Lewis star in a horse opera set in a snowbound world of bars, brothels and wide open spaces Here is a western starring Peter Dinklage, but forget hot sun-baked gullies and leather-skinned cowboys riding sweatily through rattlesnake country. The Thicket takes place in a hard, snowbound wilderness interspersed with equally hard, snowbound little townships consisting mainly of bars and brothels. You can see the breath in the air and the blood on the snow. The plot is staple horse opera: a kidnapped maiden must be rescued by a motley group of good-ish guys with mixed motives, headed up by Dinklage playing a bounty hunter character offering a similar vein of dry, world-weary cynicism as his breakthrough role as Tyrion in Game of Thrones, only much less aristocratic. He is joined by Gbenga Akinnagbe as his right hand man, with whom Dinklage has nice chemistry, and Levon Hawke, as a naive young Christian whose sister has been kidnapped by ruffians. The ruffians a...
Post a Comment

Freaky Tales review – Pedro Pascal-led 80s anthology isn’t freaky enough

-

Sundance film festival: Captain Marvel directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck have made a bizarrely misjudged hodgepodge of gore, needle drops and nostalgia

More often than not, the opening night slot at Sundance has become more curse than blessing, too many films living and dying in just one night, barely to be seen again. Emilia Clarke and Chiwetel Ejiofor’s sci-fi comedy The Pod Generation anyone? How about the Michelle Williams and Julianne Moore melodrama After the Wedding? Daisy Ridley’s suicide drama Sometimes I Think About Dying? Or maybe that sequel to An Inconvenient Truth that you didn’t even know existed? This year’s sacrificial lamb, the 80s-set anthology Freaky Tales, is nothing if not confident in its ability to make an impact, asserting itself as an experience that won’t easily be forgotten.

Acting as its own hype man, the film begins with a block of narrated opening text positioning what we’re about to see as a “hella wild” ride, a promise that had already been made during its introduction, excitably sold to us as something that would make certain audience members’ heads explode. But while the film’s makers – the writer-director duo Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck – might seem to think that they’ve made a new cult classic, it’s hard to share in their bullish enthusiasm, eye-rolling fatigue meeting their insistence that this is something to be quoted, rewatched and adored. For as bold as Boden and Fleck seem to think Freaky Tales is, it’s a hodgepodge of things we’ve seen done before and done better, a sub-Tarantino fanboy assembly of vaguely interconnected stories that belongs less in the 80s and more in the mid-to-late 90s when every American indie wannabe was trying to emulate their new icon.

Freaky Tales is showing at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution

Continue reading...

from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/blAswdz
via IFTTT

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

BREAKING: Interstellar back in cinemas due to public demand; Dune: Part Two to also re-release on March 14 in IMAX

-
A lot of Bollywood films have re-released off late but when it comes to Hollywood, a handful of classics have had a re-run in cinemas. Last month, Interstellar re-released and received a rocking response. However, it just had a one-week run. If you missed watching the cult film in cinemas, here’s a reason for you to rejoice. The film will be back on the big screen on March 14, that too in IMAX. Moreover, Warner Bros will also bring back Dune: Part Two on the same day in theatres. A source told Bollywood Hungama, “Interstellar has a huge demand as it’s a film worth watching in theatres, that too IMAX. However, it re-released on February 7 and had to discontinued from February 14 to accommodate the new releases, Chhaava and Captain America: Brand New World. Both these films got a release in IMAX as well.” The source continued, “Many were aware that Interstellar had just a one week run. Hence, it held very well in the weekdays, collecting Rs. 2 crore plus. Yet, there was a section of mo...
Read more

‘I lied to get the part’: Melvyn Hayes on his ‘angry young man’ beginnings – and It Ain’t Half Hot Mum

-
He was tipped to be the next Richard Burton – but ended up as crossdressing Gunner Gloria in the now controversial sitcom. As his breakthrough classic returns to the screen, Hayes looks back One day in 1957, Melvyn Hayes was on the set of a film called Woman in a Dressing Gown when a man sat down next to him. “I was getting paid £5 a day and I’d been on location for three days,” the actor recalls. “All I had to do was walk up to a house and put a newspaper through a letterbox. That was my part. Finished. I said to this bloke, ‘I can’t believe the waste of money on this film. Take me. You could have got a newspaper boy on £1 a day to do what I’m doing.’ Then I said, ‘What do you do then, you lazy bugger?’ And he said, ‘I’m the producer.’” Hayes, now 89, giggles at the memory of the cheek of himself at 23. Back then, £5 a day was a decent whack. His first job in showbiz, in the early 1950s, was as assistant to The Great Masoni, a magician who tasked Hayes with “disappearing twice daily...
Read more

The Portable Door review – Harry Potter-ish YA fantasy carried by hardworking cast

-
Jeffrey Walker’s adaptation of the young-adult fantasy novel retains its edge thanks to its performances, but gets stuck on the whole door thing Adapted from Tom Holt’s 2003 young-adult fantasy novel, this is a passable attempt at kickstarting a new Harry Potter-style franchise set in a fusty-quirky institution, dosed up with extra Gilliamesque grotesquery. Co-produced by the Jim Henson Company, the production design is poky and intense, and the cast – with Christoph Waltz and Sam Neill larking it up – give it their all. But amid all this clutter, it sometimes has trouble moving its story forward. The Portable Door has a nice conceit: the venerable London corporation of JW Wells & Co is responsible for engineering all the daily incidents of coincidence and serendipity that happen in urban life. Not that wet-behind-the-ears intern Paul Carpenter (Patrick Gibson), desperate for any gig, knows the company’s raison d’etre when he signs up. He appears to have no discernible talents wh...
Read more