The Hunger Games devours the competition this weekend, hitting a year high for opening weekends.
Last night Deadline Hollywood announced that MGM and director Kimberley Pierce (Boys Don't Cry) had found an actress to play the lead role in the upcoming Carrie remake and had made an offer to Hit Girl herself, Chloe Moretz.
After his incredibly powerful portrayal of a man on the brink of sanity in last year’s tremendous Take Shelter, there’s no doubting that Michael Shannon can do ‘intense’. Therefore he seems perfect for the role of Richard Kuklinski, a real life mob hitman for the Gambino family in New York who is reported to have killed (or ‘whacked’ as they say in the trade) around 250 people.
Despite the extensive marketing campaign and the generally favourable reviews, David Fincher’s adaptation of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, unfortunately, did not prove as successful as co-financier MGM had hoped. DVD and Blu-Ray sales are yet to be taken into account but, at present, the movie actually lost money overall.
Scarcely a month has passed since Project X hit cinemas in the UK, yet Warner Bros. is already motioning towards a sequel.
There are two Snow White films coming out this year and this one is definitely the more family-orientated one, compared to the Kirsten Stewart more adult re-imagined version, Snow White and the Huntsman. The attraction here is seeing Julia Roberts playing the wicked queen. In her long and esteemed career, you would struggle to name a role where she plays an out and out villain. It's a role you can clearly see someone like Glenn Close or Meryl Streep playing, but you can see Roberts is clearly repositioning herself away from her America's Sweetheart roles. Whilst she is no Cruella De Vil or Miranda Priestley, she does devour the screen with relish, as she should - this film is meant to be the wicked queen's version of the story.
Opening with a title card that reads "A Heterosexual Film by Greg Araki", it's clear that The Doom Generation is not playing by conventional means. Or, to be more precise, it's trying too hard to be unconventional.
Amy and Jordan are young lovers who are pulled into a cross country road trip with Xavier, a strange drifter who has a habit of killing people. I wish there was more I could say about the story, it's developments, rhythms and underlying themes, but I'm afraid I left The Doom Generation with very little to say.
If you love films and film making – and if you’re reading this on Lost in the Multiplex, it’s more than likely you do – then This Is Not a Film is one of the most fascinating films you are ever likely to see.
This Is Not a Film is not directed by director Jafar Panahi.
Set in post-war Britain, 1921, The Awakening sets out to tackle a sensitive issue through a genre not usually accused of subtlety. Following the First World War, and influenza pandemic of 1918, more than a million people had lost their lives. Society had changed forever and British families were left wrestling their grief in silence. Florence Cathcart (Rebecca Hall) lost her fiancé to the war, and is haunted by the thought that his ghost might be trapped in after-life. Aching with guilt, she sets out to discredit anyone who claims they can contact the dead, hoping she can employ scientific method to prove no one can survive death, and her lover is really gone.
For this week’s double feature it’s two modern classics by one of America’s hottest directorial prospects, Darren Aronofsky. The 43 year old New Yorker made waves with his debut movie Pi, a psychological thriller which focused on a fraught maths genius who is obsessed with proving his theory that everything in the world can be explained through numbers. It was with this movie that Aronofsky set the framework for a lot of his subsequent work as he presented a dangerously obsessed central character who is willing to sacrifice their own health and sanity in order to achieve their goals. In Pi it was proving a complex theory and then, in follow up Requiem for a Dream, that obsession took the far more destructive form of drug abuse.
