2012 is the 25th anniversary of the release of the independent film River’s Edge and it is still as fresh today as it was all that time ago. Set against a backdrop of American suburbia, grunge music and teenage apathy the film follows the story of the aftermath of the murder of a teenage girl by her friend and examines the bizarre reaction of her social circle
If you fancy a trip down memory lane then American Reunion will take you right there: 13 years after the original American Pie was released the whole gang are now back together for their high school reunion.
What follows is a weekend of debauchery, misunderstandings and parental embarrassment. Nothing new there then except Oz, Finch, Jim and Kevin are a lot older, with more facial hair and with wives , girlfriends and children in tow.
In a sleepy village in deepest Wales, Elfie Hopkins (Jaime Winstone) - bored twenty-nothing wannabe detective - lacks excitement in her life. When a new family moves into the neighbourhood, she soon realises she has found it, and with infatuated sidekick Dylan (Aneurin Barnard) in toe, she probes the comings and goings of the sinister Gammons.
After years of trying to make contact with alien life-forms, a radio signal sent to earth-like ‘Planet G’ results in an unexpected reply. Incoming UFOs are detected approaching at an alarming rate, and as debris from what is soon identified as an alien-craft causes catastrophic damage and worldwide panic, the extraterrestrial visitors are soon revealed to have less than friendly motives. Time is short, and all that stands between mankind and extinction, are Alex Hopper (Taylor Kitsch), and the US Navy.
European gang movies have witnessed something of a resurgence over recent years. Matteo Garrone’s interpretation of Gomorrah took a fresh approach along a well worn path, adding grit and scope to the Italian organised crime canon, and with Vincent Cassell in the lead of Jean-François Richet’s epic two-parter Mesrine, the director had the talent to bring alive the story of one of France’s most notorious criminals. The latest from the genre, Gang Story (Les Lyonnais), follows hot on their heels, bringing to the screen the tale of another figure of the French underworld: seventies gangster Edmond ‘Momon’ Vidal.
Young audiences are apparently inundating Hollywood studio mailrooms with letters demanding remakes of 70s/80s TV shows. Lucky for them, the executives are listening, because along comes the latest, 21 Jump Street.
A group of British retirees jump on the opportunity offered by the ‘outsourcing of retirement’, and head to Jaipur, India, and the eponymous Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. What they find however, is a ramshackle building, far less salubrious than they had been led to believe and despite the assurance of their ever-optimistic host (Dev Patel), immediately resign themselves to the fact the draw of the sub-continent may not have been the wisest choice for their twilight years.
On paper, four people in a room arguing for 90 minutes would seem neither the most exciting, nor original of propositions for a film. The film’s director, Roman Polanski is an undoubted talent, and has shown previously a skill at this kind of caged situation in films like The Tenant, but even his name does little to increase the appeal of an approach to cinema that rarely transcends the
For his first narrative film since The House of Mirth in 2000, Terence Davies has taken on another literary adaptation – this time Terence Rattingan’s classic 1952 play The Deep Blue Sea...
In 1964, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest author Ken Kesey set out to film a road movie. What followed was an LSD fuelled bus-trip across America to the New York World’s Fair with Neal Cassady and his ‘Merry Band of Pranksters’ - a trip described by one as a “bunch of lunatics running around acting idiotic, trying to get to the East coast somehow”.
