(WARNING: There will be spoilers) When Charlie McDowell’s mysterious film The Discovery debuted at Sundance last January, its distributor, Netflix, premiered a teaser trailer along with it — a good strategy, considering the film’s intriguing premise (that science has proven the existence of an afterlife) and its abundance of plot twists. No spoilers, please! A beautiful piece of promotion for a dark sci-fi romance ostensibly about life after death but essentially about a person looking for his soul mate, the teaser uses Roy Orbison’s “Only the Lonely” for an 88-second music-driven montage (a song not used in the film but well-suited for […]
by Stephen Garrett on Mar 23, 2017The double feature has been a moviewatching mainstay since at least the 1930s. Their appeal is obvious: What better way to cap off a film than to delay real life for a few hours more with another one? Few of us catch double bills at a theater anymore, but their allure remains strong at home. As sites like Mashable and Uproxx reported this year, Netflix users can access double-feature-friendly micro-genres with ease. These days, the work of curating a dual bill of “critically-acclaimed gritty independent crime dramas” is practically done for you. You can even start the next film without […]
by Soheil Rezayazdi on Dec 22, 2016For his first film since his directorial debut A Single Man in 2009, Tom Ford has adapted Austin Wright’s 1993 novel “Tony and Susan.” The resulting thriller, Nocturnal Animals stars Amy Adams as Susan, an L.A. art-gallery owner whose ex-husband Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal) writes a violent novel (called “Nocturnal Animals”) based on their former relationship. “I did something horrible to him,” Susan confesses in the (above) trailer for the film, which also stars Armie Hammer, Michael Shannon, Isla Fisher, Laura Linney, and Aaron Taylor-Johnson. After winning the Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Venice Film Festival, and screening recently at the Toronto Film […]
by Paula Bernstein on Sep 15, 2016