Skip to content
This week, there are EIGHT new films out for you to choose from, led by American Animals. Here are the titles, with more info below:
- American Animals
Under The Wire
The Nun
The Miseducation of Cameron Post
Puzzle
Hurricane
Final Score
The Seagull
American Animals is a crime drama, where four bright and well-off college students in Kentucky plot to steal some rare books from their university’s Special Collections Library in a misguided quest for personal glory. Based on the story, the film includes interviews with the foursome who attempted the bizarre heist, as they mistake their lives for a movie and attempt one of the most audacious heists in US history.
I love the style of this and can’t wait to see it.
Writer/director: Bart Layton
Stars: Barry Keoghan, Evan Peters, Blake Jenner, Jared Abrahamson, Ann Dowd, and Ozark‘s Kevin Johnson
Hit or Miss? Verdict: Hit!
Under The Wire
On 13 February 2012, two journalists entered war-ravaged Syria. One of them was celebrated Sunday Times war correspondent, Marie Colvin. The other was photographer, Paul Conroy. Their aim was to cover the plight of Syrian civilians trapped in Homs, a city under siege and relentless military attack from the Syrian army. Only one of them returned. This is their story.
This looks like an absolutely gripping documentary, and I remember Marie Covin’s death being reported on the news at the time, and all the tributes which followed, and I definitely want to check this out.
Marie Colvin’s story is also told in the forthcoming A Private War where she is portrayed by Rosamund Pike, and you can read my thoughts about that film on that page.
Writer/Director: Christopher Martin
Stars: Ziad Abaza, Janine Birkett, Julian Lewis Jones
Hit or Miss? Verdict: Hit!
The Nun centres around a priest with a haunted past, as well as a novitiate on the threshold of her final vows, who are sent by the Vatican to investigate the death of a young nun in Romania and confront a malevolent force in the form of a demonic nun.
But… Annabelle was a prequel to The Conjuring, and The Nun is a prequel to both of them. And no doubt, we’ll get another sequel to a prequel.
Risking not only their lives, but their faith and their very souls, it turns out this is the same nun which came about in those other two films, as the abbey becomes a horrific battleground between the living and the damned.
My chance of watching this jump-scare nonsense? None.
Director: Corin Hardy
Writer: Gary Dauberman
Stars: Taissa Farmiga, Bonnie Aarons, Charlotte Hope, Demián Bichir, Lili Bordán, Ingrid Bisu
Hit or Miss? Verdict: Miss!
The Miseducation of Cameron Post stars Chloë Grace Moretz as the titular Cameron, an introverted teenage girl who tries to survive the last week of her disastrous eighth grade year before leaving to start high school, since she’s forced into a gay conversion therapy center by her conservative guardians.
Since her character doesn’t want to be defined in any particular way, is this the first movie about someone who considers themselves non-binary gender?
It does look an interesting film, though, so I will definitely check this out.
Director: Bo Burnham
Also stars: Steven Hauck, Quinn Shephard, Kerry Butler, Dalton Harrod, McCabe Slye
Hit or Miss? Verdict: Hit!
Puzzle
Agnes (Kelly Macdonald), taken for granted as a suburban mother, discovers a passion for solving jigsaw puzzles which unexpectedly draws her into a new world – where her life unfolds in ways she could never have imagined.
This may be okay, but I’m not sure all the pieces of this puzzle quite go together (ho, ho, ho)
Also stars: David Denman, Daniel Sherman, Austin Abrams
Hit or Miss? Verdict: Maybe!
Hurricane (Squadron 303) is the story of a group of brave Poles who fought in the skies over England in WW2, not just to keep Great Britain free from the Nazis, but also to keep alive the very idea of their own country, which had existed in its modern form for barely twenty years before it was crushed between the opposing jaws of Germany and Russia. Equipped with the almost-obsolete Hurricane and (with some initial reluctance) given RAF blue uniforms, while they fought, Poland lived.
This World War II drama could be okay, but I’m not wholly sold on it.
Director: David Blair
Stars: Iwan Rheon, Milo Gibson, Stefanie Martini
Hit or Miss? Verdict: Maybe!
Final Score looks like one of those ’90s action thrillers that still play out like a ’90s action thriller when the rest of the world has moved on.
Terrorists have kicked up a ruckus at a football match (or soccer, as they call it in the US), and unless Michael Knox (Dave Bautista – Guardians of the Galaxy Vol.2) can find some Russian baddie before the 90 minutes are up, bad stuff will happen, and there’s 35,000 spectatoes that it can happen to.
In 1995, Jean-Claude Van Damme made a great movie called Sudden Death, about bad stuff happening at an ice hockey match… and this looks exactly the same sort of thing.
And it also has Pierce Brosnan doing a terrible Russian accent.
Oh, and it should be an uncut 18-certificate, but the studio have allowed it to be cut down a 15. Oh dear…
Given that this is centred around football, surely it would’ve been better to swap this with that movie, so it came out BEFORE the World Cup?!
Either way, I think I’ll give the final whistle a miss.
Director: Scott Mann
Also stars: Ray Stevenson, Kamil Lemieszewski, Martyn Ford, Ralph Brown, Aaron McCusker, Amit Shah
Hit or Miss? Verdict: Miss!
The Seagull centres around aging actress Irina Arkadina (Annette Bening), who pays summer visits to her brother Pjotr Nikolayevich Sorin (Brian Dennehy) and her son Konstantin (Billy Howle) on a country estate.
On one occasion, she brings Boris Trigorin (Corey Stoll), a successful novelist, with her. Nina (Saoirse Ronan), a free and innocent girl on a neighboring estate, falls in love with Boris. As he lightly consumes and rejects Nina, so the actress all her life has consumed and rejected her son, who loves Nina. The victims are destroyed while the sophisticates continue on their way.
For me, while it has a good cast, it looks like an achingly dull period drama.
Director: Michael Mayer
Screenplay: Stephen Karam (based on the play by Anton Chekhov)
Also stars: Elisabeth Moss, Michael Zegen, Glenn Fleshler, Mare Winningham
Hit or Miss? Verdict: Miss!
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.