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This weekend there are eight new films out for you to choose from: Richard Linklater comedy/drama in Everybody Wants Some!!, horror from the Blue Ruin director in Green Room, sci-fi action thriller in Kill Command, John le Carré drama in Our Kind of Traitor, comedy in Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, CGI dross for kids in Angry Birds, and lame-looking horror in both The Darkness and a remake of Cabin Fever.
Everybody Wants Some!! is writer/director Richard Linklater‘s follow-up to Boyhood, showing us a group of college baseball players in the ’80s, trying to find their way through the freedoms and responsibilities of unsupervised adulthood.
With the working title of That’s What I’m Talking About, this film doesn’t have any major stars – Zoey Deutch, Glen Powell, Tyler Hoechlin, Ryan Guzman and Wyatt Russell – but that doesn’t really matter, since Linklater has given early roles to stars of burgeoning talent in the past such as Dazed And Confused‘s Milla Jovovich, Ben Affleck, Parker Posey and Matthew McConaughey. This one definitely looks worth a watch.
Hit or Miss? Verdict: Hit!
Green Room centres around a rock band who stray into a secluded part of the Pacific Northwest, and stumble on to a horrific act of violence. Since they are the only witnesses, they become the targets of a terrifying gang of white power skinheads who want to make sure all the evidence is eliminated.
This film comes from writer/director Jeremy Saulnier, whose Blue Ruin was one of my favourite movies of 2014 and quite an exceptional piece of work, with a cast including Imogen Poots, Alia Shawkat, Anton Yelchin, Mark Webber and the one and only Patrick Stewart, so there are many reasons to watch this film.
Hit or Miss? Verdict: Hit!
Kill Command stars Vanessa Kirby (Everest) and Thure Lindhardt (The Bridge Season 3) in a sci-fi action thriller set in a near future, where a technology-reliant society is pitting man against killing machines.
Against this backdrop, an elite army unit is helicoptered to a remote, off-the-grid island training facility. What starts out as a simple training exercise for Captain Bukes (Lindhardt) and his tight-knit unit, descends into a terrifying battle to the death, as the marines discover the island is overrun by an enemy that transcends the human concept of evil.
Also starring David Ajala and Tom McKay, and is written and directed by Steven Gomez, in his first feature-length directorial debut, while the ‘war against the machines’, as they begin to take over us, is far from a new idea, it looks intriguing enough to warrant a viewing.
Hit or Miss? Verdict: Hit!
Our Kind of Traitor comes from the pen of John le Carré, whose The Night Manager was recently a smash hit on BBC1 with their adaptation, and could spawn a second series.
It centres around young Oxford academic Perry Makepeace (Ewan McGregor, who had an uncredited Obi-Wan Kenobi voice appearance in Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens) and his attorney girlfriend, Gail (Naomie Harris – Spectre), on holiday on Antigua. They bump into Russian millionaire Dima (Stellan Skarsgård – River, Nymphomaniac), who owns a peninsula and a diamond watch. He wants a game of tennis. What else he wants propels the lovers on a tortuous journey to the City of London and its unholy alliance with Britain’s intelligence establishment, to Paris and the Alps…
Directed by Susanna White (Parade’s End, Nanny McPhee and the Big Bang) and with a screenplay from Hossein Amini (Drive, Snow White & the Huntsman), the film has a great cast including Damian Lewis, Jeremy Northam, Mark Gatiss, Alicia von Rittberg, Mark Stanley, Saskia Reeves and Alec Utgoff.
I just hope it’s better than the adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, which was more ‘Stinker Tailor’ for me.
Hit or Miss? Verdict: Maybe!
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot stars Tina Fey as Kim Barker, and adapted from the real Ms Barker’s memoirs by Robert Carlock, a journalist recounting her wartime coverage in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Picked out from amongst her colleagues, she holds up the army by needing the loo at the most inconvenient time (that’s an early gag, so it’s certainly in trouble), and she’s also, as a Westerner, one of the hottest women out there, along with Tanya (The Wolf Of Wall Street‘s Margot Robbie).
The cast also includes Billy Bob Thornton, Martin Freeman, Josh Charles, Alfred Molina, and for some reason there are two directors – Glenn Ficarra and John Requa – which is rarely a good sign outside of an animated film.
Hit or Miss? Verdict: Maybe!
Angry Birds – remember them? It’s the mobile phone game which was all the rage back in 2011, and since then we’ve had Candy Crush, Temple Run, and all kinds of other games dominating the market, but it’s just now that the powers that be have got it together to make a film about it.
The movie takes us to an island populated entirely by happy, flightless birds – or almost entirely. In this paradise, Red (Jason Sudeikis, We’re the Millers, Horrible Bosses), a bird with a temper problem, speedy Chuck (Josh Gad – Frozen), and the volatile Bomb (Danny McBride – This is the End, Eastbound and Down) have always been outsiders. But when the island is visited by mysterious green piggies, it’s up to these unlikely outcasts to figure out what the pigs are up to.
The film is directed by Clay Kaytis and Fergal Reilly, written by Jon Vitti (it has a writer??), and also stars Peter Dinklage, Bill Hader, Keegan-Michael Key, Maya Rudolph, Danielle Brooks and the brilliantly-named Hannibal Buress.
Angry Birds looks like all the other CGI movies out there, but the name will still draw kids to the big screen. However, it has come out a whole five years after it was a big deal. Well done, Hollywood!
Hit or Miss? Verdict: Miss!
The Darkness is thankfully not a rockumentary about the cheesy axe-wielding band from Lowestoft fronted by Justin Hawkins. Instead, it’s a new horror starring Kevin Bacon as the head of a family who returns from a Grand Canyon vacation with a supernatural presence in tow.
Written by Shayne Armstrong, Shane Krause and Greg McLean, the latter of whom also directs, this film also stars Radha Mitchell, Ming-Na Wen, Paul Reiser, Tara Lynne Barr and Krista Marie Yu.
However, The Darkness, The Woods, The Forest… can we have some original titles, please?
Despite being a horror, it looks like yet another American movie which is more of a bit of a laugh, but that’s better than a stinker. And it’s a horror released on Friday 13th!
Hit or Miss? Verdict: Miss!
Cabin Fever was a low-budget horror movie for director Eli Roth, and he also has a hand in the background for this latest version, a remake of his film. No-one needed the two sequels to his film, 2009’s Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever and 2014’s Cabin Fever 3: Patient Zero, and so who on earth thought we needed a remake to a film that wasn’t highly thought of in the first place??
The nobodies on display include Gage Golightly, Matthew Daddario, Nadine Crocker, Dustin Ingram and Samuel Davis, and directed by Travis Zariwny. Who? Exactly.
Oh, what was the plot? A group of five friends are terrorised at their getaway cabin. Some of them die. That’s it.
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.