Based on a story by British spy thriller writer Charles Cumming, Plane is a breathless, white-knuckle action movie. Cummings co-wrote the screenplay with J. P. Davis, who moonlights as an actor in Hollywood.
Jean-Francois Richet directs Plane, steering Gerard Butler as pilot Brodie Torrance.
Richet is an award-winning director of French films like Inner City (1995) and Public Enemy No. 1 (2008).
Daniella Pineda as Bonnie Lane, Gerard Butler as Brodie Torrance, and Yoson An as Samuel Dele in PLANE. Photo Credit: Kenneth Rexach
Torrance tries to save his passengers from a lightning strike by making a risky landing on a war-torn island. They survive only to discover the emergency landing is just the beginning.
When most of the passengers are taken hostage by dangerous rebels, the only person Torrance can count on for help is Louis Gaspare, played by Mike Colter, an accused murderer the FBI was transporting.
Mike Colter as Louis Gaspare in PLANE. Photo Credit: Kenneth Rexach
Torrance needs Gaspare’s help to rescue the passengers. He soon learns there’s more to the accused murderer than he realized. Tony Goldwyn also stars in the movie.
Jeff Loveness wrote the screenplay and Peyton Reed directed Ant-Man & The Wasp: Quantumania.
The movie stars Paul Rudd, Bill Murray, Michelle Pfeiffer, Michael Douglas, Jonathan Majors, Kathryn Newton and Evangeline Lilly. They all head to the Quantum Realm. Watch the trailer because it tells more about the story.
The Erwin brothers bring another faith-based story inspired by a genuine movement on the screen.
Jon Erwin and Brent McCorkle co-directed Jesus Revolution. The film tells the story of a young Greg Laurie, played by Joel Courtney, being raised by his struggling mother, Charlene, played by Kimberly Williams-Paisley, in the 1970s.
Jonathan Roumie as Lonnie Frisbee and Kelsey Grammer as Chuck Smith in Jesus Revolution. Photo Credit: Dan Anderson.
Laurie and a sea of young people descend on sunny Southern California to redefine truth through all means of liberation. Everything changes when Laurie meets Lonnie Frisbee, played by Jonathan Roumie. Frisbee is a charismatic hippie street preacher, and Pastor Chuck Smith, played by Kelsey Grammer, has thrown open the doors of Smith’s languishing church to a stream of wandering youth.
Jonathan Roumie as Lonnie Frisbee and Kelsey Grammer as Chuck Smith in Jesus Revolution. Photo Credit: Dan Anderson.
What unfolds becomes the most significant spiritual awakening in American history. Rock and roll, radical love, and newfound faith lead to a “Jesus Revolution.”
Grammer nails the role of Pastor Smith. He brings humor to an otherwise strict faith-based opportunity to spread the word of Jesus.
Here, the movie tells the story of how one culture turns one counterculture movement into a revival that changes the world.
Claire Scanlon directed The People We Hate at the Wedding based on the book of the same name by Grant Ginder. With a very talented cast, the movie follows a family during the week leading up to their half-sister’s wedding in England.
Ben Platt, Allison Janney and Kristen Bell
Tensions rise among the siblings, and it’s full of laughs and silliness with, hopefully, a lesson to learn about accepting your family.
Scanlon is also an editor who won an Emmy for editing Single-Camera Comedy Series for The Office episode: Finale. Her other movies include Set It Up and Unbreakable Kimmy.
Phyllis Nagy directed Call Jane, a married woman, played by Elizabeth Banks, with an unwanted pregnancy. She lives in a time in America when she can’t get a legal abortion and works with a group of suburban women to find help.
Nagy wrote the screenplay for Carol, directed by Todd Haynes, starring Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara.
Sigourney Weaver, Kate Mara and Rupert Friend also star in Call Jane.
Fall is a nerve-shredding, knuckle-whitening, vertigo-inducing action thriller. Scott Mann and Johnathan Frank wrote the script about the terrifying tale of climbers Becky, played by Grace Caroline Currey, and Hunter, played by Virginia Gardner.
They ascend the abandoned 2,000-ft B67 TV Tower in the California desert as a means of moving on from the death of Becky’s husband Dan, played by Mason Gooding, in a climbing accident a year earlier.
But when the tower’s external ladder gives way, these best friends find themselves stuck on a platform at the top. Too high to use their cell phones to ring for help, the pair must find a way down — or die trying.
Fall began life as a short film idea hatched by Mann and Fran in response to a production company’s call for experiential shorts. “They were looking at experiential shorts, action thrillers, and we pitched this,” recalls Mann. “We got so excited about the idea of the fear of falling and the horror of heights, that it almost wrote itself for 25-30 pages. They wanted to make it, but then the whole thing shut down.”
The short film series ended up canceled, so Mann and Frank decided to expand their idea into a feature, and see if they could get it set up somewhere else. “We’ve written specs before, but this was the most fun to write because the two of us kind of lived it and acted it out as we went on, trying to think what we would do in the situation that the girls find themselves in,” continues Mann who built a paper version of the platform at the top of the tower so he and Frank could perch on it, “to figure out what to do and really play on the horror and tension. We wanted it to be the ultimate fear-of-height movie, so we looked at previous films and wrote the script accordingly.”
Mann ended up directing the thriller, which has a unique location, the very real 2,000-foot-high B67 TV tower, the fourth highest structure in the U.S. “What we found was there were a lot of internet videos of daredevils doing crazy stuff, but they were usually climbing things like cranes,” explains Mann. “So, we said, let’s find somewhere that would be the ultimate place to get stuck, and we came across this tower in California. When you’re at the bottom looking up, the tower seems to go out into infinity, into the clouds. It is a marvel of architecture. And being in the desert, made for a very barren, difficult place to survive in the first instance, let alone 2,000 feet up.”
Blumhouse brings another psychological horror movie concerning artificial intelligence development and functioning within our society.
Gerard Johnstone directed M3GAN, a story that follows a young girl, played by Violet McGraw, who lost her parents. Her aunt Gemma, played by Allison Williams, adopts her. To help her niece with the loss and transition of living in a new home and location, Aunt Gemma invites her to play with M3GAN, a robot, a lifelike doll programmed to bond with her newly orphaned niece.
Soon, the bonding becomes dangerous as M3GAN becomes violently overprotective of her new friend.
Nikyatu Jusu directed Nanny, a psychological horror fable of displacement.
Aisha, played by Anna Diop, is a woman who recently emigrated from Senegal. She nabs a job caring for the daughter of a wealthy couple, played by Michelle Monaghan and Morgan Spector, living in New York City.
But, she becomes increasingly unsettled by the family’s volatile home life. Ashia’s arrival approaches, and the violent presence invades her dreams and reality, threatening the American dream she is painstakingly piecing together.
Based upon the book by Miriam Toews and screenplay by Sarah Polley and directed by Polley, the Women Talking took place in 2010. The women of an isolated religious community grapple with reconciling their reality with their faith.
According to Polley, the women disagree on essential things and have a conversation to figure out how they might move forward together to build a better world for themselves and their children.
“Though the backstory behind the events in Women Talking is violent, the film is not. We never see the violence that the women have experienced. We see only short glimpses of the aftermath. Instead, we watch a community of women come together as they must decide, in a very short space of time, what their collective response will be.
“When I read Miriam Toews’ book, it sunk deep into me, raising questions and thoughts about the world I live in that I had never articulated. Questions about forgiveness, faith, systems of power, trauma, healing, culpability, community, and self-determination. It also left me bewilderingly hopeful.”
Toews’s book was The New York Times book of the year, so naturally, it should become a film. However, according to producer Dede Gardner from Plan B, Brad Pitt’s production studio, the film departs from the book on many levels.
From the book to the screen, the movie became much bigger. “The book is extraordinary and full of life and humor and wickedness and pithiness,” Gardner said. “Yet, two families of women in a hayloft making a decision for the duration is not an obvious idea for a film. At the same time, I could see its cinematic structure. The thing that the book and the movie really share is that despite all the things that they discuss, there’s a real sense of movement and a victory at the end of it.”
