Co-written and directed by Van Ling, Cliffs of Freedom is an epic story during the Greek War for Independence against the Ottoman Empire in 1821. Within the story is a turbulent romance between a young Greek village girl and a conflicted Turkish officer.
Twenty-year-old Anna Christina, played by Tania Raymonde, is smitten by Colonel Tariq, played by Jan Uddin, a rising star in the Turkish army. He doubts his fellow citizens’ brutal methods of governing the Greeks. He spared the life of Anna on a cliff-top when she was a child.
The romance that follows years later is tragic for her family and village. Joining the forces and swearing revenge against the Turks, Anna joins the Greek rebellion and unintentionally becomes the symbol of the Greek resistance movement. She inspires her fellow citizens and attracts the wrath of the Turks. They placed a bounty on her head.
She thought she had left her feelings for Tarig behind. She faces the man who still loves her and wants to keep her safe but now carries the burden of capturing her. Their encounters and skirmishes inevitably lead to a tragic confrontation during a pivotal battle between the Greeks and Turks. It changes the course of history.
The movie also stars Raza Jaffrey, Patti LuPone, Christopher Plummer and Billy Zane.
The Sizzle Reel shows a special screening of the movie. We meet the director, the actors, and those who know about this time in history.
Directed by Jonathan Levine, Long Shot is a comedy about the pratfalls of politics and unrequited love.
The movie follows two unsuspecting people. Fred Flarsky, played by Seth Rogen, writes as a free-spirited journalist with an affinity for trouble. Charlotte Field, played by Charlize Theron, takes on the world as one of the most influential women. Smart, sophisticated, and accomplished, she’s a powerhouse diplomat with a talent for mostly everything.
Flarsky and Field share nothing in common, except that she was his babysitter and childhood crush. When Fred unexpectedly reconnects with Charlotte, he charms her with his self-deprecating humor and his memories of her youthful idealism. As she prepares to make a run for the Presidency, Charlotte impulsively hires Fred as her speechwriter, much to the dismay of her trusted advisors.
On unfamiliar ground, Fred learns he hasn’t a clue for her glamorous lifestyle in the limelight. All is not lost, opposites do attract and their unmistakable chemistry leads to a round-the-world romance and a series of unexpected and dangerous incidents.
Of course, how will the romantic story end with the need to please the public life as a politician? The title “Long Shot” is for Field’s campaign or Flarsky and her have a chance of making it as a couple in public life.
The rest of the cast includes Seth Rogen, Charlize Theron, O’Shea Jackson Jr., Andy Serkis, June Diane Raphael, Bob Odenkirk, and Alexander Skarsgard. Skarsgard is also starring in The Humingbird Project.
The trailer is cute but pulls out before we can savor the funny punch lines. It is the first trailer, so the second one, hopefully, shows more funny stuff worth watching.
The red band trailer plays pretty clean compared Rogen’s Good Boys red band trailer. Theron appears content and hilarious. The movie proves casting opposites attract.
Red Carpet interviews some times reveal insightful tidbits about actors working together. Theron is candid and speaks highly of Rogen intuitive comedy and supporting her comedic timing throughout production.
Rogen comes across conservative, but he is hilarious. He speaks will of Theron.
Chemistry is my first thought about the movie clip called “Dating.” Rogen definitely creates the chemistry in this clip.
This featurette shows how the two stars work together. They seem different in an inteview than in a movie clip like the one above.
The movie clip about her micro napping while standing up is funny. I don’t know anyone who does that, so it is kind of fun to watch. I laughed right at the end of the clip. Rogen is funny.
The next two clips sold me on this movie. Rogen is so host in his performance.
The next trailer is short but shows Rogen’s character as a fish out of water. I hope they don’t play too much on this during the movie. I am sure he will be redeemed because that makes an interesting and heartfelt story.
Tessa, played by Josephine Langford and directed by Jenny Gage, Anna Todd’s best-selling novel After comes to the silver screen in this soft-porn movie.
After the novel became a publishing sensation on the social storytelling platform Wattpad. As a movie, the visceral and inner thoughts might be hard to convey. The story follows Tessa, a good girl, a dedicated student, and a dutiful daughter.
She is also a loyal girlfriend to her high school sweetheart. When she enters her first semester in college with only positive and grand ideas for her future, her cocoon world opens up when she meets the dark and mysterious Hardin Scott, played by Hero Fiennes Tiffin.
Tessa is drawn to Hardin as a magnetic, brooding rebel who makes her question all she thought she knew about herself and what she wants out of life.
If you haven’t read the book, you can tell by the movie trailer that Hardin is a dark and tragic character – a naughty boy. The story makes going to college a whole new way of getting an education.
Do you recognize Hero Fiennes Tiffin? He played another bad boy in a top-rated franchise—the young Tom Riddle in the 6th Harry Potter movie.
The young-adult romance stars Peter Gallagher, Jennifer Beals, and Selma Blair. Shane Paul McGhie has a decent role and is starring with Taraji P. Henson inWhat Men Want.
It looks like Gage worked her way up in the film industry as a production assistant to a documentarian, and now her directorial debut with After.
The five movie clips are the story, and one has a theme song. Enjoy them while they last.
I include an interview with the author of the online and celebrated book. I don’t understand all the sites or terminology she uses to describe how the book After became an Internet sensation. Anna Todd seems low-key and calm about her success in bringing Tessa and Hardin together.
Written and directed by Kim Nguyen, The Hummingbird Project focuses on the ruthless drive in making billions of dollars in the digital world.
The story follows two cousins from New York. Vincent, played by Jesse Eisenberg, and Anton, played by Alexander Skarsgard, are trying to be game changers in the high-stakes game of High-Frequency Trading, which is computer-controlled trading with high-volume in a very short timespan. Winnings are measured in milliseconds.
The cousin’s dream is to build a straight fiber-optic cable line between Kansas and New Jersey, making them millions. But nothing is as easy as it seems on paper because of the cousin’s unforeseen stumbling blocks.
Anton is the brains, Vincent is the hustler, and together they push each other and everyone around them to the breaking point with their foolish and impractical adventure.
Constantly riding their backs and pushing them their old boss Eva Torres, played by Salma Hayek. She is a powerful, intoxicating and manipulative trader and she stops at nothing to come between them and beat them at their own game.
Nguyen is best known for writing and directing War Witch, which follows a child soldier coerced into a civil war in Africa and is claimed to be a witch.
Watch the movie trailer and feel the silliness and intensity of the movie.
Skarsgard is so good to watch on film. He takes on the role and becomes that person using nuances of tone and unspoken expressions. He stars in The Aftermath playing a German after WW II when his country is rebuilding. He is great in that role as well playing against Kiera Knightley.
The following clips tell the story in a roundabout way. The script movies along at a nice pace and the actors eat it up. The clip where he tells her what he is trying to achieve explains the reason for the title of the movie.
Directed by Tate Taylor, who brought us The Help, brings us a completely different genre – a horror movie. Ma follows Sue Ann, played by Octavia Spencer, as she appears friendly and welcomes all the teenagers to her house to party in the basement.
All fun and games don’t appear to be all that fun. Everybody’s welcome at Ma’s. But good luck getting home safe.
Sue Ann is a loner who keeps to herself in her quiet Ohio town. One day, she is asked by Maggie, played by Diana Slivers, a new teenager in town to buy some booze for her and her friends. Sue Ann takes advantage of unsuspecting teens and some younger friends.
She offers the kids the chance to avoid drinking and driving by hanging out in the basement of her home. But there are some house rules: One of the kids has to stay sober. Don’t curse. Never go upstairs. And call her “Ma.”
But as Ma’s hospitality starts to curdle into obsession, what began as a teenage dream turns into a terrorizing nightmare, and Ma’s place goes from the best place in town to the worst place on earth.
In the movie trailer, we see her hit and run a person that looks like a man or boy. Thinking about The Help where the unsuspecting housewife eats a pie made of shit from Spencer’s character, Taylor is not going to hold any bunches in this movie.
Ma also stars Juliette Lewis, Luke Evans, Missi Pyle, McKaley Miller, Corey Fogelmanis,, Gianni Paolo, and Dante Brown.
The screenplay is by Scotty Landes, who wrote the episodic Workaholics.
The movie clips show how evil or conniving Ma is with the kids. The interviews are spoilers, and we find out the mother, Lewis, confronts Ma. They confront each other and fight with some sort of explosion at the end.
The interviews with Taylor reveal his long-term relationship with Spencer. They were roommates for seven years. Slivers and Lewis’s interview sheds light on how the movie covers current social topics like bullying, social media, and underage drinking.
Directed by Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee, Frozen II’s first movie trailer is an epic animated feature. Keep scrolling down until you have seen all the trailers. The “Let It Go” theme plays in undertones throughout the trailer. It promotes hardship, adversary, and uniting as a powerful threesome against the enemy.
Disney tells us about Elsa, Anna, Kristoff, and Olaf’s journey far in the forest to discover the known truth about an ancient mystery of their kingdom. The movie is now streaming, and the Blu-ray and DVD are available.
The former cast is returning, with Evan Rachel Wood and Sterling K. Brown added to the cast list.
The second trailer is not all that different from the first. It’s incredible to watch Elsa handle the ocean with her frozen powers. That technique reminds me of Frozone in the Incredibles movies. Since both films were produced by Disney Studios, an educated guess is that the same animated team that made Frozone’s ice made Elsa’s.
The trailer shows the two sisters going on a journey to discover the truth by going to the past. The Stonehenge tells us it is a mystical journey—perhaps they go back in time like the popular book and TV series Outlander. We see Elsa’s powers are too strong.
The third trailer tells us the story. It is intriguing with all the mystical aspects of Elsa’s powers. It’s a serious story with humor by the quirky characters from the first movie that we found endearing.
Directed by Danny Boyle, Yesterday follows Jack Malik, played by Himesh Patel, who is the only guy who remembers the Beatles songs. He turns the world on its ear because he plays The Beatle songs and everyone thinks he wrote them.
Boyle is an Oscar winner for the popular movie Slumdog Millionaire. He also directed the first Trainspotting movie. Together with Richard Curtis, screenwriter of Four Weddings and a Funeral, Love Actually and Notting Hill, comes a rock-n-roll comedy about music, dreams, friendship, and the long and winding road that leads to the love of your life.
Jack is a struggling singer-songwriter in a tiny English seaside town whose dreams of fame are rapidly fading, despite the fierce devotion and support of his childhood best friend, Ellie, played by Lily James. After experiencing a totally off the wall bicycle accident during a mysterious global blackout, Jack wakes up to discover that The Beatles have never existed … and he finds himself with a very complicated problem.
Everyone says he wrote the songs by The Beatles. He can’t believe how fast he becomes super-famous. Performing songs by the greatest band in history to a world that has never heard them, and with a little help from his steel-hearted American agent, Debra, played by Kate McKinnon.
But as his star rises, he risks losing Ellie — the one person who always believed in him. With the door between his old life and his new closing, Jack will need to get back to where he once belonged and prove that all you need is love.
Yesterday looks like a great movie. Teaming up Boyle and Curtis is a dynamite formula that just might draw a large box office and give the both of them accolades they deserve.
The interview with Richard Curtis and Ed Sheeran is spectacular. Curtis is one of the best romantic-comedy writers ever. It is so good to see him in this interview.
The featurette show the whole spectrum of the movie. It looks like so much fun to watch.
The next four clips takes on the whirlwind trip of what happens when everyone except Jack remembers The Beatles. Cute, funny, and irrestiable is the best way to describe this movie.
The movie featurette is so much fun to watch because you get to see how Himesh prepared himself to sing The Beatles’ songs.
The final trailer arrived on the streets and it looks amazing. The problem is the trailer tells us the story but we have to see the movie to know what happens at the end. That will be the toughest – the third act. Richard Curtis writes endearing third acts with the story truly ending. Meaning no cliffhangers or open-ended finalises where the audience decides what happens.
The featurette shows us how Curtis and Boyle worked together to make an ideal romantic/comedy movie.
Directed by Chris Addison, The Hustle is a hilarious movie with two dynamite comedic actresses. The comedy stars Anne Hathaway and Rebel Wilson as scam artists. Wilson plays a low-life scam artist while Hathaway places a high-class scam artist. They team up to take down the dirty rotten men who have wronged them.
Addison credits include writing and producing tons of episodic television shows like Veep, Dr. Who, and The Thick of It.
The second trailer shows more hilarity to the story. These two women are complete opposites and make situations funny.
The movie clip shows the conflict between the two women. One wants to be taught how to be a high-end con artist while the other doesn’t want to share her secrets.
It looks like the two ladies are a team. They are competing to see who is the first one to swindle $500,000 from a man. The music in this clip is interesting because it seems like it’s there to keep the scene interesting. Seeing Hathaway as an English snob is a new character for her.
Directed by Dome Karukoski, Tolkien follows the formative years of J.R.R. Tolkien, played by Nicholas Hoult. The movie explores the orphaned author as he finds friendship, love and artistic inspiration among a group of fellow outcasts at school.
Tolkien falls in love with Edith Bratt, played by Lilly Collins.
This takes him into the outbreak of World War I, which threatens to tear the “fellowship” apart. All of these experiences would inspire Tolkien to write his famous Middle-Earth novels.
Dome Karukoski is from Finland and has directed several movies and television series in Finland.
The rest of the cast includes Laura Donnelly of Outlander, Colm Meaney, Anthony Boyle, Patrick Gibson, Tom Glynn-Carney, Craig Roberts, Genevieve O’Reilly, and Pam Ferris.
The second trailer is much better and gives a flavor of adventure. The feeling of his fellowship with his boyhood friends is strong. I am curious, though, about who Donnelly plays in the movie. We don’t see her in the trailers yet; her character is not listed.
The music is powerful in this trailer, giving the sense of adventure and conquer.
Two interviews are posted with the director and lead actor. I am impressed with how the director created the fellowship on the set and how Hoult researched Tolkien’s life during the time this movie takes place – such a poignant time in his life.
The featurette tells us nothing about the story, but the two main actors talk about Tolkien’s influence on them in general. Collin talks about her favorite scene relating to the ring. We all know how important the call is in Tolkien’s stories.
I saw a movie clip that showed a whimsical scene, which is so delightful. I tried to share it with you, but the studios blocked it. I am mentioning the clip because it is an adorable scene illustrating how Tolkien worked his imagination. The woman he loved encouraged him to tell his fantasy stories.
The movie is also a love story about a writer getting inspiration from the one he loves. The next featurette says it best.
The more I see about this movie, the more interested I am in seeing it in movie theaters. The following two features tell what the film covers and how it relates to Tolkien, the writer.
A remake is a remake. Directed by Lars Klevberg, Child’s Play arrives again with the studio saying, “A contemporary re-imagining of the 1988 horror classic. “
I guess horror fans, who love Chuckie, will follow Karen, played by Aubrey Plaza, a single mother. She gifts her son Andy, played by Gabriel Bateman, a Buddy doll, unaware of its more sinister nature.
Lars Klevberg directed Polaroid and Tyler Burton Smith wrote the screenplay. Smith’s credits include Kung Fury 2 and Quantum Break. Never heard of them.
Seeing a doll hold a kitchen knife is funny, if not cheesy. The movie is for horror fans who are obsessed with Chuckie.
The following trailer shows Andy has no friends because he moved to a new neighborhood. The app called Buddi sets the pace of a horrific doll that comes after these people who live in the area.
Now, Andy has friends who are helping him destroy Chuckie. I chuckled at some of the scenes. It’s pretty funny to see a doll drag with a kitchen knife.
The featurette is funny with the producers saying they had to get Chuckie right. Chuckie is a horror icon, and you don’t want to create a doll that looks cheesy. Then, here comes Cheesy Chuckie. All kidding aside, the fact that they used six different electronic dolls to portray Chuckie is impressive.
The featurette “Meet the Cast” needs no introduction because you meet the cast and understand how their characters play into the horror movie.
