Written and directed by Graham Moore, the Oscar-winning writer of The Imitation Game, The Outfit is a gripping thriller that follows an expert tailor, Mark Rylance. He must outwit a dangerous group of mobsters in order to survive a fateful night.
Also starring in the movie are Dylan O’Brien, Zoey Deutch, Johnny Flynn, Nikki Amuka-Bird and Simon Russell Beale.
Directed by Robert Eggers, who wrote the screenplay with Sjon, The Northman follows a Viking prince, Amleth, played by Alexander Skarsgard. Amleth’s mission is to revenge his father’s murder, which becomes his journey from a child to an adult.
The movie takes place in Iceland during the turn of the tenth century.
Young Prince Amleth, played by Oscar Novak, is on the cusp of becoming a man when his father, played by Ethan Hawke, is brutally murdered by his uncle, Claes Bang, who kidnaps the boy’s mother, played by Nicole Kidman. Fleeing his island kingdom by boat, the child vows revenge.
Two decades later, Amleth, played by Alexander Skarsgard, is a Viking berserker raiding Slavic villages, where a seeress, played by Bjork, reminds him of his vow to avenge his father, save his mother, and kill his uncle.
Traveling on a slave ship to Iceland, Amleth infiltrates his uncle’s farm with the help of Olga, played by Anya Taylor-Joy, an enslaved Slavic woman — and sets out to honor his vow.
Eggers also directed The Witch, Anya Taylor-Joy’s first movie, The Lighthouse, comes an immersive Viking epic featuring an ensemble cast including Willem Dafoe.
“This is a big, muscular adventure, grander in scale than his previous films,” says Willem Dafoe, who co-starred in The Lighthouse and played the court jester Heimir the Fool in The Northman. “But Robert approaches it with the same kind of detail, creating sets, props and even shots that are made with such precision and care that the pretending on the part of the audience becomes effortless. Inside each shot of this movie, there is a rhythm and a story and a dynamic that’s beautiful on its own. Everything’s there on (the) screen; you don’t simply enter Eggers’ worlds — you get folded into them.”
Directed by Ridley Scott, The Last Duel follows a true story about France’s last sanctioned trial by combat. The story originates from Eric Jager’s book of the same title.
In 1386, Jean de Carrouges, a knight, played by Matt Damon, and Jacques Le Gris, a squire, played by Adam Driver came to blows to the death after Marguerite, the knight’s wife, played by Jodie Comer, accuses Le Gris of raping her, which he denies.
Watch the trailer, and you’ll see Affleck playing Count Pierre d’Alencon, donning blond hair.
If Marguerite’s husband dies, she ends up burning at stake for perjury. The winner of the duel ends up as divine providence.
According to the New York Times article, the movie forms into three chapters based on a video interview with the three writers of the movie version, Damon, Affleck and Nicole Holofcener: Carrouges story, Le Gris story and Marguerite story. The men, according to Damon, took fastidious notes while women did not because they had no public respect nor held any kind of power. Holofcener wrote Marguerite’s perspective, made of whole cloth, the book lacked the wife’s perspective.
Directed by Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, Summer of Soul presents a powerful and transporting documentary—part music film, part historical record created around an epic event that celebrated Black history, culture, and fashion.
Over six weeks in the summer of 1969, just one hundred miles south of Woodstock, The Harlem Cultural Festival was filmed in Mount Morris Park — now Marcus Garvey Park.
Never seen footage and largely forgotten — until now. The movie shines a light on the history of our spiritual well-being. It stands as a testament to the healing power of music during times of unrest, both past and present.
The feature includes never-before-seen concert performances by Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone, Sly & the Family Stone, Gladys Knight & the Pips, Mahalia Jackson, B.B. King, The 5th Dimension, and more.
Directed by the late Luke Holland, Final Account is his interviews of nearly 300 elderly perpetrators and witnesses of the Holocaust from the Nazi side.
Such an important documentary that shows how the Nazis viewed their rise over Europe and the atrocities they allowed to happen. Doing nothing is still a transgression, and this movie received praises from prominent newspapers worldwide.
Final Account premiered posthumously three months after the death of Holland in June 2020.
Written by Natasa Drakulic and directed by Predrag Antonijevic, Dara of Jasenovac follows a little girl named Dara, played by Biljana Cekic, during the Holocaust in the Balkans to the infamous extermination camp complex Jasenovac — coined as Balkan’s Auschwitz. The story takes place in the Nazi-occupied Croatian Ustasha regime “NDH” in former Yugoslavia during WWII. They are told through the eyes of Dara, who the Nazis sent as a child during the Holocaust, ruled by sadistic camp commander Maks Luburic until the liberation. It is the first modern WWII movie that takes place in or shows the NDH-era camp.
It begins during the summer of 1942 when the family of twelve-year-old Dara is taken away and separated into two concentration camps. She witnessed all the horrors of the Ustashe regime. After they kill her brother and mother, she tries to save her younger brother’s life, hoping that her father is still alive.
Probably one of the most overlooked parts of history, Germans do not run Jasenovac, but the fascist Ustase runs the complex. He brutally murdered Jews, Serbs and Roma people, which included many women and children. As unspeakable atrocities unfold, Dara must summon tremendous courage to protect her infant brother from a terrible fate. At the same time, she safeguards her own survival and plots a precarious path toward freedom. The movie is the Serbian selection for the Academy Awards for Best International Feature.
The movie has English subtitles, and the rest of the talented cast includes Vuk Kostic, Natasa Ninkovic, and Nikolina Jelisavac.
The filmed version of the original Broadway production of Hamilton combines the best elements of live theater, film, and streaming to bring the cultural phenomenon to homes around the world for a thrilling, once-in-a-lifetime experience.
With book, music, and lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda and direction by Thomas Kail, Hamilton is inspired by the book Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow.
Featuring a score that blends hip-hop, jazz, R&B, and Broadway, Hamilton has taken the story of American founding father Alexander Hamilton and created a revolutionary moment in theatre. This musical has had a profound impact on culture, politics, and education.
Hamilton stars: Daveed Diggs as Marquis de Lafayette/Thomas Jefferson; Renée Elise Goldsberry as Angelica Schuyler; Jonathan Groff as King George; Christopher Jackson as George Washington; Jasmine Cephas Jones as Peggy Schuyler/Maria Reynolds; Lin-Manuel Miranda as Alexander Hamilton; Leslie Odom, Jr. as Aaron Burr; Okieriete Onaodowan as Hercules Mulligan/James Madison; Anthony Ramos as John Laurens/Philip Hamilton; and Phillipa Soo as Eliza Hamilton.
“I’m incredibly grateful that the world will be able to see this. Theater is a communal artistic experience, and this film is a love letter to live theater,” Lin-Manuel Miranda.
Capturing the essence of the Broadway show were six camera positions with six camera operators. Additionally, there were three fixed camera positions, one dolly and a Steadicam, a crane and two angles capturing each performance. There was one overhead camera and one at the rear of the stage, strategically hidden in a brick wall. The Steadicam, crane, and dolly were used on the scene the day the audience was not present. They shot 13 or 14 numbers from the 46 numbers in the show.
Director Thomas Kail describes directing Hamilton for the screen, “This film celebrates the work of our extraordinary designers.”
Offering the example with one of the most moving scenes, he says, “Satisfied changes time and plays with the time dynamic. The show doesn’t proceed in a linear fashion. It’s elliptical… it’s not continuous time, but it’s always moving forward, and Satisfied is the first moment in our show where we stop time.”
The song is also doing more, “What we are doing in that song is setting up the final duel… we’re setting up the bullet, and what we’re able to do on film is be much more subjective with the camera, so it feels a little more like we’re going inside her brain. The cut pattern is quite accelerated, and the camera angles are quite varied, and we did that because we wanted to also break the form in the cinematic language in the same way that we break the form in the theatrical language in the theater.”
Written by and starring Tom Hanks and directed by Aaron Schneider, Greyhound follows captain Ernest Krause, played by Hanks, in the early days of WWII. Krause commands an international convoy of 37 Allied ships as his first command of a U.S. destroyer.
They cross the treacherous North Atlantic while hotly pursued by wolf packs of Nazi U-boats. The story originates from actual events and the novel The Good Shepherd by C. S. Forester.
Also starring in the movie is Elisabeth Shue, Rob Morgan, and Stephen Graham.
Make sure you watch the trailer because the movie is intense and visceral.
Written and directed by Wes Miller, Hell on the Border follows the story of Bass Reeves, played by David Gyasi. The movie appears to be an action-packed Western about Reeves, who was the first black U.S. marshal in the Wild West.
Having escaped from slavery after the Civil War, Reeves arrives in Arkansas seeking a job with the law. To prove himself, he must hunt down a deadly outlaw, played by Frank Grillo, with the help of a grizzled journeyman, played by Ron Perlman.
As Reeves chases the criminal deeper into the Cherokee Nation, he must not only dodge bullets in hopes of earning his star but severe discrimination and ends up cementing his place as a cowboy legend.
The cast includes Chris Mullinax, Jaqueline Fleming, Rudy Youngblood, Nick Loren, Marshall Teague, Gianni Capaldi, and Zahn McClarnon.
Jack London’s literary classic takes a new turn in the adaptation of The Call of the Wild with live-action and animation animals.
The movie is streaming on Amazon, and here is a featurette about the star of the film, Buck. The man who plays him is with Cirque du Soleil. Watch this clip and see how well he acts like Buck.
Directed by Chris Sanders and starring Harrison Ford as John Thornton, the vivid story comes is well-known. We follow Buck, a big-hearted dog whose blissful domestic life is turned upside down when he is suddenly uprooted from his California home and transplanted to the exotic wilds of the Alaskan Yukon during the Gold Rush of the 1890s.
As the newest rookie on a mail delivery sled team–and later its leader–Buck experiences the adventure of a lifetime, ultimately finding his real place in the world and becoming his own master.
Sanders helms the movie as a live-action and animation hybrid, employing cutting edge visual effects and animation technology to render the animals in the film as fully photorealistic, emotionally, and authentic characters.
Sanders credits include Lilo & Stitch and How to Train Your Dragon. He holds quite a repertory of writing credits, including The Lion King, Mulan, and Beauty and the Beast. However, Michael Green wrote the script based on London’s novel and Egerton Ryerson Young’s source material.
The cast also includes Dan Stevens, Omar Sy, Karen Gillan, Bradley Whitford, and Colin Woodell.
Ford is a natural in this movie clip, an amazing actor.