No one has ever accused Luc Besson of being a master filmmaker – despite gems like Léon: the Professional, La Femme Nikita and The Fifth Element. Part of that is because he likes to juxtapose things that are utterly real with things that are utterly ridiculous. Usually, that means putting a down-to-earth old school spy next to someone who looks like Emma Peel, or creating an utterly fantastical world and making the lead a real-guy cabbie. With Lucy, he takes three genres – an intense drug thriller, an over-the-top action movie, and a psychedelic would-be philosophical statement – and crams them together in unexpected ways. Somehow, it works.
With vampires of the monstrous, non-sparkly variety about to make a comeback on FX’s The Strain, it’s interesting to discover a trailer for Dracula Untold – Legendary Picture’s first big release in partnership with Universal Pictures. It’s a tale of sacrifice, as Dracula surrenders his humanity for the power to save his family and his people.
It looks like it could be either a brilliant reimagining or an utter flop. Either way, you can check out the trailer following the jump. Dracula Untold hopes to pump other people’s blood into theaters on October 17th.
Seth MacFarlane plays a guy who gets shot and dumped by his girlfriend on the same day in his Western spoof, A Million Ways to Die in the West. I’m not sure why he thought a Western would be the way to go for his second movie – and the first in which he stars – but it turns out to pretty entertaining for about ninety minutes. Too bad it’s 115 minutes long.
One of last year’s unexpected hits, The Purge – set in a U.S. where once a year, for twelve hours, anything goes including murder – has spawned a sequel. The trailer for The Purge: Anarchy has just been released and it looks as unsettling as its progenitor.
Check it out after the jump. The Purge: Anarchy opens July 20th.
Universal Pictures chairwoman Donna Langley came to the CinemaCon party ready to rock and roll. The audience was thrilled to see brand new trailers for most of their upcoming slate of films. We were treated to sneak peaks from several highly anticipated films from 2015 including a very surprising first look at Fifty Shades of Grey. While the presentation lacked star power and sizzle, it did have a lot of meat for us to chew on. We even got a surprise appearance by Angelina.
Richard Curtis is responsible for such films as Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill and Love Actually – romantic dramedies that detail burgeoning relationships that work, as often as not, because the people in them are flawed. For About Time, Curtis adds a very limited form of time travel to the mix in a low key, unsurprisingly affecting movie that will provoke a bit of laughter, a few tears and the feeling of almost two hours well spent.
The sequel to one of the oddest comic book satires (from the satirical superhero comic of the same name), Kick-Ass 2 remains as faithful to the details of the comic as the original, but wildly misses on the tone. It’s a case of a well-directed film that features some bravura performances but loses its way in attempting to mix the inspired grotesqueries of the comic with a tone of gritty reality that turns it into a descent into over-the-top action/superhero cliché.
Edgar Wright’s The World’s End might the final entry in the so-called Cornetto Trilogy, but there’s a lot more than that going on in it. Wright and stars Simon Pegg and Nick Frost talk about some of the movie’s themes in a new featurette, Not What It Used To Be (as in ‘The future…’).
Check it out after the jump. The World’s End premieres on August 23rd.
