By now, young people scratching and clawing their way towards adulthood is a quintessential, clichéd story. The wide-eyed dreamer trying to make it in the big city is one of the hoariest tricks in the book, but Frances Ha is a welcome new variation on this theme, a striking and beautiful ode to youth and its many flaws. Headlined by Great Gerwig, Frances Ha is nothing short of a triumph, an endearing, unforced, and honest story of failures and frustrations.
We are living in a golden age of animation, yet so many people working at Hollywood’s studio-funded animation companies are content working in the realm of the familiar. Too frequently, new mainstream animated films are like a big bowl of soup, with countless flavors that you’ve tasted before tweaked only slightly to not be total carbon copies of something bigger and often better. Blue Sky’s latest, distributed by 20th Century Fox, is no different: Epic is pleasingly colorful and well animated. Unfortunately, it is immensely derivative and thus, only moderately charming some of the time.
All hail JJ Abrams, Emperor of the Nerds. Having taken over both the Star Trek and Wars franchises, he continues his blockbuster offensive with Star Trek Into Darkness, an already-contentious addition to Trek lore that engages with the series’ past, present and future. Former host and avid Trekkie Mariko McDonald joins Ricky, Edgar and Simon to tackle the new flick in both spoiler-free and spoiler-ful segments. As ever, you’ve been warned. Discussed: Quizno’s, space Pomeranians, international terrorism, and the reasoning behind Abrams’s Hollywood coup.
Stunning images from SNOWPIERCER
A ton of beautiful images from Won Kar Wai’s The Grandmaster