“In a premise not unlike a magical, Merrie Olde Englande version of Borat 2, Tristan decides to to haul his comely female cargo into town to barter the affections of his petulant blond target.”
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Bird Box and A Quiet Place are not the only two oddly similar films to be released in the same year. Cast your minds back to Friends with Benefits and No Strings Attached (2011), A Bugs Life and Antz (1998), or White House Down and Olympus Has Fallen (2013). Surely no coincidence? In fact, there’s a name for this Hollywood phenomenon where two separate production companies release almost identical films within the same year: ‘twin films’.
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“For its young (and vast) audiences, Shrek actually shouldered the same role of moral guidance which it satirized in fairytales—and perhaps the heavy dose of world-bitten irony in the storytelling leaked into its message of self-acceptance.”
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“The 110 minute-deluge of non-stop stimulation lurches constantly between registers: hallucinatory sights and sounds, grotesquerie, extremes of acting style. Like a fairground ride, the disorientation is part of the fun, but also an involuntary, physical experience.”
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“With its blend of outdoorsy antics and simpering sentimentality, Jojo Rabbit proffers a twee vision of everyday Nazism Germany that somehow centres on the 'good ones’.”
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“Contemporary viewers may find themselves identifying a little too closely with downtrodden protagonist Sam Lowry, seeking his escape from the surveillance capitalist hellscape in an audio-visual dreamland of yesteryear.”
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“The gaunt, puppy-eyed protagonist of Nightcrawler (2014) is no more than a content purveyor of TV news, a regular guy descending to ever ghastlier depths, not at the behest of conventional incentives such as love, revenge, or fear, but of modern hustle culture. Jake Gyllenhaal’s Lou Bloom works as a ’stringer’, or freelance cameraman, hunting down the grisliest crime scenes in LA to shoot, sell, and even, perhaps, stage.”
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“Armed with the non-negotiable terms that the film would be Chinese language, and feature an entirely Asian and Asian-American cast, Wang was able to steer clear of soapiness or inauthenticity, in favour of an intimate mix of farce and melancholy.”
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