Category: Country: US
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Roar. Dir. Noel Marshall. Film Consortium, Filmways Pictures. 1981
“No Animals were harmed in the making of this film. 70 cast and crew members were”. A film tagline that instantly grabs your attention. The Drafthouse re-release in 2015 coined this moniker for the 1981 box-office blunder[1] “Roar”, which lacks plot, conventionality and, as the curious tagline suggests: a lack of safety measures for the actors…
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The Darjeeling Limited. Dir. Wes Anderson. Searchlight Pictures. 2007
Animals Articulating Emotion and Inspiring Growth in The Darjeeling Limited In an attempt to remedy their stagnant relationship, three brothers, Francis (Owen Wilson), Peter (Adrien Brody) and Jack (Jason Schwartzman) board a train travelling around India. Each brother harbours his own inner turmoil which contributes to the complex relationship between the brothers and is often…
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Nope. Dir. Jordan Peele. Universal Pictures. 2022
Jordan Peele’s latest film nope follows siblings OJ and Emerald Haywood in the aftermath of their father’s unexpected death. The siblings ‘We ain’t got no more problems’ is the foreboding line said by Otis Haywood moments before his untimely death and the supernatural haunting begins on the Haywood family ranch. Jordan Peele’s latest film Nope…
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The Little Prince. Dir. Mark Osborne. Paramount Pictures. 2015
“One sees clearly only with the heart. What is essential is invisible to the eye.” In The Little Prince the depiction of foxes defies conventional animality as they generally symbolise perfidy. But The Fox here is characterised as holding pragmatic intellectual power. He is a teacher but does not hold any other forms of power,…
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The Future. Dir. Miranda July. Roadside Attractions (US). 2011
The title of the film, The Future, is emblematic of the very thing the characters fear, what is the unknown. July certainly lets the cat out of the bag as she reveals her inner monologue through the narration of an anthropomorphic feline. The cat plays a central role in the drama, as it begins with…
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An American Tail. Dir. Don Bluth. Universal Pictures.1986
An American Tail tracks the adventures of Fievel Mousekewitz a brave (and reckless) little mouse, his Russian-Jewish family, and their treacherous journey from Russia to New York in the search for the American Dream that will put some distance between them and cats… or so they thought. The film tells a story within a story,…
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Annihilation. Dir. Alex Garland. Netflix. 2018.
“It’s not destroying. It’s creating something new”. Annihilation, by definition, is something “Completely destroyed; nothingness, non-existence”, Yet Alex Garland’s 2018 film entirely rethinks what it really means to be obliterated. Annihilation follows the perilous journey of Lena (Natalie Portman) and four other female scientists into a mysterious, expanding biome named ‘The Shimmer’, as an attempt to discover…
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Mr Popper’s Penguins. Dir. Mark Waters. 20th Century Fox. 2011.
Jim Carrey and Penguins. It does not get any better. Think Beethoven but with Penguins. Try to spot the difference between the CGI penguins and the real ones. Grab the popcorn. As you can surmise from the title, the film details Mr Popper who is played by Jim Carrey and his hijinks with the penguin…
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Big Miracle. Dir. Ken Kwapis. Universal Pictures. 2012.
”And we ache for them cause they are so much like us”. Rachel Kramer. The film Big Miracle is a drama directed by Ken Kwapis and distributed by Universal Pictures in 2012. It is based on the book Freeing the Whales written by Tom Rose in 1989, which narrates the 1988 Operation Breakthrough to rescue…
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The Book of Life. Dir Jorge R. Gutierrez. 20th Century Fox. 2014
“I’m allergic to dying!“ -Pepe Rodriguez 20th Century Fox’s, 2014, animated feature film, The Book of Life, follows two best friends, Manolo and Joaquin, who are in love with the same woman, Maria, our independent and fiercely empathetic heroine. The married gods, Xibalba and La Muerte, exchange bets on who will win her heart first,…