Cars 3
Lightning McQueen is back on the big screen, but he’s not a rookie anymore. Blindsided by a new generation of blazing-fast racers, the legendary Piston-Cup champion finds himself suddenly pushed out of the sport he loves. While Lightning is still the same self-assured, determined and fun-loving race car audiences fell in love with, his confidence is being tested by the new cars on the track. Enter Cruz Ramirez. Tasked with getting Lightning McQueen back on track after a devastating setback, Cruz isn’t shy. Her training style is high-tech, enthusiastic and steadfast – she’s not afraid to apply a little tough love. But there’s more to Cruz than meets the eye. Cars 3 pays homage to Nascar with four characters based on real-life stock car racing legends.
Says screenwriter Kiel Murray, “I think what will really resonate with audiences – especially adults – is this idea of finding meaning as we age, finding a way to be valuable in every phase of our lives, and giving back to the next generation in a way we don’t ever think about when we’re just getting started.”
“It’s kind of a timeless story in sports,” says screenwriter Mike Rich. “We’ve seen it with so many athletes – whether it’s Michael Jordon or Peyton Manning, Wayne Gretzky or Misty May-Treanor. The thing that’s unique to athletes is that they’re thirty-something years old when they retire. They still have the rest of their lives to think about. We asked Jeff Gordon about it and he said, “I was just afraid that I would never find anything else that I could do as well. They feel this gaping hole.”
Directed by Fee (storyboard artist Cars, Cars 2), from a story by Fee, Ben Queen (TV’s Powerless), Eyal Podell (actor, Code Black) and Jonathon E. Stewart (Doing Time, short), the screenplay was penned by Kiel Murray (Cars), Bob Peterson (Up, Finding Nemo) and Mike Rich (Secretariat, The Rookie).
Directed by Jon Gunn and written by Brian Bird, based on a true story that inspired the 1998 book of the same name by Lee Strobel.
This contemporary fairy tale revolves around the most unlikely of friendships between a reclusive, agoraphobic young woman (Jessica Brown Findlay) with dreams of being a children’s book author and a curmudgeonly old widower (Tom Wilkinson), set against the backdrop of a beautiful garden in the heart of London. Bella Brown is a beautifully quirky young woman who dreams of writing and illustrating a successful children’s book. Despite her abandonment as a child, the all-consuming OCD, the unfulfilled dream, her awful boss at the library and her paralysing fear of flora and fauna, Bella is down but not out. She has a spark, an edge, a talent and a voice that we can feel from the get go. This girl has a preternatural survival instinct, having been found in the middle of winter in the middle of Hyde Park as a babe. When Bella is forced by her landlord to deal with her neglected garden or face eviction, she meets her nemesis, match and mentor in Alfie Stephenson, a cantankerous, loveless, rich old man who lives next door and is an amazing horticulturalist.
Says writer-director Simon Aboud: “I’m very glad people call it a modern-day fairy tale. That’s what I set out to achieve. But, I was very careful to make the film seem timeless and at the same time to ground in a reality. Which it’s meant to be London today, but I didn’t put any computers or mobile phones in there…. I deliberately took away the things like cars, buses; I took away a lot of that. If you go through it very carefully you’ll realise the bus she gets on is modern-day where she goes is modern-day. I think, one part of fairy tale telling is the ability to suspend belief, right. So, there’s a point I present them to you that these things are possible. But over the course of 100 minutes they hopefully, fingers crossed, take on the air of being slightly magical.”
When a solitary assassin’s (Sam Worthington) conscience proves impregnable high-octane thriller, he finds himself rallying against his orders, protecting the young woman (Odeya Rush), he was hired to kill. With both now marked for death, they form an uneasy alliance. As the hitman drags the weight of his sins behind him and the young woman is forced to grow in spite of her situation, the pair are relentlessly pursued across Europe, their only hope of survival to expose those responsible for brutally murdering her family and bring them to justice. But with the cost of killing laying heavy on their shoulders, even if they survive, their souls may not.
“In my opinion, the best thrillers are the ones where the audience is thinking, no matter what the character does, ‘yeah, I could do that, in that situation, I’d do that’. They seem to be doing the smartest thing every step of the way,” says director Jonathan Mostow.
With its subversive take on the genre, The Hunter’s Prayer is a modern action thriller, driven more by character development than derivative set pieces. For Sam Worthington, it was always about seeking the truth. “Action movies are normally: stand there, blow shit up, shoot the gun, run. It’s never normally why,” he says. “Would you really want to pull your gun out at this point? What’s the emotional state you’re in? I’ve never experienced that in any action movie I’ve done. When all the bombs and the bells and whistles are going off, what’s going on in these two people’s hearts?”
Directed by Jonathan Mostow, The Hunter’s Prayer was written by John Brancato, Michael Ferris, Paul Leyden, Oren Moverman, based on the novel by Kevin Wignall.
Five best friends (Scarlett Johansson, Kate McKinnon, Jillian Bell, Ilana Glazer, Zoë Kravitz) from college reunite 10 years later for a wild bachelorette weekend in Miami. Their hard partying takes a hilariously dark turn when they accidentally kill a male stripper. Amid the craziness of trying to cover it up, they’re ultimately brought closer together when it matters most.
“This movie might seem to be about friends who find themselves in a not-so-average bachelorette party through a series of very over-the-top events, but the movie is really about friendship,” says Scarlett Johansson, who expresses her comedy chops in Rough Night. “We often can take for granted the people that know us the best… This movie is a sort of cautionary tale about taking that for granted – and also, it’s a celebration of that kind of deep friendship. Underneath this wild, R-rated comedy is a movie with a very warm heart about friendship.”
The director, co-writer, and a producer of the film, Lucia Aniello, says she was reflecting on how the formative friendships of her life had changed over time, and that inspired the film. “It’s based on so many relationships that I have had, the feelings that I have with certain people from my past,” she explains. “It’s about figuring out how your past fits into your present and your future.”
This black comedy was directed by Lucia Aniello in her directorial debut, and written by Aniello and Paul W. Downs.
A cinematic journey through the great chapels and museums of Florence, Rome and the Vatican, to the print and drawing rooms of Europe, to explore Michelangelo’s tempestuous life. The film goes in search of a greater understanding of this charismatic and enigmatic figure, both through his relationships with his contemporaries and his on-going artistic legacy.
Bold, breathless and wickedly fun, this electrifying action comedy tells of an arms deal that goes spectacularly and explosively wrong. Acclaimed filmmaker Ben Wheatley (Kill List, High Rise) propels the audience head-on into quite possibly the most epic shootout ever seen on film as he crafts a spectacular parody — and biting critique — of the insanity of gun violence. Everyone’s got a gun, and absolutely no one is in control. Set in a colourful yet gritty 1970s Boston, Free Fire opens with Justine (Oscar winner, Brie Larson), a mysterious American businesswoman, and her wise-cracking associate Ord (Armie Hammer). It was directed by Ben Wheatley, from a screenplay by Wheatley, who wrote the script with his wife and writing partner, Amy Jump.
Says Wheatley: “I wanted characters in this film, but I didn’t want to have normal, stock, kind of, goodies and baddies or kind of, like, American crime stuff. Because it wasn’t that. It’s been done so much. They seemed very trope-y, and kind of generic, so I wanted a set of characters that would have real lives and real backgrounds and real stakes, you know? And so, the idea of people coming to America to specifically buy guns, that felt like a… it felt more interesting than your off-the-peg criminal types.”
The story of an atheist journalist who gets upset when his wife converts to Christianity, so he decides to investigate Christianity in the hopes of debunking it.
In 1980, Lee Strobel’s (Mike Vogel) award-winning, investigative reporting earns him a promotion to legal editor at the Chicago Tribune. Things at home aren’t going nearly as well. His wife Leslie’s (Erika Christensen) newfound faith in Christ compels Lee to utilise his journalistic and legal training to try and disprove the claims of Christianity, pitting his resolute atheism against her growing faith.
It was directed by Jon Gunn and written by Brian Bird, based on a true story that inspired the 1998 book of the same name by Lee Strobel.
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