The movie industry has two especially busy times – there is the flurry of activity towards the end of the year, when holiday movies and potential award-winners come out, and then there is the highly anticipated summer movie season as well. Lake Effect film contributor Dave Luhrssen gives a preview of what's to come and his recommendations:
1. Ex Machina - "One of the best, maybe the best science fiction film I've seen in many years...It's a look at a lot of different things including the meaning of what it is to be human. I mean, you can't get into a heavier science fiction topic than that. Done very well, visually stunning, good acting - I just can't rave enough about it, and it won't receive as big of an audience - at least on initial release - as it deserves."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bggUmgeMCdc
2. Trainwreck - "It'll be a date film, and maybe one that women will lead the men into."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MxnhBPoIx4
Sequels - The Inevitable and the Needless Reboot
3. Pitch Perfect 2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bh4mvJ5jUg
4. Mission Impossible: Rouge Nation - "Geopolitics aside, people will go see it to see Tom Cruise hanging from the side of an airbus cargo plane as it takes off."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOW_azQbOjw
5. Jurassic World - "I put it into the 'potentially needless reboot'...It could be good, sometimes these things work."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFinNxS5KN4
6. Terminator Genesys
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62E4FJTwSuc
7. Mad Max: Fury Road - "It's been a dormant franchise for about fifteen years, and the Australian director of it seemed determined before he died to make one last one...I think that the first Mad Max movie really did launch a whole cycle of often very interesting post-apocalyptic survivor movies. It wasn't the first movie that dealt with that, but I think it really kind of accelerated the move in popular culture toward those kinds of representations on film of a future we wouldn't want to live in."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QoYlqdBtRSw
8. Fantastic 4 - "Hollywood goes back to the tablet again and sketches out a new version, yet another origin story for superheroes. We just can't get enough of that apparently."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POBI7OhGB18
9. Inside Out - "The director of this movie was the director of Up and Monsters Inc., which I though were two of the finest Pixar films...so [this] looks extremely promising."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=seMwpP0yeu4
10. Irrational Man - "[Woody Allen's] stock continues to be very high. He can attract some of the most important cast members of any given time and not pay them millions of dollars either. Stars really want to be in a Woody Allen film because there is a prestige to doing that."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hP8mPkyBntw
11. Mr. Holmes - "One of the more interesting examples of the survival of that character...Sherlock Holmes appears to be deathless."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qng3t9RZk6Q
Dave Luhrssen is arts and entertainment editor at the Shepherd Express weekly newspaper, author of its I Hate Hollywood blog.
