Join us every week for a trip into the weird and wonderful world of trailers. Whether it’s the first teaser for the latest instalment in your favourite franchise, an obscure preview for a strange indie darling, whether it’s good, bad, ugly or just plain weird – your favourite pop culture baristas are there to tell you what they think.
A coming-of-age story… in the format of an indie pixel-art point-and-click adventure? Well, Perfect Tides did a great job of this, so why not check out its follow-up, Perfect Tides: Station to Station, which Matt liked a hell of a lot?
From Perfect Tides‘ early 2000s to the heyday of snarky action cinema: in this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees, Julie looked back at the genre’s biggest titles (so does the post count as a stealth addition to our Summer of Genre?).
And what else is in this week’s trailer grab bag?
Mege: Can you watch a movie about dementia and not think about Sarah Polley‘s brilliant Away from Her (2006) or Florian Zeller‘s The Father (2020)? Probably not. Queen at Sea seems to focus on the family who is left adrift about what to do and how to relate to a family member that is no longer the same person. Acting in their best interest means different things to different family members. Horror vacui is very real.
Matt: I like it when an actor who can pull off the charming, attractive leading man thing with ease plays something that sidesteps the clichés of leading man roles. This certainly seems to be what Robert Pattinson is doing in Primetime, which also looks to share more than just a few genes with the queasy 2014 satirical thriller Nightcrawler, in which another charming, attractive leading man played against type to fantastic effect.
Matt: The wonderfully named Niki Lindroth von Bahr was responsible for the sad, funny, poignant The Burden (2017), in which a bunch of stop-motion animated animals sing in anticipation of the end of the world. Which, it seems, is not miles away from the theme of Lindroth von Bahr’s new depressing delight: The End. Perhaps we’re all animated animals just waiting for some final disaster to strike – and sensing, deep down, that this disaster has already arrived.
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 