12 Years a Slave is an award-winning emotional roller coaster, which sees a free man become a slave in the deep south of the United States.
Set in 1841 and living in New York with his wife and two children, making a living as a violist, Solomon Northup thinks he is about to play an out of town gig, only to be drugged and sold into slavery. Through bravery and co-operation, Solomon fights for survival but that doesn’t always get him in the good books of his master. After meeting a Canadian by chance, Solomon’s chances of reuniting with his family hang in the balance.
After bagging numerous awards at the Oscars, Golden Globes and BAFTA Awards, you may be curious as to why this film has become a massive hit.
Firstly, the film touches on history that some people try to avoid, because of how sensitive the subject matter is. However, Director Steve McQueen took on the challenge to highlight the past’s most horrendous history and has turned it into a masterpiece.
12 Years a Slave will tug at even the tightest of heart strings, with some scenes proving very difficult to watch.
In 2003, American mountain climber Aaron Ralston was hiking Blue John Canyon in Utah when he fell, and a dislodged boulder pinned his right arm to a rock wall. The feat of human endurance that followed quite seriously deserved the movie treatment, if only to highlight the incredible resilience, determination and willpower that one man can possess.
Loosely based on actual events, Unstoppable sees an unmanned train on the rampage with some 40-plus carriages, two of which are carrying molten phenol.
This sensitive drama from Anthony Fabian tells the remarkable true story of Sandra Laing, a black girl who was born to white Afrikaner parents in 1950’s South Africa. Due to a genetic throwback, Sandra’s hair is frizzier than that of her parents, and her skin darker. As her conservative father seeks to defend her mother from persistent accusations of infidelity, Sandra becomes embroiled in a series of legal battles to classify her race. Amazingly, The Laings’ campaign is successful and the dark-skinned Sarah is officially classified as white. She is legally entitled to attend a “white” school, sit in the “white” section in waiting rooms and dine in “white” restaurants. Her parents blankly ignore the stares from racist onlookers, and their policy of “reclassifying” their daughter appears to work, for a while.
The Founding of a Republic, a star-studded epic which marks the 60th Anniversary of China’s Communist revolution, opens in UK cinemas on Thursday.
On 16th November, 1859, the flamboyant American author of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Truman Capote, reads an article about four members of a well-respected Kansas family who were brutally murdered one night. The notion of two very different worlds colliding – the protective unit of Clutter family and the rootless, amoral sphere inhabited by their killers – enthralls him, and Capote phones up William Shawn, editor of the New Yorker, to ask if he would be interested in a magazine article examining the effect of the murders on the local community. Shawn gives him the nod of approval and Capote leaves for the wind-swept plains of the Mid-West along with his childhood friend Harper Lee.
Landing director Ken Loach a Palme D’Or at the 2006 Cannes film festival, The Wind That Shakes the Barley charts the IRA’s attempts to oust the British in the early 1920s and the civil war that followed the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922.
Based on a real-life incident at a California high school in 1967, Dennis Gansel’s cautionary thriller takes a disturbing look at fascism’s ongoing appeal.
Valkyrie is an old-fashioned espionage thriller based on a large-scale plot within the Nazi ranks to assassinate Hitler. It’s one of those ‘what if’ tales which, had it succeeded, might have completely changed the fate of Europe.