A Complete Unknown
Dune star Timothée Chalamet takes on a hefty role here playing the legendary music icon Bob Dylan is James Mangold's biopic, A Complete Unknown, a film that's sure to entice those dedicated Dylan fans among you.
Marking Mangold’s first music biography since his award winning work on his Johnny Cash bio Walk the Line in 2005, Mangold takes inspiration for this Dylan flick from Elijah Wald's popular book, Dylan Goes Electric that focuses on his early folk music years and up to his controversial move to electric at the infamous Newport Folk Festival in 1965.
Indeed, this is a period in Dylan's career that has long divided many hardcore fans, and was also portrayed in director Todd Haynes 2007 experimental flick, I'm Not There. Mangold, however, sticks to the tried and tested biography formula in his retelling of this tumultuous period in Dylan's life and career, and has crafted an altogether traditional biography movie that looks as beautiful as the it sounds, thanks to the wistful, iconic soundtrack that catalogues the musician's most timeless works.
Chalamet does a great job in playing Dylan, tapping into the star's enduring, mysterious and hard-to-read appeal. There's also great support from Edward Norton as folk legend Pete Seeger, and Elle Fanning as Dylan's lover and muse, Sylvie Russo.
Beautifully filmed and capturing superbly the sights and sounds of 60s America, A Complete Unknown is well worth a go this weekend.
Wolf Man
Directed by Leigh Whannell, the celebrated spookmeister behind horror flicks Insidious and the 2020 reboot of Universal's classic The Invisible Man, Wolf Man is another well-crafted reboot of a beloved horror classic.
Starring Poor Things' Christopher Abbott and Ozark's Julia Garner, this is a remake of the 1941 film of the same name and sees Whannell taking a similar approach to his retelling of The Invisible Man story, delivering a more realistic and modern take on the traditional werewolf motif.
Suitably set in a dark and wintry Oregon where the bite of frost is almost as sharp as the snap of the Wolf Man’s bite, the action follows married couple Blake and Charlotte who relocate to the chilly north from San Francisco with their young daughter Ginger.
Moving back into Blake's childhood abode after the mysterious disappearance of his father, the family have no sooner settled in to their new home when they come under attack from a strange, snarling woodland creature that seems determined to hunt the family down one by one. Cloaked in an unnerving darkness, Wolf Man sucks you into its foreboding gloom and strikes hard with plenty of jump-scares and some gloriously gory special effects. If you are a certified horror junkie, Wolf Man is one you do not want to miss.
