#OnTheBigScreen: Captain Marvel, White Boy Rick, Carmen and Red Room

Captain Marvel

With the release of Captain Marvel, Marvel Studios launches its highly anticipated, female-led franchise. Zooming in on a previously unseen period in the history of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the film introduces its first stand-alone, female-franchise title character — Carol Danvers aka Captain Marvel.

Based on the beloved Marvel comic book series, first published in 1967, Captain Marvel is set in the 1990s.

The film sidesteps the traditional origin story template, with Carol Danvers (Brie Larson) already possessing her superhero powers. Leaving her earthly life behind, she joins an intergalactic elite Kree military team called Starforce, led by their enigmatic commander Yon-Rogg. But after Danvers has trained and worked with the Starforce team, and become a valued member, she finds herself back on Earth with new questions about her past. While on Earth she quickly lands on the radar of Nick Fury, and they must work together against a formidable enemy in the form of the Skrulls — the notorious Marvel bad guys made even more dangerous by their shape-shifting abilities — and their leader Talos who is spearheading a Skrull invasion of Earth.

Written and directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck with Meg LeFauve, Nicole Perlman, Geneva Robertson-Dworet, Liz Flahive, and Carly Mensch also contributing to the screenplay.

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White Boy Rick

An incredible true story of the youngest FBI informant in history, White Boy Rick tells the moving story of a blue-collar father, Richard Wershe Sr (Matthew McConaughey) and his namesake teenage son, Rick Jr (newcomer Richie Merritt), and chronicles three critical years in the life of Rick Wershe Jr as he rises from baby-faced teen to infamous drug dealer before ultimately becoming a pawn to some of Detroit’s most powerful and corrupt politicians.

Directed by French-British Yann Demange (‘71) and written by identical twin brothers Andy Weiss and Logan and Noah Miller, White Boy Rick is a tarnished American Dream, an improbable tale of fathers and sons, friends and family, a shifting landscape of loyalty and betrayal, where everything has a cost, including love and the ultimate price may be survival.

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Red Room

Khanyi Mbau plays the wife to a wealthy husband who loses it all and is thrown into the frightening South African underworld of human trafficking. The movie follows Khanyi’s character, Zama, a successful business man’s wife who discovers that her husband is involved in the world of human trafficking, sex, and betrayal.

Carmen

The Metropolitan Opera’s sumptuous production of Bizet’s much-loved opera Carmen stars mezzo-soprano Clémentine Margaine as the strong-willed seductress, and tenor Roberto Alagna as her lover Don José, with Louis Langrée conducting. The filmed performance is hosted by soprano Ailyn Pérez and directed for cinema by Gary Halvorson, as part of the 2019 season of The Met: Live in HD. Georges Bizet’s Carmen premiered only a few months before the composer’s untimely death in 1875. Considered scandalous at its debut, it has become one of the world’s most enduringly popular operas, containing two of the most instantly recognisable arias – “Habanera” and the “Toreador Song”.
Set in and around Seville, it tells the story of the beguiling gypsy whose lover kills her in a jealous rage after she rejects him for a toreador. Sir Richard Eyre’s production of Carmen has been a Met favourite since it premiered a decade ago; this year’s production has once again won rave reviews.

Carmen will screen at Cinema Nouveau and selected Ster-Kinekor sites from 9 March for selected performances, including: Rosebank Nouveau, Gateway Commercial, Brooklyn Nouveau and V&A Waterfront Nouveau. At Somerset and Blue Route Mall in Cape Town, Bedford Square in Johannesburg and Garden Route Mall in George.

Read more about the latest and upcoming films: http://writingstudio.co.za/lets-go-to-the-movies/.