#OnTheBigScreen: Breaking News in Yuba County and Chaos Walking

Breaking News in Yuba County

An absolute delight with loads of fun, thrills and twists, this is one film you will never forget!

Sue Buttons (Allison Janney) is an underappreciated suburban wife in pastel-painted Yuba County who gets no attention — not even on her birthday, which she spends buying herself a cake while listening to self-affirmation tapes. But on this day, getting noticed isn’t the only thing missing from Sue’s life: When her husband Karl (Matthew Modine) goes missing, she gets a taste of being a local celebrity as she embarks on a city-wide search in small-town Yuba County, California, to find him.

To prolong her newfound fame, she stumbles into hilarious hijinks as her world turns upside down, dodging a wanna-be mobster (Awkwafina), a relentless local policewoman (Regina Hall), her half-sister (Mila Kunis) — a local news reporter desperate for a story — and her husband’s dead-beat brother (Jimmi Simpson) along with his sidekick (Wanda Sykes), who all set out to uncover the truth behind the disappearance.

From a crackling screenplay by Amanda Idoko, a young Bronx-born screenwriter and daughter of Nigerian immigrants, and visionary director Tate Taylor, comes Breaking News In Yuba County, a deliciously wicked, dark and humorous dissection of America’s fixation on fame, notoriety and victimhood, even while there is actual marginalisation happening just out of view.

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Chaos Walking

What if your innermost thoughts were always on display?

The story is set in the year 2257 AD on a distant planet known as New World, the male settlers are bombarded every second of every day with each other’s thoughts, in the form of an unrelenting cacophony of sounds, called The Noise. It drove the men insane because women could also hear and see their thoughts, while the women’s remained hidden. After the women were killed off, purportedly by the planet’s indigenous species, the men remain haunted, if not tortured, by the endless barrage of their thoughts come to life.

In the not-too-distant future, Todd Hewitt (Tom Holland) discovers Viola (Daisy Ridley), a mysterious young woman who crash lands on his planet, where all the women have disappeared and the men are afflicted by The Noise – a force that puts all of their thoughts on display. In this dangerous landscape, Viola’s life is threatened, and as Todd vows to protect her, he must discover his inner power and unlock the planet’s dark secrets.

Patrick Ness’s celebrated science fiction novel The Knife of Never Letting Go, the first book in the Chaos Walking series, is brought to life on the big screen by filmmaker Doug Liman, who reinvented the action movie with The Bourne Identity and challenged familiar science fiction trope into the original and dazzling film Edge of Tomorrow.

“I had grown tired of stories where the boy was brave and a little bit thick, and the girl was brainy and sassy, and together they solve crimes,” Ness explains. “I thought, why can’t they be equally smart, scared, messed up, and glorious in their curiosity,” says Ness. “The story is about them both learning that they have the capability of relying on someone other than themselves, which is a huge step. Their adventure is not about how to avoid failure; it’s about how you address those failures.”

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