Late last week, filmmaker Luc Besson (The Fifth Element, most recently Lucy) joined Twitter to announce that his next film would be, “a big sci-fi,” called Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. He went on to reveal the film’s logo (pictured above) as well as Valerian’s lead actors Dane DeHaan and Cara Delevingne arranged together in moody, black-and-white shots (included below). Now, coming from Cannes is news that EuropaCorp plans to release Valerian to worldwide audiences on July 21st, 2017.

Starring @danedehaan & @Caradelevingne. Shooting in December. In theaters 2017. pic.twitter.com/R3STb1aPsf

— Luc Besson (@lucbesson) May 12, 2015

Though this latest news doesn’t come from Besson’s impressively sparse Twitter footprint, where he has followed 2 accounts and favorited 5 tweets while writing 4 of his own, it stemmed from the same announcement that revealed Chinese company Fundamental Films plans to invest $50 million in Besson’s upcoming large scale sci-fi project. While Besson has been busy launching The Transporter franchise, launching the Taken franchise, and launching an Arthur and the Invisibles franchise, fans of his work have awaited his return to The Fifth Element-sized sci-fi productions since 1997. Valerian will be an adaptation of the highly popular French graphic novel series created by writer Pierre Christin and artist Jean-Claude Mézières.

While zombie movies can be traced back to the 1930s, the modern zombie film era is generally accepted to have begun with George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968). Since then, the zombie movie has been a staple at the cinema and at home, with offerings ranging from the totally ’80s classic Night of the Comet to the biggest box office zombie flick yet, World War Z. Because there are only so many ways to serve up brains, and with TV’s The Walking Dead doing an excellent job of that on a regular basis, filmmakers are taking unique approaches to zombies and treating them as characters, not just mindless threats. Now we have tales of zombie romance such as the latest zombie movie to hit theaters, Life After Beth.

Zach Orfman (Dane DeHaan) is a devastated teen. His girlfriend, Beth Slocum (Aubrey Plaza), has died, and not long after the couple’s last discussion revolved around ending their relationship. In the days after her funeral, the young man clings to Beth’s memory and spends as much time with her parents as he can. He grows suspicious, however, when the Slocums (John C. Reilly and Molly Shannon) stop returning his calls. A visit to their house – where they pretend not to be home – reveals the truth behind their sudden secrecy: Beth is alive.

Well, sort of.

Beth is a zombie, only she doesn’t realize it. (Her parents see her as being resurrected.) As she and Zach rekindle their romance, Beth slowly deteriorates in both body and mind.

Life After Beth’s premise tantalizes before the film even fades in. Despite what feels like market saturation, zombies are still all the rage. The film’s plot (my dead girlfriend doesn’t know she’s dead) is a clever one. The leads are talented, good-looking, and popular. The supporting cast is terrific (including Paul Reiser and Cheryl Hines as Zach’s parents), with decades of cumulative comedic acting experience among them. This is a film that is aching to succeed.

Unfortunately the film’s concept works better on paper than it does as a movie. Life After Beth‘s fatal flaw is that there is little to the story beyond the clever premise.

Writer/director Jeff Baena spends the first act of the film slogging through a set-up that includes creating a contrived conflict between Zach and Beth’s parents. Time is also wasted establishing Zach’s own parents, with their yelling and their disbelief and their short attention spans, as adults from a bad sitcom. Never does Baena show Beth’s death, her “resurrection,” or her triumphant return home. It’s mentioned, not shown.

The middle of the film is nothing more than a series of sketches, each as unfunny as the one before it, and only made different by Beth’s continued deteriorating physical and mental condition. There is, also, the introduction of a girl from Zach’s childhood, Erica Wexler (Anna Kendrick), inserted (I guess) to offer a future for Zach once Beth goes Full Zombie. It’s an inserted idea yet not well-developed; another great talent wasted.

The third act is perhaps the most baffling aspect of the entire film. I don’t want to spoil anything by revealing details, however the path the story takes seems to occur out of the blue as a device used to help bear the weight of the film’s non-full length structure and is highly frustrating. This third act surprise could have been nicely developed early, and then followed throughout the film as a meaty subplot.  Instead, it’s triggered as an escape hatch to bring the film to a preposterous conclusion.

It’s hard to fault anyone in the cast for their work, because no one is given much to work with in the first place. As noted, Reiser and Hines have a sitcom sensibility to them, as does Shannon. Reilly is only slightly elevated because he’s given more relevant dialogue than the rest of the grown-ups. Plaza does fine descending from hapless to mindless. Honestly, there isn’t an MVP performance in the bunch.

Everyone should walk away from this unscathed, but it will be curious to see how DeHaan’s career is affected. In Life After Beth, he’s pale and he broods and stumbles about in a disbelieving haze, none of which is memorable. However, this is his second subpar outing in 2014 (following the terrible The Amazing Spider-Man 2), so 2015 might be pivotal for the young actor. He has a period piece (Tulip Fever) coming out, but more importantly, he is playing James Dean in Anton Corbijn’s Life, a role that might be make-or-break for him.

The zombie genre will (un)live on beyond Life After Beth, a film that feels like a Halloween entry of a Saturday Night Live routine that may have been funny in a short sketch, but can’t survive being stretched out over 90 minutes.

Life After Beth trailer

Based on true events that took place in and around Colombia University in 1944, director John Krokidas‘ impressive debut feature, Kill Your Darlings, is a dark, moody tale of obsession, betrayal, and murder involving a handful of young men, unruly intellectuals who poison as much as they inspire and arouse each other. These young men just happen to be Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and Lucien Carr (and others), the cornerstone figures of the eminently influential Beat Generation, but Krokidas’ film wisely doesn’t check your knowledge of their later accomplishments at the door.

It’s a self-contained origin story of the beloved literary and counterculture icons that’s friendly to the unfamiliar as it cuts off just before our anti-heroes go off to become famous writers. The movie’s focus begins to blur eventually when it starts playing it too loose for its own good, but it’s intoxicating throughout and harbors a murderer’s row of thriving young actors who deliver solid performances.

Daniel Radcliffe (The Boy Who Lived!) leads the ensemble as Ginsberg, a brilliant, sheepish 17-year-old freshman at Colombia who becomes enamored with Carr (Dane DeHaan, ridiculously good), an androgynous, boisterous rebel with a magnetic aura and an affinity for reciting Henry Miller on top of tables in the campus library. Carr ushers the Ginsberg into a hazy world of heavy drugs, heavy drinking, and heavy ideas, ideas that renounce societal, sexual, religious, and artistic norms. Through Carr, Ginsberg meets the kooky, likable Burroughs (Ben Foster, who’s great as usual, though he lets his younger cast-mates shine), the hard-headed (one-dimensionally written) Kerouac (Jack Huston), and David Kammerer (Michael C. Hall), a spiteful, damaged soul.

The drugged-out thinkers massage each others’ genius (it’s almost as sexual as it sounds), ruminating through the night and brainstorming ways to upheave the system and shake up the social consciousness. Kamerer is the bitter outlier of the group–he and Carr have a dark, nebulous history that eventually turns murderous–Kill Your Darlings begins at the end, opening with Carr holding Kammerer’s dead body in the Hudson River.

There isn’t a bad word to say about the performances the actors turn in. Not a thing. But still, there isn’t a grand, towering performance turned in either, though DeHaan comes close with his assured, seductive take on Carr, by far the most interesting of the lot (even the other characters are drawn to him like flies to a light). Radcliffe balances the wide-eyed naiveté and big brains of the young Ginsberg well, and he disappears into the role with ease (surprisingly, “Harry” didn’t pop into my head even once). The chemistry between Radcliffe and DeHaan sizzles, which is good, since their relationship bears the heft of the drama. The supporters–Elizabeth Olsen, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Kyra Sedgwick, David Cross–are superb and make the few moments they have on camera count.

As the story–written by Krokidas and Austin Bunn–unfolds and Ginsberg follows Carr deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole, things get a little sketchy. Krokidas gets funky with his camerawork, which helps communicate the groups’ druggy state, but often results in shots that seem superficial and superfluous in relation to the narrative. One scene in particular–a happy-gas-induced dream sequence in a jazz club–feels awfully showboat-y, though it’s got a ton of style, just like the rest of the film, which is worth noting. The rich, moody atmosphere Krokidas and DP Reed Morano create is striking, with deep shadows and dusty light framing the characters as they scheme and philosophize around in and around the university in the dead of night. There’s a chilling, shadowy, nocturnal feel to the sets and locations that makes the film feel like it’s been dipped in a bucket of film noir (a good thing).

One of the film’s glaring blemishes is a writing conundrum that Krokidas and Bunn couldn’t seem to work around. From the outset, it’s clear that Ginsberg is meant to be our eyes and ears, our vessel into Krokidas’ smoky 1940’s world of knit sweaters and boozy excess. With this in mind, the scenes between Carr and Kammerer feel oddly ancillary, as Ginsberg wasn’t involved with these meetings at all. It’s a bit off-putting, though Krokidas’ narrative is obviously trapped by the reality of the events, so it’s hard to think of how he could have worked around it.

As an introduction to the Beats (which it will likely be to many), Kill Your Darlings is a success–despite its flaws, it successfully dramatizes some of the most canonized figures in modern literature without relying on their reputation (no easy feat), making them cool, young, and edgy again. It’ll likely inspire many a youth to pick up a book by one of the Beats or perhaps put pen to paper themselves, which is a triumph.

Kill Your Darlings trailer:

After premiering (and receiving a relatively warm reception) at TIFF in September, we really haven’t heard much about Derek Cianfrance’s new film, The Place Beyond the Pines. Some wondered what would come of the film. A couple months back the studio releasing the film, Focus Features, announced that it would see theaters near the end of March.

I personally saw this as a meaning that the film wasn’t as strong as some once thought. Well now we have a full length trailer and boy does it look to be an emotional experience. The film stars Ryan Gosling as a motorcycle stunt man who starts committing robbery’s to support his family. On the other side of the coin is a cop played by Bradley Cooper whose looks to take him down.

Cianfrance was last seen with the emotionally wrought drama Blue Valentine (also starring Gosling). By the end of that film, it felt like my heart had been ripped out and stepped on. This looks to have the same emotional impact. The film also stars Rose Byrne, Eva Mendes, Bruce Greenwood and Ray Liotta. Check out the trailer below.

Watch the official trailer for The Place Beyond the Pines: