Frankenweenie is immediately recognisable as a Tim Burton film. Its eerie stop-motion animation and its use of Danny Elfman’s vivid, sorrowful music is in line with Burton’s best and most representative work. The film tells the tale of a young boy and a reclusive genius who is fascinated by science, Victor Frankenstein, whose only friend Read More
F. W. Murnau’s 1926 Faust is a powerful example of German expressionist black and white film. Faust uses earlier folk tales and Goethe’s original tale as a basis for its own plot. The story is one of a man selling his soul to devil, and the repercussions of this bargain. At the DCA screening, a Read More
“There is no fairy tale”, Lady Runcie-Campbell warns her son as she admonishes him for showing compassion to two men working on their highland estate in 1943. The truth is apparent at the start of this Aberdeen Performing Arts production of The Cone Gatherers, based on Robin Jenkin’s 1950s novel. Lady Runcie-Campbell’s shattered nerves, her Read More
French film Comme Un Homme (Bad Seeds) is an interesting yet uneasy blend of the neo-noir and the bildungsfilm. The story follows two middle-class teenaged boys, Greg (Kevin Azais) and Louis (Emile Berling), as they kidnap a young female teacher from their school. Greg is a delinquent with behavioural issues that escalate to the point Read More
The term “Oscar movie”, which usually denotes a well-made film that is self-consciously worthy has already been repeated in many reviews of Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano’s new film, Untouchable. There seems to be no doubt the film will at least be nominated for an Oscar for best foreign film given the level of acclaim Read More
ParaNorman is a 3D stop motion zombie horror comedy by Laika, the makers of the critically acclaimed Coraline. Their latest offering has all the elements of classic horror genre films: zombies, of course, and lots of ghosts and ghouls – as well as a witch, and an ancient evil curse which incites a stereotypical angry Read More
The latest film from German director Christian Petzold, Barbara, has received a number of awards, including a nomination as Germany’s entry for the Foreign Language Film Oscar. Set in East Germany in 1980, the story revolves around Barbara Wolff, played by Petzold’s ‘muse’ Nina Hoss. Wolff is a paediatrician who is sent to a provincial Read More
Fredrik Gertten’s Big Boys Gone Bananas!* tells the kind of gripping, contemporary story of Kafkaesque corporate persecution that any earnest politicised documentary maker would take pains to seek out. Any earnest politicised documentary maker except for Fredrik Gertten, that is. The subject of Gertten’s latest documentary is himself, and the alarming media harassment and debilitating Read More
Eight senior citizens, each between the ages of 80 and 100, representing six countries, have one common goal: a gold medal at the International Over-80s Table Tennis Championships. In a nutshell, this is the eccentric medley of characters that up-and-coming filmmaker Hugh Hartford has assembled in his latest documentary Ping Pong. The film is as Read More
The release of Christopher Nolan’s Inception in 2010 left the landscape of the action-thriller genre irrevocably changed. Despite its oddly sterile characters and environments, the film’s sleek cerebral plotting and brain-bending, complex theorisations about time showed that blockbuster audiences don’t have to be patronised to be entertained. As Hollywood tries to catch up with the Read More