To paraphrase the bard - a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Anno's theatrical redo of the series continues to be either incoherent or impenetrable - it's hard to tell which.

It all looks and sounds very good, but it's still next to impossible to find a way into the densely delivered material, and consequently, a reason to care about what happens. In the end I didn't, and the final moments of the film merely filled me with dread…

No proper review for now - I feel I have to watch this again to give it a fair assessment. My first impression is that it's a handsome, but somewhat superficial movie - there's no real connection with the characters to speak of here, not like in most of Wong's earlier movies. It's also rather more conventional than expected. While still firmly an art movie, it's no less accessible than, say, Zhang Yimou's Hero - a movie it also resembles…

Essentially Battle Royale for the Twilight crowd, The Hunger Games makes the leap from the pages to the big screen with the majority of the details intact. Sticking so closely to the source material means that the movie also shares the novel's strengths and weaknesses.

First and foremost, Katniss remains an interesting, reluctant rebel character (Jennifer Lawrence, excellent), while the rest of the cast of characters veer more towards simple archetypes, sometimes wrapped in colorful costumes, sometimes not. The dystopic…

The world was very unkind to Goro Miyazaki when he took the unexpected leap from landscape architect and museum manager to director in 2006. Tales from Earthsea had its fair share of weaknesses and outright faults, but the yardstick by which the younger Miyazaki was measured and found lacking was downright unfair and cruel. The recent documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi contains a musing from a food critic that's strikingly relevant: 86 year old Jiro is still in charge of…