Letterboxd — Your life in film

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…

The Backwater Gospel is a seriously impressive tour de force of style and atmosphere, drawing inspiration from the same dark corners of the universe Carnivàle emerged from. The soul-stirring songs of Tom Waits and Woven Hands too. I'm not saying it was inspired by any of these fine sources, but they are all clearly kindred spirits.

Being a student film, there is a limit to how much it has on its mind, mind you. One could argue that it's a…

The Host is a curious collision of opposing worlds. On one side you have cold and somewhat cynical director Andrew Niccol, with his penchant for mindfuckery, but lacking in what you might call a human touch. On the other side, you have Mormonic writer Stephenie Meyer and her dribbly tween love triangles – all feelings, and a severe lack of sturdy world-building skills. I'm not sure what the thinking behind this pairing was, but perhaps it was thought each of…

Michel Gondry's story, about an indie filmmaker and his girlfriend who turns into a chair, is quite delightful, coasting along on the director's usual quirky sense of humor.

Bong Joon-ho's shut-in story is utterly mediocre, literally.

Leos Carax's story is so shit (as he tells us in capital letters, right at the beginning) that it detracts a full star from Tokyo!'s final score. I pray that no one ever gives this offensive clown any kind of funding ever again.

All…

Shunji Iwai has always been an interesting filmmaker, and was once one of Japan's hottest chroniclers of the nation's adolescent generation. It's fair to say that he peaked around the millennium, however, and while he has continued to work, his output nowadays seems more introverted and experimental, less connected to the wider audiences. Cue Vampire.

Ostensibly his first English-language film (but not really, Swallowtail Butterfly is largely in English, albeit heavily accented), Vampire was shot in Vancouver way back in…

Uhm... wow! Don Coscarelli's latest movie is a wild and crazy beast of a movie, impossible to sum up, and sure to wow and alienate its audience in equal measures.

A mysterious, goopy drug that may or may not actually be alive, sinister aliens, squishy bugs, exploding heads, alternate universes, weird time shifts, tentacled horrors, boobs, talking dogs, ghosts, reanimated corpses, a guy using a hotdog as a cellphone - this movie has it all, and more, all wrapped up…

At once both deceptively simple and complex, To the Wonder feels like the distilled essence of the Malick experience, with everything extraneous pared away. Fans of the cinematic poet will consequently find much to love here, but the uninitiated may well blow this off as impenetrable nonsense. It's not a bad movie, but probably not the best introduction to Terrence Malick.

At its core is the chronicling of the ups and downs of the relationship between Marina (Olga Kurylenko) and…

Simon Klose's documentary about the world's largest torrent tracker and the men behind it, grabbed headlines ahead of its world premiere at the Berlinale. The movie would be made available for free via – of course – The Pirate Bay, simultanously with the first screening at the film fest. And why not? While TPB: AFK is not entirely one-sided, and certainly not hagiographic, it does have a partisan bent, and you get the feeling that widespread viewership is the paramount…

Fan edits are a fascinating side effect of the democratization of powerful editing suites. Obviously, like with everything else, most of the fan edits are worthless – a fun project for the amateur editor, but generally not an improvement on the original. There are exceptions, of course – the silent movie edits of the Star Wars prequels spring to mind. Jaws: The Sharksploitation Edit sits somewhere inbetween.

The Spielberg classic remains the core of the movie, but the fan edit…