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Dark Shadows (Video Review) | By Anders Wotzke

Anders Wotzke — Sat, 12 May 2012 04:26:24 +0000

Every few years on Halloween’s eve, somewhere between a sharp crack of thunder and a wolf’s longing howl, Tim Burton phones Johnny Depp to ominously announce:

“It is time.”

“Right,” Depp sombrely replies, “I’ll start applying the makeup.”

This is the unofficial story of how Burton and Depp’s eight collaborations have come to pass, the first being the broodingly brilliant Edward Scissorhands, and the latest being the broodingly not-so-brilliant-but-still-entertaining Dark Shadows.

Based on a [...]

The Five-Year Engagement (Review) | By Anders Wotzke

Anders Wotzke — Sun, 06 May 2012 15:24:41 +0000

Super-producer Judd Apatow and his creative minions have given the romantic comedy a much needed shakeup in recent years, embracing humour of a more raunchy and irreverent variety while also pasteurising the classic formula with a welcome degree of sincerity. Still, if last year’s Bridesmaids is any indication, Apatow’s rom-com recipe has yet to be perfected, the film’s serious and silly elements struggling to meld into [...]

Battleship (Video Review) | By Anders Wotzke

Anders Wotzke — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 12:30:48 +0000

If you can look past the fact that Peter Berg’s Battleship is based on a board game, well, you’re doing better than me. It’s just so ridiculous! I mean, at what point when playing with a bunch of white and red pegs do you stop and think: “Wait a minute, there’s a bazillion-dollar movie in this! Quick, get Liam Neeson on the line!”

But instead of trying to look past the [...]

Mirror Mirror (Review) | By Anders Wotzke

Anders Wotzke — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 03:13:08 +0000

It’s easy to roll your eyes at the endless fairy-tale “re-imaginings” Hollywood thrust upon us each year, but not even the credited authors of many of them, the Brothers Grimm, could claim them as original works. No, stories of lore are but a never-ending game of Chinese whispers, passed down through time from one raconteur to another, each adding their own personal flair to the fable. In Mirror Mirror, the [...]

17 Girls [17 filles] (Review) | By Tom Clift

Tom Clift — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 00:53:08 +0000

Once is a coincidence, twice is an anomaly. Seventeen times is definitely a trend. A troubling tale of teenage naivety, 17 Girls [17 filles] takes its premise from a real life occurrence in a Massachusetts high-school in 2008, where seventeen students conspired amongst themselves to become pregnant. In this fictional French retelling, the trouble begins with queen-bee Camille (Louise Grinberg) reveals that she is up the duff. Seeking the support [...]

Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance | By Tom Clift

Tom Clift — Sat, 17 Mar 2012 11:31:21 +0000

There are few filmmakers working in the action genre today who demonstrate the same wicked virtuosity as the double act that is Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor. Credited professionally as Neveldine/Taylor (an unconventional label that suits their unconventional style), the duo behind Gamer and the Crank movies are known for their hands-on approach to filmmaking that has seen them dangled off cliffs and dragged behind motorcycles on rollerblades, all in [...]

Among Men – Gay In East Germany (Berlinale Review) | By Anders Wotzke

Anders Wotzke — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 01:13:58 +0000

On the night of November 9, 1989, the ground-breaking gay film Coming Out was set to premiere to an East German repressed, homosexual audience, but fatefully, another ground-breaking event occurred that night: the Berlin Wall came down. As co-director Ringo Rösener narrates in his and Markus Stein’s Panorama documentary Unter Männern — Schwul in der Ddr (Among Men — Gay In East Germany), the gay GDR community was robbed that [...]

Curling King (IFFR Review) | By Tom Clift

Tom Clift — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 00:43:41 +0000

A charming comedy set in the cutthroat world of Norway’s least popular sport, Ole Endresen’s Curling King was a colossal audience hit at this year’s International Film Festival of Rotterdam. Co-writer Atle Antonsen (a popular Norwegian comedian) also stars as Truls Paulsen, a once champion curler whose manic obsession with the sport eventually saw him institutionalised with obsessive compulsive disorder. Released after a decade – heavily medicated – into the [...]

The Comedy (IFFR Review) | By Tom Clift

Tom Clift — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 15:55:54 +0000

From the opening scene, in which lead character Swanson (Tim Heidecker) describes in detail the effects of an anal prolapse before insulting the sexuality of the male nurse whose job it is to take care of his barely breathing invalid father, Rick Alverson’s new film does everything it can to be as aggressively alienating as humanly possible. An ugly tale of a fat, over-privileged, middle-aged New York hipster stuck in [...]

Alps (IFFR Review) | By Tom Clift

Tom Clift — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 12:50:24 +0000

In the back of an ambulance, a paramedic tries to keep a critically injured car-crash victim talking. He asks her name, and if she has any siblings. At first it seems like he’s just trying to help her remain conscious, but then his questions grow more obscure and personal. It’s just one of many early clues in Alps that something in this world is seriously amiss. This new film from [...]