There’s an urban myth in the writing business: if a book devotes more space on the cover to the author’s name than anything else, then it is trying to sell that book on the strength of the author. Stephen King novels remain the perennial example of this. Books where the author’s name is less obtrusive […]
And so we bid a fond farewell to this year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival. A typically diverse programme of movies from around the world brought us touching drama, thrilling action, surreal fantasy and insightful documentaries, and made for a fascinating fortnight of cinema. The festival always concludes with a “Best of the Fest” line-up shown […]
Nazis make the best movie villains; that’s something almost everybody can agree on. Officious, racist bureaucrat-soldiers with a fevered devotion to a pseudo-mystical ideology are perfect fodder for the “stock bad guy” role, and it helps that for half a century the vast majority of cinema-goers have been raised to instinctively hate them. The fact […]
I remember the first subtitled film I ever watched all the way through. It was Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and I must have been in my mid-teens at the time. I found it distracting at first, having to follow the words on the screen whilst simultaneously trying to take in all the images the […]
Cynics have suggested that Pixar’s recent move into spinning off its existing properties (first with Cars 2 and now with Monsters University) rather than producing more original content is (a) a sign of creative bankruptcy, and (b) a calculated attempt to further monetise old products. It would be naive to suggest that the latter consideration […]
Classical literature has provided storytelling fodder for cinema since the invention of the medium, but rarely is it adapted as unconventionally as in Emperor Visits the Hell, the new film from Chinese director Li Lou. Based on a part of the 16th century Ming Dynasty classic Journey to the West (which also inspired the cult ’70s TV […]