Alone in the Dark

DVD Prizes To Be Won

2012-02-26T03:59:00.001-08:00

Win The Shrine on DVD

From award-winning filmmaker Jon Knautz, writer-director of the cult hit horror-comedy “ Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer”, comes The Shrine, “a wonderfully eerie slice of Lovecraftian horror”
(BeyondHollywood.com) that sets itself up as a traditional genre entry before brilliantly and unexpectedly pulling the rug from beneath the viewer with a killer twist.

Starring Aaron Ashmore (Smallville; Veronica Mars), Cindy Sampson (Supernatural; Reaper) and Meghan Heffern (The Fog; Chloe), The Shrine has been hailed as “true-blue horror all the way… uncompromising and aggressively nasty” (FearNet.com) and gained plaudits for its “great story arc, solid writing and acting, and a last act that’ll blow you away” (AnythingHorror.com).

When a young American goes missing in Poland while backpacking around Europe, ambitious journalist Carmen (Sampson) links his disappearance to a number of similar events that have occurred over the years in and around the remote rural village of Alvaina. With the US and Polish authorities showing little interest in the case, Carmen decides to investigate the story herself, hoping for a scoop that will forward her career as a writer.

She convinces her photographer boyfriend, Marcus (Ashmore), and her young intern at the newspaper, Sara (Heffern), to join her in trying to uncover the truth and the trio travels to Alvaina to make some initial enquiries. On arrival at the village they immediately attract the unwelcome attention of the hostile locals who order them to leave the area. Fearing for their safety Marcus is ready to give up and go home, but Carmen and Sara become intrigued by and drawn to a mysterious fog hanging over the nearby woods. On entering the mist, they come across what appears to be an ancient statue – a discovery that leads them on the path to a revelation far more terrifying than anything they could possibly imagine.

A solid supernatural chiller that recalls elements of “The Exorcist”, “Jacob’s Ladder” and “The Evil Dead”, The Shrine is an unexpected gem of a horror film and boasts a Grammy nominated (for Best Score Soundtrack For Visual Media) score by award-winning composer Ryan Shore (Stan Helsing; Numb; The Girl Next Door).

The Shrine (cert. 15) will be released on DVD and Blu-ray by Arrow Films on 27th February 2012.

To be in with a chance of winning a copy, simply send an email with your name and postal address to aloneinthedarkcomps@gmail.com by Friday March 2nd.

Terms and Conditions

Only one entry will be accepted per person.
Entrants must be UK residents and aged 18 or over.
The judge's decision is final and no correspondence will be entered into.

DVD prizes to be won

2012-02-04T04:44:00.000-08:00

This competition is now closed.

Terms and Conditions

Only one entry will be accepted per person.
Entrants must be UK residents and aged 18 or over.
The judge's decision is final and no correspondence will be entered into.

Chronicle review

2012-02-01T09:30:00.000-08:00

Chronicle (12A/PG-13, 83 mins)
Director: Josh Trank
★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

Super-powers meets handheld indie in this well made sci-fi drama that at least scores a few points for originality, as high school student Andrew begins filming all aspects of his life right around the time he and his friends develop telekinetic powers after stumbling across a possibly alien artefact. At first they, and the audience, have fun with it as they discover the extent of their abilities, but as their powers grow, it takes a dangerous turn due to Andrew’s anger stemming from him always being a troubled teen and something of a loner. The homemade nature of the filming isn’t much more than a gimmick, and there’s no real reason it couldn’t be a straight narrative given the lengths sometimes gone to to ensure coverage of events. But the content is powerful enough, with a strong emotional impact to the flipside of the usually lighter superhero escapades, even if it does run out of ideas before the end.

Journey 2: The Mysterious Island review

2012-01-31T09:15:00.000-08:00

Journey 2: The Mysterious Island (PG, 94 mins)
Director: Brad Peyton
★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

This sequel to 2008’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth replaces star Brendan Fraser with Dwayne Johnson, who along with his stepson Sean (Josh Hutcherson, returning from the original) gets washed up on a remote fantasy island while searching for Sean’s grandfather (Michael Caine). Jules Verne’s source gets freely and amiably adapted, and the literary and mythological references get layered on with glee, even as they’re being chased by giant beasties brought to life by well realised visual effects. It’s all agreeably silly, with high production values and likeable performances from everyone - Johnson even sings! Though slightly light on danger, it builds to a strong finish, is smashing fun for the most part, and as Indy rip-offs go, there’s a whole lot worse out there.

Win Kevin Smith's Too Fat For 40 on DVD

2012-01-22T06:03:00.000-08:00

This competition is now closed.

Terms and Conditions

Only one entry will be accepted per person.
Entrants must be UK residents and aged 18 or over.
The judge's decision is final and no correspondence will be entered into.

Coriolanus review

2012-01-15T17:38:00.000-08:00

Coriolanus (15, 123 mins)
Director: Ralph Fiennes
★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

In a place calling itself Rome, General Caius Martius (Ralph Fiennes) is hated by the people, who are desperate for food. But when he defeats his great enemy Tullus Aufidius (Gerard Butler), he returns in triumph and is given the title Coriolanus. His subsequent decision to run for consul upsets a pair of scheming tribunes who conspire against him and this along with his inability to associate with the common people leads to his downfall. Though retaining and streamlining Shakespeare’s words, Fiennes, in his directing debut, has updated the setting to modern day Eastern Europe, which cleverly allows TV reports to do the exposition, and for allegorical parallels to be drawn. He delivers action that is visceral and gritty, with running gun battles in the streets and vicious close quarters combat, as well as giving a commanding, full blooded, performance. But the film’s failings lie with the Bard, in what simply isn’t one of his most accessible or interesting works, one in which the motivations of its central character are murky at best, if not downright annoying.

W.E. review

2012-01-15T17:32:00.000-08:00

W.E. (15/R, 119 mins)
Director: Madonna
★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

More than with most movies, nearly all the attention focussed on W.E. will rightly or wrongly be towards its celebrity director, with Madonna making what is actually her second film after the little seen Filth and Wisdom. Telling parallel love stories, it’s a sombre and brittle romantic drama that centres on Wallis Simpson (Andrea Riseborough) and her affair with the future King Edward VIII. Meanwhile in 1990s New York, a young woman (Abbie Cornish) has her own marriage woes, and fascinated by the life of Wallis, looks to her for inspiration. Though competent enough, W.E. never sits still for a minute, full of editorial tics to distract from its lack of emotional core. The Wallis stuff pings about all over the place, from 1920s Shanghai to 40s France, before settling in England in the 30s, but the abdication crisis is hardly ground that needs covered and the modern story quickly becomes a tedious distraction.

Haywire review

2012-01-15T17:26:00.000-08:00

Haywire (15/R, 92 mins)
Director: Steven Soderbergh
★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

In a diner in New York state, two people, a man and a woman, chat in a booth. Suddenly it explodes into violence, as the pair grapple for life and death before the woman escapes the restaurant and gets away in a jacked car.

A series of flashbacks fill us in on the covert missions in Barcelona and Dublin that led to the current situation. The woman is Mallory Kane (Gina Carano), a black ops agent, and the man is Aaron (Channing Tatum), who was part of her Barcelona team.

When the spooks higher up the food chain (Ewan McGregor, Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas) get together in a room to discuss them, they're speaking absolute jibber-jabber as far as the audience is concerned. The details of the plot are labyrinthine and barely register, but it matters not a jot because this is director Steven Soderbergh cutting loose and having oodles of kick-ass fun.

Just know it involves the usual betrayal and double cross antics, which leaves Mallory on the run and on a mission to bring down those who set her up.

There are two things that raise Haywire a level above your usual action guff. The first is Carano, a former mixed martial arts fighter. Okay, she’s far from the greatest actress in the world, but her physical performance is hugely impressive. Despite the other big names, she’s unquestionably the star, and watching her lay savage beatings on Tatum, McGregor, Michael Fassbender and countless nameless goons is supremely satisfying.

Secondly, the direction from Soderbergh is just so sharp, so smart, so unlike anything you’re likely to see in a standard action film, that every scene becomes a joy. He brings the cool swagger of Ocean’s Eleven, coupled with his indie aesthetic to bone crunching fights that are brutal and unglamorous yet executed with endlessly dynamic choreography.

As icing on the cake, Douglas is hilarious, Banderas unusually slobby, McGregor a twit, and they're all enjoying themselves immensely, which the viewing audience can’t help but pick up on.

It’s not a million miles away from something Tarantino might rattle out - a marquee cast all taking on smaller roles, probably just for the chance to work with the director, fitting effortlessly into action that’s done in sufficiently different ways that you look on the whole genre afresh.

Win Troll Hunter on Blu-ray

2012-01-04T05:43:00.000-08:00

This competition is now closed.

Terms and Conditions

Only one entry will be accepted per person.
Entrants must be UK residents and aged 18 or over.
The judge's decision is final and no correspondence will be entered into.

Goon review

2012-01-04T05:30:00.000-08:00

Goon (15/R, 91 mins)
Director: Michael Dowse

★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

Nice guy Doug (Seann William Scott) is a bouncer of little brain who gets a trial for his local ice hockey team after they witness his fighting abilities. Even though he can barely skate, he ends up at a minor league Canadian team as an enforcer to protect their star player and get him out of his slump, which puts Doug on a collision course with another legendary destroyer (Liev Schreiber). Funny and sweet, brutal and profane in equal measure, this makes up in amiability and one-liners what it lacks in storytelling. Characters are flat and there are more hockey scenes than are ideal, but a likeable and convincing Scott keeps it on track and there’s a certain compulsive appeal to the violence.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo review

2011-12-18T15:59:00.000-08:00

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (18, 158 mins)
Director: David Fincher
★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

Though it would be nice to think that this English language remake of the hit Swedish thriller has been made for any reason other than financial, with over 60 million books sold there’s a very sizable audience out there of people who couldn’t be bothered to read subtitles when the original trilogy was released in cinemas last year, so that plainly isn’t the case.

The basics are identical, so it’s in the details that the justification of whether or not this ought to exist lies. The addition of demented title credits that play out like an oil-slicked Bond sequence to a cover of Led Zeppelin’s Immigrant Song is an interesting start.

It even retains the Swedish setting, which throws up the daft situation of having Swedish characters being played by Americans, Canadians, Swedes and Brits, speaking to each other in English with Swedish accents, expect star Daniel Craig, who more or less stays English.

Craig plays Mikael Blomkvist, a journalist for the acclaimed Millennium magazine (which lent its name to the title of Stieg Larsson’s original trilogy of books), who is tasked by an elderly, and very wealthy, businessman (Christopher Plummer) to look into the mystery surrounding his niece, who was murdered on the family’s private island 40 years before.

He believes someone in the family killed her but no one has ever been convicted, and he would like one more investigation of the events while he’s still around. But Blomkvist was only hired after a report by investigator and computer hacker Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara) confirmed he was right for the job.

Lisbeth has her own problems; with her guardian gravely ill and her finances held in trust, she is brutally assaulted by the man controlling her money. By the time she and Mikael come together, with Lisbeth as his research assistant, we know exactly what she’s capable of.

Like the Swedish version, it’s all about the sensational character of Salander, an avenging punk angel brought to life in a startling performance by the relatively unknown Mara. Craig, so often solid but boring, is very good too, straight talking but not physically intimidating or able, which lends him some vulnerability.

A quietly insistent score twists the tension of what is, in the main, a talky affair, as Mikael interviews a sprawling collection of shady family members on the search for clues. As he does so, it takes on the dimensions of a classic murder mystery, full of files, photos and puzzle solving, ground that director David Fincher has been over before in his meticulous Zodiac.

It gets its point across without hanging about, though you could also never accuse it of rattling along, not with that running time. Yet it’s never dry or dull, done with enough grit and visual style to ensure it holds the attention. It’s on a more ambitious scale than its forebear, and though a little less scuzzily graphic than first time round, no punches are pulled.

In the credit column is a streamlining of all the Millennium shenanigans, meaning we don’t have to sit through a lot of office politics or the fact that Mikael is due to go to prison. But like the original film, it’s guilty of trundling on way too long once it seems to have peaked, and there’s also a curious switch in the timeline in the latter stages that dampens the impact of Lisbeth’s characterisation.

And if you’ve seen the original you’ll know every bend on the road, meaning this lands somewhere between workable and pointless. Though it’s the same film, it’s still a fine one, and you can probably add a star if you haven’t seen the Swedish version.

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows review

2011-12-13T11:54:00.000-08:00

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (12A/PG-13, 128 mins)
Director: Guy Ritchie
★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

Surprising for all the right reasons, 2009’s Sherlock Holmes brought Arthur Conan Doyle’s legendary sleuth to a whole new generation of fans, and cemented the comeback of Robert Downey Jr. as a smooth-talking, all-brawling Holmes.

It was more than enough of a financial success to beget this sequel, one that more or less replicates the first movie in terms of spotty and sporadic enjoyment to accompany its storytelling inadequacies.

Downey Jr. returns as Holmes, as does Jude Law as his associate Dr. Watson, and their banter and interplay remains the heart of the piece, with Holmes less than happy about Watson’s impending marriage, although this does develop into a rather wet and distracting subplot.

But the big news here is the appearance of Professor James Moriarty, arch-enemy to Holmes, who was merely seen in shadows in the first film. Played with a cool detachment by Jared Harris, it’s the scheme of the so-called Napoleon of Crime that drives a convoluted plot.

Set in 1891, there’s anarchy across Europe, and a series of bombings that Holmes, consulting detective, martial arts expert and amateur alchemist, is trying to get to the bottom of. Rachel McAdams pops up ever so briefly, reprising her role as the treacherous Irene Adler, working for Moriarty not entirely of her own choice.

But she’s soon replaced by the original Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Swede Noomi Rapace, given a rather thankless role as a fortune teller roped into the whole business thanks to the involvement of her brother with Moriarty’s plans.

It’s here the film takes a bit of time to settle into its main story, rounding up all the supporting players including Stephen Fry, who puts in an appearance, essentially as Stephen Fry, playing Holmes’ brother Mycroft.

There doesn’t seem to be a great deal of logic or flow to the mechanics of the plot, more a sense that certain characters need to be in a certain place, and then the next sequence can begin. The result is disorganised, yet consistently fun enough almost to overlook the weaknesses.

Holmes soon has his first brief meeting with Moriarty, one which provides a promise of great machinations to come, so it’s a shame they only have a couple more opportunities to play their intellectual chess game that ultimately becomes a literal one.

Holmes thrives on having a nemesis in Moriarty worthy of him and their scenes together are when they're both at their most interesting, when the game is afoot. Moriarty is seemingly always a step ahead, with an early reference to Reichenbach Falls tipping off Holmes fans as to where it all might be heading.

And yet their mutual antagonism fails to sizzle quite as much as may have been hoped, with Moriarty never quite as dangerous and menacing as he ought to be, and the actual details of his plan to start a major Europe-wide war little more than window dressing.

The rest is robust fights that too often descend into shootouts, but with so much fisticuffs and gunplay it leaves little time for any real sleuthing, surely the driving force behind why Holmes exists at all. Still, the meticulous pre-planning of everything that will transpire when he’s about to pull off one of his ingenious plans is still something to marvel at.

Also worth marvelling at is a level of production value that amazingly makes this look even better than the already gorgeous first movie did, albeit a shade darker and grimier. Though it’s a shame almost all of it takes place outside of London, it remains firmly rooted in a late Victorian aesthetic, yet with a modern sheen that steers clear of steam-punk anachronism.

Director Guy Ritchie once again plays out the fights in super slow motion, a highly stylised approach that renders the movie exciting because it’s boisterous and noisy, not because it’s especially imaginative or clever. And, crucially, it lacks that that one intricate sequence that isn’t just a lot of bang-bang.

It’s not disappointing then by most standards, just likely to leave a nagging sense that it could, and should, all be so much better.

Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked review

2011-12-08T08:37:00.001-08:00

Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked (U, 87 mins)
Director: Mike Mitchell

★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

Alvin and his brothers Theodore and Simon are computer generated rock star chipmunks whose two movie outings thus far have set box office tills worldwide ringing to the tune of $800m, all the while offering barely a moment’s entertainment. This inevitable second sequel sees them, along with their ‘dad’ Dave (Jason Lee) and girl group the Chipettes on a cruise ship, where what Dave has planned as a relaxing vacation turns into a nightmare thanks to Alvin being more mischievous than ever. A hang-gliding stunt ends up with them lost at sea, where sadly they don’t drown but end up on a desert island where sadly they're not eaten by foxes. Once again, an actual plot is not on the minds of the filmmakers, though the island setting does keep it focussed and there is real threat and stakes. Still, there are many inexplicable elements, with once again the Chipettes voiced by Anna Faris and Christina Applegate when they could be anyone, and really the film is just mostly a tired parade of dance routines and cover songs. There’s no faulting the CGI used to realise the rodents, and there are a couple of nice Cast Away gags, but largely it’s pratfalls and pop culture references, and to say it’s an improvement on the brain-piercing atrocity that was the second Alvin movie, The Squeakquel, is damning with very faint praise indeed.

New Year’s Eve review

2011-12-06T15:09:00.001-08:00

New Year’s Eve (12A/PG-13, 118 mins)
Director: Garry Marshall

★ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

An in-concept only follow up to Valentine’s Day, this hideous romantic comedy tracks what appears to be several thousand different characters on a New York New Year’s Eve, taking in births, deaths and marriages, with many of them orbiting Jon Bon Jovi’s rock star, due to play a gig at Times Square where most of them end up gathering. Returning players such as Jessica Biel and Ashton Kutcher take on entirely different characters from those in Valentine’s Day, while the likes of Robert De Niro, Halle Berry and Sarah Jessica Parker get roped into feeble situations constructed with the most flat and uninspired direction and acting imaginable. With an alarming dearth of laughs when it’s not being cloying and obvious, it soon progresses from just being bad to active incompetence, made with a complete lack of care and attention. The only remotely tolerable thread involves Zac Efron helping out Michelle Pfeiffer’s dowdy office worker, but they're forced too frequently to make way for the rest of a catastrophe that makes Valentine’s Day look like His Girl Friday.

DVD Prizes To Be Won

2011-11-24T05:00:00.001-08:00

Win Rare Exports on DVD

This competition is now closed.

Terms and Conditions

Only one entry will be accepted per person.
Entrants must be UK residents and aged 18 or over.
The judge's decision is final and no correspondence will be entered into.

Win a subscription to The Dark Side

2011-11-18T05:37:00.001-08:00

Win a year's digital subscription to The Dark Side.

The UK’s number one specialist horror genre magazine The Dark Side has just turned 21 years old and to celebrate this momentous anniversary in style, along with the help and support of sponsors Network DVD, The Dark Side is offering all its readers, both old and new, the chance to enjoy the magazine’s first four rare collectors’ editions totally free of charge at www.thedarksidemagazine.com. No longer available to buy as back issues, these archive volumes have been recreated as brand new digital editions allowing readers to take a chilling journey down the dark alleyways of horror history.

If you want to catch up with The Dark Side now then do visit their website for print and digital subscriptions but we're offering one lucky reader a chance to win a digital subscription for a whole year!

To be in with a chance of winning, simply send an email with your name and address to aloneinthedarkcomps@gmail.com by Friday December 2nd.

Terms and Conditions

Only one entry will be accepted per person.
Entrants must be UK residents and aged 18 or over.
The judge's decision is final and no correspondence will be entered into.

Justice review

2011-11-14T12:57:00.001-08:00

Justice (15, 104 mins)
Director: Roger Donaldson
★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

The original title of this batty thriller was The Hungry Rabbit Jumps, a coded phrase that crops up early as we open on a man being secretly filmed while being questioned by persons unknown.

Moments later he’s in his car and being pushed off the roof of a car-park by another vehicle, and how these events are connected with husband and wife Will and Laura (Nicolas Cage and January Jones) soon becomes clear.

He’s a New Orleans teacher and she a musician whose lives are turned upside down when Laura is brutally assaulted. Will is approached by someone calling himself Simon (Guy Pearce) who says he’s with an organisation who will “take care” of the problem. After a bit of thought, it’s an offer Will accepts, and sure enough, Laura’s attacker ends up dead, killed by the husband of a previous victim of crime.

But, just like in The Godfather, Will may be called upon by Simon to provide a service, which starts out innocuously enough, just deliveries and observation. But soon he’s being asked to murder a suspected criminal as payback for the service provided for him, and if he refuses, things are likely to turn very nasty indeed for Laura and him.

Vigilantism always makes for an interesting and provocative subject matter, though one that’s rarely treated well by modern movies. But Justice doesn’t really ask any moral questions of the audience, preferring to quickly turn into the usual innocent man wronged tropes.

It also doesn’t take very long at all to go from silly to preposterous. It’s one of those daft thrillers where practically everyone in it is part of a network of operatives, a springboard for moronic twists that provide absolutely no clue just whose side Xander Berkeley’s cop is supposed to be on.

It’s cheap looking and over-egged when it’s being serious, and twee and unconvincing when it’s trying to be a bit lighter, and all you really get in the way of excitement is shady guys watching and doing things unseen and some extremely low rent chases.

Cage in normal guy mode is like Fun Bobby from Friends when he’s sober – just not enjoyable for anyone to be around, and you realise you miss the wacky, off the wall Cage, who at least brings a certain manic energy to films that are invariably rubbish anyway.

Arthur Christmas review

2011-11-08T14:19:00.000-08:00

Arthur Christmas (U, 97 mins)
Director: Sarah Smith
★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

Arthur Christmas (voiced by James McAvoy) lives at the North Pole with his family, and mostly spends his time reading letters that have been sent to Santa. His dad Malcolm (Jim Broadbent) is the current Father Christmas, but big brother Steve (Hugh Laurie) yearns to take over, and orchestrates the present delivery like a military operation, shown in an ingenious sequence that reveals how the elves manage to deliver to every child in the world in a single night. But when one child is missed out and Steve doesn’t seem to care, it’s up to Arthur and his Grandsanta (Bill Nighy) to get that little girl her bike no matter what. This breezy computer animation from Aardman can only dip after such a fantastic start, and for a while the plot starts to wander as much as Arthur does, as his world tour to deliver the errant present takes him from Mexico to Africa, though with enough wit and imagination to make the journey a pleasant one, and only a bit of steam lost. It remains engaging throughout thanks to cheery voices, the show stolen by Ashley Jensen as Bryony, an elf with very impressive present-wrapping skills, and it’s certainly heartwarming enough to get by.

Tower Heist review

2011-11-02T04:07:00.000-07:00

Tower Heist (12A, 104 mins)
Director: Brett Ratner
★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

Ben Stiller is the manager of a New York apartment building for the super-rich, keeping the place ticking. When one of the residents (Alan Alda) is arrested in a billion dollar fraud scandal, all the staff find their pensions are gone, so Stiller and a bunch of disgruntled employees hatch a scheme to relieve Alda of the $20m in cash they believe he’s hidden in his home. With no skills between them, and Stiller forced to enlist the help of his jailbird neighbour (Eddie Murphy), it should play like a low-rent Ocean’s Eleven, with all the opportunity for breezy caper antics that should afford, and which ought to be the basis for a few undemanding laughs. In its defence, it's the best thing Murphy has been attached to in years, and his performance has an edge that's been missing since his heyday, meaning that what few chuckles there are come from him. But the rest is flabby, with plot holes that aren’t so much gaping as offensive, and entirely lacking in sparkle or surprises.

Win Straw Dogs on Blu-ray

2011-10-27T09:46:00.000-07:00

This competition is now closed.

Terms and Conditions

Only one entry will be accepted per person.
Entrants must be UK residents and aged 18 or over.
The judge's decision is final and no correspondence will be entered into.

The Adventures of Tintin review

2011-10-24T15:58:00.000-07:00

The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn (PG, 107 mins)
Director: Steven Spielberg
★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

Steven Spielberg’s first film since the much lamented Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull arrives as a huge, multi-million dollar gamble for many reasons.

First off, it’s an adaptation of what is a fairly niche property, Hergé’s 80 year old Belgian comic book. And, unknown for a film of this scale from the world’s most famous and successful filmmaker, it’s out in Europe now but won’t hit cinemas in the States until Christmas, the reason given that its Euro-ancestry makes it only right that it should play here first.

More to the point, the financiers will be praying it already has some hundreds of millions in the bank from its worldwide run before it arrives Stateside. That’s because the other massive gamble is that this is a motion capture animation, much like that notorious disaster from earlier this year, Mars Needs Moms, which was one of, if not the, biggest flops in box office history.

But it will sell on Spielberg’s name, and hopefully it will sell based on the fact that it’s really very good indeed, a rollicking adventure that contains several moments of unrivalled cinematic exhilaration from a director whom we’d thought had forgotten how to have fun.

We meet our hero, young reporter Tintin (voiced and performance captured by Jamie Bell) as he buys a model ship in a market, one which a lot of people seem keen to get their hands on, including the devious Sakharine (Daniel Craig).

The ship is the Unicorn, a replica of a real boat lost since the 17th century, and thought to have gone down with its secret treasure. Kidnapped by Sakharine, Tintin meets Captain Haddock, whose ancestor was captain of the Unicorn, and is played as a drunken Scotsman with a mostly agreeable but occasionally fishy accent by Andy Serkis.

It’s a blend of intrigue and action that spends much of the first half introducing plenty of engaging supporting characters, like Tintin’s dog Snowy, who frequently appears to be smarter than he is, and the useless detectives Thomson and Thompson (Nick Frost and Simon Pegg).

But it hits its stride during a marvellously inventive biplane sequence which takes Tintin and Haddock to Africa and the meat of the adventure, and an equally impressive flashback featuring the original Unicorn captain and his pirate encounter.

It’s at this point the action barely pauses for breath and when it most begins to resemble an Indy flick. The centrepiece, a chase through a Moroccan town, is truly breathtaking, although this does make it seem like the film peaks early.

A pertinent question might have been why it’s been filmed as an animation at all, and not simply live action. The answer to that lies in an astonishingly detailed level of richness and opulence in the design that would have been hard to achieve on any budget, and action sequences so fluid and imaginative that they would have been impossible as live action without the need for so much CGI that it would look like a cartoon anyway.

The issue of dead eyes and waxy features that has blighted so many mo-cap efforts also seems to have been addressed, with faces full of life and expression, although every once in a while the characters do move like they're on strings.

But that’s a tiny flaw, and let’s hope the gamble pays off, so that in a couple of years from now we’ll be enjoying the proposed Peter Jackson sequel, followed by many more Tintin adventures to come.

First Night review

2011-10-09T16:12:00.000-07:00

First Night (15, 116 mins)
Director: Christopher Menaul
★ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

A group of opera singers are brought together by Richard E. Grant’s wealthy industrialist to stage a production of Cosi fan Tutte in the grounds of his country estate. As they plod through their rehearsals, punctuated by the goings on in and out of the bedrooms during the downtime, we’re forced to suffer through a barely competent am-dram car crash, and the most clumsily directed, misbegotten tosh you’re likely to see all year. It’s acted out by a bunch of dreadful old hams who can’t seem to perform the most basic lines or actions, with not a single moment that rings true and many that would be hilarious if they weren’t so painfully embarrassing. This really is appalling on every level, a desperate pudding that not even Mozart can save.

The Three Musketeers review

2011-10-09T16:07:00.000-07:00

The Three Musketeers (12A/PG-13, 110 mins)
Director: Paul W.S. Anderson

★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

This umpteenth version of Alexandre Dumas’ novel announces itself from the off as a Pirates of the Caribbean style fantasy, much too interested in delivering 21st century thrills even though it’s set in the early 1600s.

We meet the three musketeers, the king’s elite guards, who are introduced to us as spies and assassins, and young D’Artagnan (Logan Lerman) who longs to join up with them, even though they're all washed up.

Young king Louis XIII is on the throne of France, but Cardinal Richelieu (Christoph Waltz) is plotting to start a war with England so that he can take over the running of the country, with only the musketeers able to foil his scheme.

A surfeit of baddies certainly doesn’t help to keep matters manageable. As well as Richelieu, there’s Mila Jovovich as M’lady, here turned into a super-assassin, Orlando Bloom’s Buckingham and Mads Mikkelsen’s Rochefort, each of them given a centre stage turn as the musketeers disappear for long stretches, leaving behind a useless teen angst subplot about the king and his bride.

All this takes place against truly lavish, opulent sets and magnificent computer generated recreations of Paris and beyond. No expense has been spared and every moment on screen looks glorious. But with the niceties out of the way, let’s take a look at what doesn’t work, which is pretty much the rest of it.

First things first, get some fun, charismatic actors to play your musketeers. Matthew Macfadyen, Ray Stevenson and Luke Evans are solid enough, but no one’s idea of star attractions, while Lerman fluctuates wildly between an American accent and various parts of Europe.

Next, get a director with the first clue about staging action. It’s a movie full of swordfights and explosions and therefore mildly diverting as it goes, but the action scenes are modelled after 300 and Resident Evil, only without the benefit of sane editing.

The numerous fancy booby traps and devices give it a certain pizzazz, no question, but it becomes all about the whizz-bang, with the anachronistic weaponry and gadgetry an attempt to turn it into a shiny confection rather than a period piece.

Dismal dialogue means it starts out silly and only gets sillier still by the time James Corden rocks up as Planchet with the sole purpose of having a bird shit on his head, and his attempts at comic relief are painful.

And though it’s marginally better than the Peter Hyams swing at the story from a decade ago, The Musketeer, that really isn’t saying a great deal.

Kevin Smith Red State Interview

2011-09-27T17:47:00.000-07:00

Kevin Smith interviewed by Paul Greenwood, Glasgow, September 14th, 2011

Red State seems like a film made by someone with a lot to say....

Early in my career I had a lot to say and then in the middle of my career I didn’t have too much to say and now I've decided to end the career, and once you know there’s not much time to say anything, you start saying everything. It came from a place of not having had much on my mind for the last few years. I love Zack and Miri, but no one was crying for the story of that, and certainly not Cop Out, to be told, but this feels for the first time in a while I get to make a flick where there’s some real meat, some layers, and you get to enjoy it on several levels, and it’s got a bunch to say while saying nothing at all. I like the trappings of the exploitation film because it downplays what could be a very medicine-y message movie. You wrap it up in the gunfights and the fun of the chase and who’s going to get killed next, I think that takes the medicine-y edge off, and then you forget maybe it has something on its mind.

What was the catalyst for wanting to tell this story?

In the States we have to deal with the Westboro Baptist Church all the time in the media. You guys know them over here from the Louis Theroux doc, The Most Hated Family in America, these people wasting everybody’s time. They usually show up on the worst day of a person’s life, as they're putting a child in the ground and holding up their ridiculous signs and making lives miserable, and when you see that enough over the years you wish you could stop it, but you can’t stop free speech, particularly in my country, so your hands are tied to some degree. But you hate watching bullies of any kind, particularly bullies that run rampant in the name of God. So the movie is kind of my version of holding up a sign like they do, just to make their lives a little less pleasant, just irritate them a little bit. They’re monsters in real life and Red State kind of makes them cartoons, takes the idea of something like WBC and gun-toting religious nuts and throws them up on the screen - you take the monster, pull their teeth out, paint them up like clowns, and say look at these idiots. And that’s my version of them holding up a ‘God hates whatever’ sign.

If you do it all heavy handed it doesn’t work nearly as well, so you wrap it up in some entertainment at the same time. Bruce Willis said to me one time on set, ’It’s a movie, we should be moving’. And that stuck with me, so this is constantly moving forward, even when it’s not talking about issues, it’s designed to not let you get ahead of it. When I was writing it, every time I felt like I knew where it was going I just switched, jumped over to something else. I knew that if I knew where it was going, the audience would as well, so in order to make it fun for everybody you jump around and do genre mash-ups where it’s three different movies at once. That’s a great way to throw the audience, suddenly dropping one movie and picking up another. I've seen far better filmmakers than me do it for years, like the Coen brothers in Fargo - what a wonderful magic trick where it’s 30 minutes into the movie before the heroine finally joins; if you can pull that off I always thought it would be neat to have that kind of talent. And that’s kind of what Red State is, it’s me trying to do someone else’s movie, Quentin Tarantino by way of the Coens, with just enough of my sensibility in there so that people know it’s still me.

Do you want people to be surprised it’s a Kevin Smith film?

The highest compliment you can get is when some says to me ‘You didn’t direct this’. Every once in a while as an artist you should reinvent and give them something new, because once they get used to your bag of tricks, it’s so easy for everyone to go across the street and start looking for something else. If you want to maintain an audience or stay relevant or keep fresh, you’ve got to do something different every once in a while. And this was pretty drastic, I really feel like I took a nice chainsaw to the career of Kevin Smith, I took it down and then rebuilt it. But that’s a good thing, it’s not like ‘Oh, I hate my old career’, it’s just that I've done it and in order to step to the next place you obliterate the old and build something new. This is part of it, all the podcasts on the Smodcast network are part of it, and it feels neat. For the first time in a long time I feel on fire, and art should feel like if you don’t make it you’ll die, which is how I felt with Clerks and Chasing Amy and now Red State. With most of the stuff in the middle, it was more like ‘If I don’t make this movie, I'll just make another movie’.

So it’s nice to feel the desperation again, it makes you feel young. I just turned 41, so the notion of being involved in punk rock filmmaking in any shape of form, as we did with Red State, it makes you feel vital, just kind of gasses you up, and gives you enough energy to get through what will be the last flick I'll do after this, Hit Somebody. And then I'll be able to close it down. I'm kind of in love with the idea of completing a career, being able to say this was my movie period, for 20 years I made flicks, started with Clerks and ended with Hit Somebody, and there it is. That way the work never really gets a chance to start sucking, go out strong. I’d rather do that than sit around and collect a cheque. Some movies work, some don’t, but if I don’t have the fire in my belly for it, you make stuff like Cop Out and Zack and Miri, just movies. They can be fun and I love them, but they're not screaming to be made. There’s a lot of me in them but it’s not me opening up my mind and my heart and pouring it onto celluloid. When someone asks what my favourites were, it’s easy to point to the cheap ones. Clerks, $27,000, Chasing Amy $250,000, Clerks II $5m and now Red State $4m – the less money we had, the more creative we got, the riskier we could be. Jersey Girl was $35m and you can’t take any risks. The less money we had, there’s a sense of, fuck it, we can’t get in trouble, let’s go for it.

Will you pay much attention to the film’s critical response?

I got into a thing with critics after Cop Out where I had a real weird relationship with them and I’d started paying them too much attention. Even from day one with Clerks, I was always told I had to love and respect and kiss the ass of the critical community because they're the conduit between you and the audience, particularly if you’re a weird filmmaker. We’re talking pre-internet in 1994 where if you're making indie flicks, that’s the only way anyone is going to hear about it. And then the world changed, and I can now get in touch with the audience directly. I don’t have to rely on the opinions of a few people who’ve been canonised as people who can tell you whether your movie is good or bad, I can literally ask someone who bought a ticket, I can hear from anyone with an internet connection. So for years I played the game all filmmakers play where you smile through the bad reviews and engage when the reviews are good, and I got kind of sick of it. How can anyone tell me that I failed at self-expression? Art is subjective, when someone self-expresses, there’s no failure, there’s no wrong way. It got to a point where I thought ‘I'm done with this backwards nonsense’. I realised with Red State that I had to cut ties with the critical community, there’s no way I could have been as free as I was making this movie if I was worried about what people would think about it afterwards.

What were some of your horror influences going into Red State?

Rosemary’s Baby was a huge influence, because the creepiness of that flick is how normal everyone comes across. Ruth Gordon and all those senior citizens in that movie, they come across so sickeningly normal that it makes it even more terrifying. There’s also an exploitation film from the 70s I was always scared of called Race with the Devil, with Warren Oates and Peter Fonda camped out in the desert and they discover a Satanist cult who chase them across the desert in their Winnebago. So those devil worship movies really captured my imagination.

The distribution of the film in the States was unusual, where you took it on the road one city at a time. What was your thinking behind that?

The conventional wisdom is you got to spend money to make money, but I thought if I could just take this movie out there, we could make the money back without spending any more. My philosophy was we already spent the money, we made the fucking movie, but spending more than that to reach the audience in a world where I could tweet them or do a podcast or a radio or TV show for free, why are we spending all this money to get to the same place? So I then took the philosophy of less is more to the next degree in terms of marketing, just go after the audience. I've been through the release of a movie nine times prior to this, so I pretty much know what to expect. But the nice thing about Red State is it’s being going on now for almost a year since we found out we were in Sundance, so for a year without spending a dime I've just been stoking fires, showing it places, showing it over here in the UK, which brings it back to life again while it’s still live in the States. My hope is it never totally goes to sleep, like a conventional film with its theatrical run, home video and then that’s it. I want to see if, let’s say two years from now, I can still take Red State out, sell out a 500 seat venue and still charge a premium for it, even though the movie will be on DVD. I could literally go anywhere in the States or the UK and throw a screening of Red State on, I'll do a Q&A after it, 20 bucks, and people will still come out. And you put that money into a box office chart every month and that movie is still alive, generally you don’t see a two year old movie in the box office chart. I'm not doing it for financial gain, I just want to see if it can be done, and that’s the very essence of art.

Melancholia review

2011-09-25T16:29:00.000-07:00

Melancholia (15, 135 mins)

Director: Lars von Trier

★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

Like Danish director Lars von Trier’s previous film, Antichrist, Melancholia begins with a dreamy super slo-mo prologue, presenting seemingly random shots of Kirsten Dunst on a golf course in a wedding dress, intercut with images of the cosmos and the earth crashing into another planet. This takes us into a lengthy wedding sequence in which Dunst’s depressive bride and her loathsome family are revealed, as their bickering takes its toll on her fragile mental state. Though this goes on much too long, and is frequently deeply pretentious, it contains many moments of merit, not least a fine performance by Dunst. Meanwhile, a planet called Melancholia is due to pass by earth, and this is where the film becomes something remarkable, an existential sci-fi where Deep Impact meets The Tree of Life. It wouldn’t be a von Trier film if it didn’t go bananas at some point, and there’s a grim fascination to see just where it will go. And as an examination of depression, desperation and how people deal with death, it’s really quite distressing despite its indulgences.