Every time you see a truly old film being covered in this blog, you’d know that it must be because it’s one of the all time greats. This is especially true for Sunrise by German expressionist director F.W. Murnau which is usually considered as one of the top ten greatest films of all time. It also stars the extremely tiny Janet Gaynor who we’ve seen before in Street Angel.
This is the last of a series of recommendations of interesting European animated films from a Chinese television program that my wife caught a long while ago. This one is obviously French and unlike so many animated films we’ve seen is apparently an original creation instead of being based on another property. However as is appropriate it derives its art style from a variety of famous artists including Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso.
This was a recommendation I read on Marginal Revolution. Tyler Cowen, oddly enough, praised it for its depiction of modern Taipei. After reading its synopsis however I became a bit apprehensive: stories about geniuses who suffer from a mental ailment of some sort as a side effect of their talent is well-trodden territory and risk conforming to a standard formula. X + Y (known in the US as A Brillliant Young Mind) might be doubly prone to these tropes as its protagonist is a teenager.
For a very long time, Games Workshop refused to allow anyone to make video games based on their licensed properties. But now that they’ve jumped on the digital bandwagon the floodgates are totally open and there’s been all sorts of adaptations, some of them of dubious quality by rather small companies. This is one of the lower budget adaptations for their Battle for Armageddon boardgame by Slitherine, a company known for its hex-based wargames. I wouldn’t say this is low quality but it does have rather low production values, including spelling errors scattered around which are somehow still even after multiple patches.
It’s been a while since we’ve actually watched a film in a local cinema. This one was picked because it’s an animated film which always makes my wife happy, it has a stellar Rotten Tomatoes rating and at least one poster on Broken Forum had some nice things to say about it. It also helps that this was made by Laika, the studio that only does stop-motion animation, and was responsible for the impressive Coraline.
Ever since I started watching films seriously, I’ve been a bit obsessed with lists of the best films. It goes without saying that these are always highly subjective and prone to all sorts of biases but they’re awesome for knowing what’s out there. The problem with lists of great cinema is that they’re heavily weighted towards the great films of the past so that it’s hard to spot anything recent on them. This is why one of the most interesting lists I’ve seen recently is one that limits itself only to films released so far in the 21st century and this film by Paolo Sorrentino had a strong showing on it.
If you’ve heard about the term “pod people” but have never watched Invasion of the Body Snatchers, well, now you know where it comes from. I didn’t know this myself until I watched this film and I’ve even watched the 2007 remake starring Nicole Kidman and simply titled Invasion. That version admittedly isn’t very good and doesn’t have pod people at all. I also didn’t realize until after the film was over that this 1978 version is also a remake of the original that was made in 1956. It always seemed to me that this version is more well known, especially since the iconic final shot of Donald Sutherland is a popular image on the Internet.