The Demon Barber of Fleet Streets gruesome tale.

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From the outset, you know this film is from the imagination of Tim Burton. The streets of London are midnight blue, and his characters faces are pale and dirty. I suppose the fact that it has both Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham-Carter is a dead giveaway too. Even the opening credits are fun, complete with tomato ketchup blood. And boy, is there a lot of it. And its great fun to watch. The story is from the musical of the same name, and follows Todd, who was banished from his happy life with his wife and child because Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman) took a fancy to his spouse. the bad Judge decide to get rid of Todd so that he could have her for himself. The film begins with Todd being found on a boat after he has been rescued by a young sailor who is taking him home to London. When he arrives back at his old barber shop, he finds Mrs Lovett (Bonham-Carter), his neighbour in the shop below, who makes 'the worst pies in London'. Times are hard, and meat is scarce. She discovers who...

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This film is fantastic. Odd, and a bit confused about what it wants to be at times, but it's still great. Steve Carell plays Dan, an awkward widower struggling to bring up his 3 daughters. One of whom is 13 and has a boyfriend (which he strongly disapproves of), one who is 17 and desperate to drive but he wont allow her because 'its not her, its the other people on the road', and his youngest who is about 7 or 8 who is by far the easiest to look after because she's still in the stage of being a daddy's girl. Having torn his middle child away from her boyfriend to go on the annual trip to his parents where the whole family have congregated, and not allowing his eldest to drive, he leaves his daughters to cool down. After his mum has sent Dan away, he wanders into a bookshop where he meets Marie (Juliette Binoche), and, after pretending to be a store clerk so that he can talk to her he takes her for coffee and it's love at first sight. The meeting is short lived as she has to run...

A teenagers life in the aftermath of an accidental murder

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Directed by Gus Van Sant, and told through a letter, Paranoid Park is the story of a young (at a guess, 16 or 17) skater who accidentally kills a security guard, and what has happened in his life after it as he struggles to come to terms with what he has done. There's nothing complicated about the story itself, the lead, Alex, sometimes stumbles over his words as he reads aloud, but it jumps a lot through different timeframes, repeating scenes as he struggles to piece together what has happened - 'I was never very good at creative writing'. It has one of the most horrifying scenes I've ever seen. Forget monsters and full on gore, this was just plain disturbing. I actually choked on my popcorn. It is a bit gory, but its the sheer horror of what is actually happening itself at the scene of the security guard's death. What’s great about it is that we don’t see the archetypal skater boy - we meet a shy, nervous boy who's messed up, but tries to keep it to himself. His girlfriend...

Pride is a curse

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Robert Zemeckis's animated versioun of the story of Beowulf

Get Ready to get wasted

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Take a bunch of daft American teenagers, send them over to Ireland to meet their hippy pals and go taking mushrooms in the middle of the woods, add in some inbred peasant goatherders living in middle of said woods, supposedly true campfire story of a children's home nearby run by sadistic monks that tortured the children before going on a rampage killing them all that supposedly haunt the area, have one of the teenagers flip out and having premonitions of something hunting them, then people start to go mising.. yeah, you get the idea. Formulaic b-movie horror it is, nicking bits from blair witch, texas chainsaw massacre, the JUDDERMAN and whatever else it can find along the way but strangely not the complete utter gashfest I was expecting. Really, really nicely shot, some well excecuted 'tripping' camera effects, and half decent attempt at 'is this real or are they just hallucinating?', plus an amusing talking cow. Other than that, expect plenty slow tension building with a...

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The latest film from director David Cronenberg is not easy viewing, but when have Cronenberg's films ever been so? This is the story of Tom Stall, a small town America family man who has a quiet and seemingly perfect life. Married to Edie and with two children, Jack and Sarah, Tom runs a coffee shop. Things for Tom are gentle and happy and his life is good, until one day two armed men come in to his coffee shop. Tom foils their attempt at robbery, and his life is changed forever when the media latch on to his story and portray him as a new American hero. The film is based on a graphic novel by Vince Locke and Jack Wagner who also worked on the film. The novel has its critics but the concept of the story is one which most of us have discussed at some point: does violence beget violence? The title of the film and the opening scene leave the audience in no doubt as to what they are about to see. This film is brutal and the violence is deeply unpleasant. Like American History...

There are shop boys, and boys who just happen to work in shops for the time being.

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A philosopher once asked,
'Are we human because we look at the stars, or do we look at the stars because we are human?'
Pointless really.
'Do the stars gaze back?'
Now that's a question.

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The Counterfeiters is the true story of the Jews who were put to work forging British and American currency in concentration camps during the Second World War. It is mainly based around Salomon "Sally" Sorowitsch who, before the war, lives a life of luxury, earning a lot of money from counterfeiting. The chief of police who is pleased to arrest ‘the best’ catches him however. Placed into a concentration camp, through his art and general wit when it comes to knowing how to treat the officers who are in charge of him, Sally stays out of trouble, far more well fed and clean than his fellow Jews as he is allowed to work on various artistic projects. He is moved to a new camp, where he again encounters the chief of police who is pleased to see him, as the task which he has could not have been better suited to anyone else. He and his fellow Jews are placed into much finer conditions than that of the poor souls outside of his quarters, who’s conditions are heard from time to time...

Experimentation ... Evolution ... Extinction

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Part 3 of the RE film series.

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Team Sparta: Greece Police is the latest result of Hollywood's burning compulsion for translating comic books into big screen fodder. It's not so much a film as a slideshow of gorgeous desktop wallpapers. It is, however, huge amounts of fun. The eponymous comic, of which the film is (for the most part) a faithful scene-by-scene translation, is itself extremely loosely based on the battle of Thermopylae, in which a small Greek contingent faced off against the might of the Persian Empire in 480 BCE. The group comprised some 300 Spartans, plus a few thousand assorted Greek soldiers of lesser calibre, and estimates of the invading forces arrayed against them range from 100,000 to over five million. Despite these overwhelming odds, thanks to martial superiority and clever use of terrain the Greeks managed to hold up the entire Persian advance for a period of several days, and inflicted a grossly disproportionate number of casualties. While the magnitude of the Persian forces may...