Shutter Island, the setting of the new film by the same name from Martin Scorsese, is a haunted place. Apart from the disturbing apparitions that stalk its protagonist, the island is overrun with the phantoms of 1950s Cold War conspiracy films and film noirs, cerebral thrillers like Jacob’s Ladder, Mulholland Drive and The Shining, and [...]
Lewis Carroll’s classic books have inspired countless pieces of popular culture over the years — movies as diverse as Terry Gilliam’s Jabberwocky and an animated 1951 Disney Alice in Wonderland film, computer games like American McGee’s Alice, and even a concept album by Tom Waits. But of all the artists to take a crack at [...]
A young father scans the crowd in a busy shopping mall, looking for a lost child. He pushes his way through a sea of shoppers. He spots a red balloon across the room, runs towards it hoping that it’s the one his 10-year old son is clutching in his hand. Concern gives way to panic [...]
Few videogame sequels have had to fight as hard to justify their existence as Bioshock 2. The game is a follow-up to a wildly ambitious and imaginative title that many fans felt had no need for a direct sequel. What’s more, it was put together without the guiding hand of the original’s celebrated designer, Ken [...]
An animated adaptation of Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr Fox seems, on the face of it, to be an unlikely project for Wes Anderson, the American auteur responsible for indie dramas such as Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums.
Yet his film version of the beloved children’s classic manages to be true both to his own quirks as [...]
Remember the first time you saw Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back and it grabbed you by the scruff of the neck from the opening battle on Hoth, not letting go until its famous cliffhanger ending? Mass Effect 2, the new space opera from role-playing game (RPG) master Bioware, captivated me in the same way [...]
Up in the Air, the new film from director Jason Reitman, feels at times like an overlong commercial for American Airlines, Hilton Hotels and Hertz Car Rental. Yet it expects to be taken seriously as a study in the loneliness of the long-distance business traveller.
That battle between filthy lucre and artistic pretension is just one [...]
The battle lines for this year’s best film and best director Oscars have been drawn between two movies that could hardly be more different: the bombastic, big-budget epic, Avatar, and the low-key Iraqi war thriller, The Hurt Locker.
As much as I enjoyed Avatar, I’m rooting for The Hurt Locker, if the choice is to be [...]
There are videogames that elevate the medium, perhaps not to the level of art, but to something approaching respectability. The gleefully dumb Bayonetta is not one of them. The third-person action game, published by Sega and developed by the Japanese studio Platinum Games, revels in its own trashiness as much as a Robert Rodriguez movie [...]
October and November are traditionally the cruellest months for gamers’ wallets, but the first quarter of 2010 is as jam-packed with big releases as any festive season in recent memory.
From low-key sleepers like the apocalyptic Zelda/God of War mash-up, Darksiders, to macho, fist-pumping shooters in the mould of Electronic Arts’ (EA’s) Army of Two: the [...]
