Review

Awoken after being buried for 200 years, reluctant vampire Barnabas Collins (Johnny Depp) comes across his first taste of 1970s-style civilization: a tarmac road leading through the forbidding forest. “This is curious terrain,” he pronounces. It most certainly is. The latest salvo in a lifelong mission to bring outsider cinema …

Think the New World crossed with Day For Night , as an idealistic Spanish director (Gael García Bernal) and his cynical producer (Luis Tosar) pitch up in Bolivia to make a revisionist epic about Christopher Columbus’ ‘conquering’ of America. Meanwhile, in Cochabamba the locals are resisting governmental attempts to privatise …

A romantic melodrama spanning four decades, this sweeping 1943 epic explores the English character through the experiences of a well-meaning buffoon whose touching belief in decency and fair play render him an endearing but irrelevant relic. Churchill was one of many dismayed by Powell and Pressburger’s affectionate satire. Its status …

If you were to make a list of the actors most likely to play a hardened, haunted marine, there can’t be many you’d put further down than Zac Efron. Then again, his character here is a hardened, haunted marine as viewed through the misty-eyed filter of The Notebook and Dear …

Aggressive yet fragile, Angel (the outstanding Clotilde Hesme) is trailing a troubled past when she pitches up in a Normandy fishing community, encountering reserved fisherman Tony (Grégory Gadebois) and his grieving family. A relationship begins to bud, but Angel has a secret that could mar it… Blending docu-style realism and …

In the ’90s, Whit Stillman was one of the US indie scene’s bright young things, a chronicler of neurotic, narcissistic, upper-crust youth whose 1990 debut Metropolitan was an undoubted inspiration for the career of Wes Anderson. But where’s he been hiding since his last film, 1998’s The Last Days Of …

Who doesn’t love Elmo, the scraggly red Muppet with the round orange nose and the big, trusting eyes, the squeaky voice and the lion-sized heart? Never mind kids – which of us adults wouldn’t benefit from one of Elmo’s love-filled hugs? Constance Marks’ suitably warm-hearted documentary introduces viewers to the …

Episode 4.08 Writer: Toby Whithouse Director: Philip John THE ONE WHERE Burn, baby, burn… Annie blows up Eve and the leader of the Old Ones – and finally moves on. Could this be the end for Being Human ? It could, you know. It really could. But we fervently hope …

Unfolding in the titular Normandy port, Aki Kaurismäki’s ( Lights In The Dusk ) latest is another of the Finnish director’s deadpan fairytales. Elderly artist-turned-shoeshine merchant Marcel (André Wilms) is already coping with an ailing wife (Kati Outinen) when he comes across an African stowaway child (Blondin Miguel), who risks …

Playing Armored Core V, the latest in From Software’s cultish series of rock ‘em, sock ‘em giant AC (mecha) simulators, was something of an emotional journey. After the dust cleared, our therapist (a former Nintendo gameplay counselor, now in private practice) helped us identify four distinct phases: confusion, excitement, disillusionment, …