Miles Fielder

The Reaping

(15) 96min

11 Apr 2007

HORROR What the hell is Hilary Swank playing at? This glossy, but in all other ways substandard supernatural chiller is the kind of by-the-numbers chick horror flick that Sandra Bullock churns out periodically, not what you’d expect a two-time Oscar…

Hellboy

Comics

11 Apr 2007

DVD The first of three feature length television cartoons adapted from Mike Mignola’s marvellous comic book series, Sword of Storms takes Hellboy and his Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defence colleagues east to Japan where they duke it out with a…

Bryan Talbot

The Pilgrim’s Progress

26 Mar 2007

North of England born and bred comics creator Bryan Talbot is credited with writing and illustrating the very first British graphic novel. The Adventures of Luther Arkwright is a science fantasy epic initially serialised in 1978 and first collected in…

Little Red Flowers

(12A) 87min

26 Mar 2007

DRAMA/COMEDY Based on the semi-autobiographical novel by the bestselling enfant terrible of Chinese literature Wang Shuo, Little Red Flowers is the story of a precocious four-year-old boy, Qiang (Dong Bowen), who rebels against the conformity in his…

DVD - The Ultimate Film Noir Collection

The Ultimate Film Noir Collection

26 Mar 2007

THRILLER Although his fiction made a huge contribution to post-war American cinema via others’ screenplay adaptations, Raymond Chandler only wrote two films himself: The Blue Dahlia and (with Billy Wilder) Double Indemnity. Both feature in this…

Comics - Chicanos

Carlos Trillo & Eduardo Risso

26 Mar 2007

CRIME Fellow Argentineans Carlos Trillo and Eduardo Risso’s fourth collaboration, originally published in Italy and France, is a New York City-set crime comic featuring a pointedly unconventional protagonist: a short, fat, ugly Mexican female…

Profile - Gerard James Butler

Profile

13 Mar 2007

Name Gerard James Butler Born 13 November 1969, Glasgow, Scotland Background Raised by his divorced mother in her hometown of Paisley, and Canada, Butler studied law at Glasgow University but allegedly gave up on that career after losing his job…

Sleeping Dogs

(18) 89min

13 Mar 2007

A sexual indiscretion - and that’s putting it mildly - kicks of this tasteless but sweet natured comedy about a girl who’s hiding a traumatising secret (again, mildly put) from her fiancé. But although this consistently amusing and frequently hilarious…

Comics - 300

Frank Miller & Lynn Varley

12 Mar 2007

EPIC Re-reading Frank Miller’s graphic novella in its landscape format hardcover edition (it was originally serialised as a five-issue comic book in 1998/99), it’s clear just how perfectly suited 300 is for the Hollywood blockbuster film…

Eva Mendes

STUCK ON HER

27 Feb 2007

Aside from wanting to work with wild man Nicolas Cage and being a self-confessed freak, Eva Mendes’ motivation for playing a cartoon damsel-in-distress in the camp comic book adaptation Ghost Rider is seeing Latino women being fairly represented on the…

Profile - Edward Norton

PROFILE

27 Feb 2007

Name Edward Norton. Born 18 August 1969, Boston, US. Background Interested in acting from the age of five, by eight Norton was asking his drama teacher about his character’s ‘motivation’. He attended drama schools, but didn’t get serious about…

The Good German

27 Feb 2007

Steven Soderbergh said he decided to direct this adaptation of Joseph Kanon’s murder mystery novel set in Berlin at the end of WWII because he wanted to make a movie in the classic film noir style. Soderbergh, who also produced, photographed, and edited…

Grinderman - album review

Grinderman

27 Feb 2007

ROCK (Mute) Grinderman sounds like Nick Cave and three of his fellow Bad Seeds locked themselves in a dank basement for a week and beat into shape 11 songs in a series of dirty blues jam sessions. Actually, that’s pretty much what happened when…

Letters from Iwo Jima

12 Feb 2007

Clint Eastwood follows up his admirable but uneven World War II movie Flags of Our Fathers with a second, more accomplished, film looking at the battle for the Pacific island of Iwo Jima. This time the focus is on the Japanese as opposed to the American…

The Number 23

12 Feb 2007

This conspiracy theory chiller, penned by first time British screenwriter Fernley Phillips, turns on the notion that the number 23 is a diabolic digit pairing that’s ubiquitous and exhibits a pernicious effect on the world (the DNA of a child is…

Brian Azzarello & Eduardo Risso

100 Bullets: Decayed (Vertigo/Titan)

12 Feb 2007

CRIME Now possibly three-quarters of the way into this cracking crime drama (this tenth volume collects issues 68 through 75 of what’s perhaps going to be a double dead-eye 100), it’s clear just what an enormously impressive feat of writing 100…

Fast Food Nation

Food for thought

30 Jan 2007

Eric Schlosser touched a nerve with the public when he exposed the unethical and unhygienic practices of America’s junk food industry in his book Fast Food Nation. It swiftly became an international bestseller and required reading for anyone concerned…

Running with Scissors

29 Jan 2007

Nip/Tuck writer/executive producer Ryan Murphy does a very fine job of cutting/pasting onto the big screen the horrific and hilarious teenage memoir of journalist Augusten Burroughs. Abandoned first by his alcoholic father Norman (Alec Baldwin) and then…

Chris Ware - comic review

Chris Ware

29 Jan 2007

WARPED HUMOUR The 17th volume of Chris Ware’s now self-published irregular comic continues the sad tale of Rusty Brown, a pre-pubescent dork who lives in a snowbound small town in America’s mid-west, where he stubbornly clings to his best friend, a…

Grand Illusion, La - DVD review

La Grand Illusion

29 Jan 2007

WAR After La Grande Illusion won a prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1937, the Nazis declared it ‘cinematic enemy number one’, and when Germany invaded France a couple of years later Goebbels had prints of the film destroyed. Jean Renoir’s…

Black Book - Paul Verhoeven interview

15 Jan 2007

Dutch master Two decades after he left Holland for Hollywood’s dream factory, Paul Verhoeven has gone home to make his first Dutch film in 24 years. Having established himself as a critically and commercially successful maverick talent in Tinseltown…

Black Book

(15) 145min

15 Jan 2007

With his creativity curtailed by Hollywood’s dream factory since 2000’s underwhelming Hollow Man, Paul Verhoeven has gone home to Holland, where he’s also made a return to form with this pacy, provocative wartime thriller. It’s a companion piece to his…

The Fountain

15 Jan 2007

Plagued with production problems - most infamously star Brad Pitt exiting over creative differences, causing the film to close down - Darren Aronofsky’s labour of love has been a long time coming. Before rewriting the script and recasting a scaled down…

Them

(15) 78min

15 Jan 2007

A young French couple living in an old mansion 30 kilometres outside of Bucharest are woken one dark night by the sounds of intruders. Thereafter, a game of cat and mouse commences as the man and woman creep around their labyrinthine home stalked by…

Jason - comic review

Jason

9 Jan 2007

HORROR France-based Norwegian cartoonist Jason’s last graphic novella, The Left Bank Gang, was a witty, wacky crime caper featuring zoomorphic versions of modernist literature masters, canine Ezra Pound, James Joyce, etc. His new novella is an…

11:14 - DVD review

11:14

3 Jan 2007

DRAMA This clever cubist thriller examines a single moment in time from the varying perspectives of a dozen people for whom 11:14 pm proves to be a pivotal moment in their lives. Writer-director Greg Marcks’ inspired and assured feature debut begins…

Garon Tsuchiya & Nobuaki Minegishi - comic review

Garon Tsuchiya & Nobuaki Minegishi

19 Dec 2006

MANGA/CRIME This is the crime manga that inspired South Korean director Chan-wook Park’s acclaimed Cannes Grand Jury prize-winning film of the same name. Translated into English for the first time since it was published in 1997, Dark Horse have…

Flags of Our Fathers

7 Dec 2006

At 76 years of age, Hollywood living legend Clint Eastwood crowns his glorious career with his most ambitious film to date. Flags of Our Fathers is not his best film, but it’s an impressively epic endeavour, the first of two grand scale films shot…

Sir Kenry at Rawlinson End - DVD review

Sir Kenry at Rawlinson End

27 Nov 2006

SPOOF/COMEDY Confoundedly eccentric, inordinately shambolic and downright hilarious, this one-of-a-kind British cinema oddity plays like a collaboration between Luis Buñuel and the Monty Python team. It’s actually the fever dream of Vivian Stanshall…

The US vs John Lennon

27 Nov 2006

This incisive and engrossing documentary is both a portrait of the former Beatle as political activist and a slice of secret history from America’s recent past. It follows its subject from 1966-76, the heady years during which Lennon left The Beatles…

Dan Sartain - album review

Dan Sartain

27 Nov 2006

ROCK After the rocking good time garage punk, mamba and rockabilly workouts on Dan Sartain Vs The Serpientes this follow up is slightly disappointing. But then the boy from Birmingham, Alabama did set the bar impossibly high with his superb debut.

Comic - Jim Krueger, Alex Ross & Doug Braithwaite

Justice (DC/Titan)

22 Nov 2006

SUPERHERO The creators of Earth, Universe and Paradise X reunite (with Braithwaite providing pencil base for Ross’ glorious painted panels) for another heavily religious, wholly apocalyptic adventure involving DC’s greatest heroes and villains. This…

Comic - Marjane Satrapi

Marjane Satrapi

22 Nov 2006

BIOGRAPHY Having recounted the story of her own life in Persepolis, Iranian cartoonist Marjane Satrapi here tells the tale of the strange death of her great uncle, Nasser Ali Khan. By all accounts Khan was a world-class musician, and by Satrapi’s he…

Shortbus - interview

Real sex in the city

21 Nov 2006

New York City rom-com Shortbus is John Cameron Mitchell’s (writer, director and star of the stage musical and subsequent Sundance Film Festival favourite Hedwig and the Angry Inch) new film. It might sound a rather conventional follow-up to his riotous…

Green Man, The - DVD review

The Green Man

14 Nov 2006

COMEDY Aside from being quite possibly the great comic actor Alistair Sim’s finest hour, The Green Man is also one of the very best post-war British comedies. Directed by camera operator Robert Day, with the uncredited assistance of old pro Basil…

Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny

The devil plays guitar

13 Nov 2006

Tearing modesty a new asshole, Tenacious D describe themselves as ‘the world’s greatest rock band’. The D’s two members, Jack Black (vocals and rhythm guitar) and Kyle Gass (lead guitar and backing vocals), name check among their inspirations Kiss, Dio…

Pervert’s Guide To Cinema, The - interview

Popcorn and Brecht

13 Nov 2006

‘You enjoy a film immediately, naively, but theorising about films spoils enjoyment. I violently disagree with that,’ says outspoken and influential Slovenian philosopher and film lover Slavoj Zizek (pictured). ‘If anything I think it’s the opposite.’

Pan's Labyrinth

(15) 119min

13 Nov 2006

This wildly imaginative fabulist fable from Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro works as a companion piece to his earlier excellent Spanish language ghost story, The Devil’s Backbone. Like that film, Pan’s Labyrinth locates supernatural events within…

Casino Royale

(12A) 144min

13 Nov 2006

This second adaptation (following the 1967 spoof) of Ian Fleming’s first 007 novel is pitched as a prequel to the 20 films that came before it. It begins with James Bond becoming a ‘double 0’ licensed to kill agent and thereafter fills in how the…

Hollywoodland

13 Nov 2006

Pitched somewhere between the great Los Angeles noir Chinatown and the Tinseltown legend and lore of Gods and Monsters, Hollywoodland is at once a cracking thriller, lavish period drama and engrossing true life mystery. It centres around the death in…

The Pervert's Guide to Cinema

13 Nov 2006

If you want to know why Northern California’s avian population went nuts in The Birds, or how The Wizard of Oz was able to send Dorothy home to Kansas despite being a fraudulent huckster, then this is the film for you. A collaboration between Slovenian…

Tim Moore

Nul Points (Jonathan Cape)

11 Nov 2006

COMIC TRAVELOGUE Tim Moore usurped Bill Bryson’s humorous travel writing crown by putting himself through dreadful physical hardship ?" cycling the route of the Tour de France, dragging a braying donkey along the pilgrim trail to Santiago de…

Hawk and a Hacksaw, A - album review

A Hawk and a Hacksaw

11 Nov 2006

AVANT GARDE FOLK Jeremy Barnes, late of Leicestershire and recently relocated back home to Albuquerque, New Mexico, former drummer in the influential American indie rock band Neutral Milk Hotel, is a weirdo. And possibly a genius. His third album of…

Breaking and Entering

30 Oct 2006

Urban alienation among disillusioned middle-class thirtysomethings is a popular theme in film these days. In Anthony Minghella’s largely refreshing take on the subject, a number of disconnected individuals are connected or re-connected by a resolutely…

The Prestige

26 Oct 2006

Given that Christopher Nolan displayed masterful slight-of-hand with the backwards-unspooling amnesia thriller Memento, he’s the perfect man to adapt Christopher Priest’s novel about a diabolical personal vendetta played out between rival stage…

Scenes of a Sexual Nature

26 Oct 2006

Old school mates and new writing and directing team Aschlin Ditta and Ed Blum are to be congratulated for assembling an impressive cast, which includes Ewan McGregor, Sophie Okonedo, Catherine Tate, Gina McKee, Hugh Bonneville, Adrian Lester and Mark…

Romanzo Criminale

26 Oct 2006

This mobster epic charting the rise and fall of a gang of street punks from Rome’s suburbs, who took control of the capital’s criminal underworld in the 1970s, owes a debt not only to Italian crime movies of the period, but also to Italian-American…

Hawk and a Hacksaw, A - album review

A Hawk and a Hacksaw

26 Oct 2006

AVANT GARDE FOLK Jeremy Barnes, late of Leicestershire and recently relocated back home to Albuquerque, New Mexico, former drummer in the influential American indie rock band Neutral Milk Hotel, is a weirdo. And possibly a genius. His third album of…

Nabiel Kanan

The Drowners (Image)

26 Oct 2006

CRIME The US has the crime comic market sewn up with titles such as Stray Bullets and 100 Bullets. But this London-set, noir-styled murder mystery draws fine comparison with its Transatlantic cousins. UK writer-artist Nabiel Kanan’s fourth graphic…

Ultimate Hammer Box Set, The - DVD review

The Ultimate Hammer Box Set

17 Oct 2006

HORROR That the words ‘Hammer’ and ‘horror’ are synonymous is testament to the British production company’s significance in cinema history and to the enduring appeal of the films it produced. Although Hammer Film Productions Ltd had been making films…

The Grudge 2

12 Oct 2006

With four Japanese Ju-On: The Grudge films under his belt, a fifth in the works and now a pair of US remakes to his name, writer-director Takashi Shimizu has rung a lucrative career out of his simple idea of a malign ghost that haunts one victim after…

A Good Year

10 Oct 2006

On the page it sounds like a bloody cheek. Knackered from directing his Moroccan medieval epic, Kingdom of Heaven, Ridley Scott takes a paid holiday in the south of France (where he has a house) and tosses off a film adapted from a novel penned by an…

The Last Kiss

10 Oct 2006

This reworking of the 2001 Italian film L’Ultimo Bacio, scripted by Paul Haggis hot from his back-to-back Oscar wins for Million Dollar Baby and Crash, is a smug dram-rom-com that isn’t nearly as smart, original or true to life as its makers would…

David Lloyd

Kickback (Darkhorse)

10 Oct 2006

CRIME NOIR Well-established comic book artists usually get around to writing their own material at some point in their careers. Veteran British artist David Lloyd, who remains best known for his collaboration with Alan Moore on the virtuoso V for…

Nabiel Kanan

The Drowners (Image)

10 Oct 2006

CRIME The US has the crime comic market sewn up with titles such as Stray Bullets and 100 Bullets. But this London-set, noir-styled murder mystery draws fine comparison with its Transatlantic cousins. UK writer-artist Nabiel Kanan’s fourth graphic…

Brothers of the Head - interview

I wrote Don Quixote

2 Oct 2006

‘The danger is you mythologise,’ says British screenwriter Tony Grisoni, with reference to promoting his film Brothers of the Head. Prior to its premiere at last August’s Edinburgh International Film Festival Grisoni tells me, ‘During the making of a…

Brothers of the Head

(18) 93min

2 Oct 2006

MOCKUMENTARY Brothers of the Head This British mock-rock-doc is something of a curate’s egg. It purports to tell the life stories of Tom and Barry Howe, a pair of conjoined twins who were snatched from the obscurity of England’s southern…

Neil Young: Heart of Gold

2 Oct 2006

This concert film, combining the two nights Neil Young played at Nashville’s legendary Ryman auditorium in August 2005 finds the Canadian troubadour in rude health and sounding as soulful as ever. Amazingly, Young played the two gigs just a few short…

Countess Dracula

(18) 93min (Network DVD retail)

2 Oct 2006

HORROR Having sunk her fangs into the heaving flesh of Kate O’Mara and other voluptuous beauties in the 1970 Hammer hit The Vampire Lovers, Polish scream queen Ingrid Pitt was immediately cast in another softcore horror. Drafted in to replace Diana…

Medusa Touch, The

The Medusa Touch

2 Oct 2006

THRILLER This 1978 British-French made telekinesis chiller was released the same year as the Australian mind-over-matter thriller, Patrick and Brian De Palma’s psychic shocker The Fury. Jack Gold, who directed The Naked Civil Servant for television…

Fabio Moon & Gabriel Ba

De: TALES (Dark Horse)

2 Oct 2006

URBAN MYSTICISM Moon and Bá are Brazil’s answer to Los Bros Hernadnez. Like the Mexican creators of Love & Rockets this pair of young writer-artists are siblings (twins in fact), and like Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez’s comics, Moon and Bá’s strips mix…

Jamie Delano & David Lloyd

The Territory (Dark Horse)

28 Sep 2006

DARK SCI-FI Repackaged as a hardback on the back of V for Vendetta and the forthcoming Kickback, this flight of fantasy (originally published as a four-part series in 1999) was artist David Lloyd’s first collaboration with writer Jamie Delano since…

Thief of Baghdad, The

Thief of Baghdad,

4 Sep 2006

ADVENTURE Two decades before Ray Harryhausen’s The 7th Voyage of Sinbad indelibly imprinted the Arabian Nights fantasies upon the minds of film lovers, the sword and sorcery adventures were being realised on the silver screen under the all seeing eye…

David Lindsay - A Voyage to Arcturus (1920)

100 Best Scottish Books of all Time

1 Jan 2005

One of the greatest flights of fantasy in all of fantastic fiction, David Lindsay's debut is not only a metaphorical flight; it's also a quite literal one. Beginning with a séance in Hampstead and a journey to an observatory in north-east Scotland…