Mia Wasikowska

‘Crimson Peak’ is an ambitious miscalculation that should have waited for the script to catch up with the visuals.

Christoph Waltz is prepping his directorial debut, The Worst Marriage in Georgetown, for which he will also produce and star. In the film, Waltz will play Albrecht Muth, a man who sought to enter the social elite and the privileged political circles by marrying the wealthy, 71-year-old Viola Drath when he was just 26. The …

The New York Film Festival starts today, and with it critics and industry members will get their first look at Gone Girl and Inherent Vice, leaving only a few studio tent poles remaining throughout the fall. They’ll also get a renewed look at Mr. Turner, Foxcatcher, and Birdman, so expect those to be back in …

Adapting such a real life story into a piece of cinema brings with it a series of extraordinary challenges. For starters, the walk itself lasted a mind-boggling 9 months. How does one communicate the length of a near 3,000-kilometer long walk to modern audiences with boring them to death? Short of pulling off a Béla Tarr Satantango-esque epic, judicious decisions need be taken in order to pack the essentials into a reasonable running length whilst conveying the harrowing experience in gripping manner.

Only Lovers Left Alive Directed by Jim Jarmusch Written by Jim Jarmusch UK, 2013 Inspired by Mark Twain’s Extracts from Adam’s Diary, Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive beautifully explores love and living after immortality siphoned away any semblance of life. Beautifully shot and wonderfully performed, the film eschews the more bombastic side of vampiric …

Better to have an ungainly surplus of ideas than none at all; that seems to be Richard Ayoade’s philosophy behind The Double, a wild, uneven, but never dull sci-fi black comedy that purports to tackle Dostoevsky’s novella of the same name, but is at least as interested in pilfering visual ideas from films gone by while marrying them to Ayoade’s winningly dry comic sensibility.

Alice in Wonderland Directed by Tim Burton Written by Linda Woolverton Starring Mia Wasikowska, Johnny Depp, Stephen Fry, Helena Bonham Carter Alice in Wonderland is a truly inexplicable, baffling, painful film to watch. I don’t know what anyone involved in the film was thinking in making it. Did they want to honor the vision from …

For many film fans, Stoker is a major event in cinema, the long-awaited arrival of Park Chan-wook on American shores. The director of Oldboy, among other genre favorites, has a cult fandom, but only for films made in his native South Korea. Even more, Stoker features a striking cast, including Nicole Kidman, Matthew Goode, and …

Stoker Written by Wentworth Miller Directed by Park Chan-wook USA/UK, 2013 – By the end of 2013, three of South Korea’s most notable filmmakers will have made the trek to the US of A to make their English-language debut – first up was Kim Jee-woon’s less than stellar Schwarzenegger vehicle The Last Stand, and in a …

Stoker Directed by Chan-wook Park Written by Wentworth Miller and Erin Cressida Wilson 2013, USA South Korean director Park Chan-wook’s first cinematic foray with the English language is a gratifyingly morbid journey, albeit frustratingly simple in its conclusion. The man behind “The Vengeance Trilogy” (Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy, Lady Vengeance) doesn’t deliver the level of graphic gore or …

Lawless Written by Nick Cave Directed by John Hillcoat USA, 2012 Director John Hillcoat and musician Nick Cave have collaborated numerous times since the late 1980s, from Cave having starred in Ghosts… of the Civil Dead to composing Hillcoat’s adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Lawless marks their second collaboration involving Cave as screenwriter, following …

Lawless Directed John Hillcoat Written by Nick Cave U.S.A., 2012 In 2006, the creative filmmaking duo of John Hillcoat, director, and Nick Cave, screenwriter, floored many a serious movie goer with their brutal, cold, austere period piece The Proposition. Set in the turn of the 20th century, the emotionally and graphically violent piece had Australian …

Lawless Written by Nick Cave Directed by John Hillcoat USA, 2012 Director John Hillcoat and musician Nick Cave have collaborated numerous times since the late 1980s, from Cave having starred in Ghosts… of the Civil Dead to composing Hillcoat’s adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Lawless marks their second collaboration involving Cave as screenwriter, following …

Albert Nobbs Directed by Rodrigo Garcia Screenplay by Glenn Close and John Banville U.K, Ireland, 2011 Mainstream cinema has a difficult time tackling what some big studio executives might view as the ‘icky’ side of gender politics. Cross-dressing, homosexuality and its oft-maligned offspring themes of homo-eroticism, transsexuals, etc. These are topics which, if one is …

Jane Eyre Directed by Cary Fukunaga Written by Moira Buffini UK, 2011 A curious meld of influences both classical and contemporary, this umpteenth film adaptation of Charlotte Brontë’s iconic novel amps the story’s gloom and doom for maximum visual splendor, while offering a strictly face-value approach to its evocations of grief, sexual repression, and class, …