I have never understood the violent passion aroused by Star Wars. I know some people hate it, regarding it as somehow debasing science fiction (and, indeed, the whole of cinema) though for me they remain an entertaining and imaginative sequence of films – not profound, certainly, but fun. More bewildering, though, are those who adore […]
If your previous encounters with Japanese animation stretch only as far as Akira and the occasional juvenile movie featuring giant robots, then Spirited Away may be as pleasant a surprise to you was it was to me.
Sometimes an opening shot will tell you everything you need to know about a film. Star Wars had huge spaceships, flashing lasers and chest rattling music. From the very beginning, that was going to be a big, brash, exciting movie. Solaris, by contrast, opens with a shot of rain against a window. If that sets […]
Whichever way you looked at it – and mostly I do my looking upwards, from the gutter – the streets of Sin City are mean. Really mean. They’re the kind of mean that makes junkyard dogs nervous. They’re the kind of mean that involves dramatic slashes of light through slatted blinds and a reflection catching […]
At the end of Serenity, ship’s captain Mal (Fillion) has a little speech about the first rule of flying a spaceship – “it ain’t all buttons and charts” he says, but “love that keeps her in the air when she ought to fall down.” Writer/director Whedon is surely addressing the legions of “browncoats” – the […]
The last time I expressed my disappointment with Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy (Matrix 160) I received a couple of letters that can only be described as hate mail. The unsigned author was keen to point out my mental and genetic deficiencies as well as my ignorance of literature and film. The […]
“It was beauty that killed the beast” is one of the greatest lines in cinema and one of the greatest lies. Oh, beauty made the beast vulnerable but it was greed, Karl Denham’s greed for money and fame, that got the beast killed. It has always been one of cinema’s great injustices that in King […]
Regularly lauded as the best anime of all time, Grave of the Fireflies (Hotaro no Haka) now has a UK region “special edition” DVD release. US film critic Roger Ebert has said that this film belongs on any list of top war movies and others have compared its emotional impact to Spielberg’s Shindler’s List.
The original Ghost in the Shell (GitS) was a landmark in quality animation and it remains one of the most satisfying post-cyberpunk sf action movies ever made. Mingling philosophy with wild action sequences, GitS was an almost perfect blend of urban grittiness, large weapons, technology fetishism, big ideas and stylish violence.
Equilibrium borrows liberally from great works of science fiction from the past. 1984, Fahrenheit 451 and Brave New World should all get together and kick the living daylights out of this small-minded piece of rubbish, says Martin McGrath.