A tight, competent, well-shot, classic whodunnit. One of the real stars of this film is Venice itself, with gorgeous aerial views of the city - in fact there are so many wide angled shots that the movie has been jokingly been subject of a 0.5 camera setting meme online. You can however almost feel the damp in the crumbling palazzos. Kenneth Branaghs interpretation of the character will inevitably suffer from comparisons to Suchet, who arguably perfected the character in the…
Gareth Edward's brings a guerilla filmmaker sensibility to his sci fi epics, creating movies which look like mega budget blockbusters for a fraction of the cost. The world of the creator is absolutely beautiful to look at, with almost every other scene prompting a woah from me and my partner. The setting, in south east Asia, marrying the ancient with sci fi, is both unique and feels authentic - much in the same way our own cities still look like…
This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
Jim Jarmusch's masterpiece does what he does best - take a genre and flip it to gaze at its soft underbelly. The result, like this one, is usually a hazy contemplative meditation on life in the outward trappings of a B movie. This is one of Depps best movies, back when he was an up and coming young talent, waif like as William Blake, a mild mannered accountant being baptised by blood in the violence of the west. He plays…
Twilight.
That is the what I saw as the central theme of this movie. Not in the sense that this movie is in any way similar to that OTHER movie about vampire lovers, but in the sense of being a movie about twilight in a more classical sense - the grand old sense of Wagner's Gotterdamerung ('Twilight of the Gods'). Decay and mortality are at the heart of this movie, as two ancient vampire lovers - Gods, almost - confront…
The atmosphere of pure moral ambiguity that this movie is shot through with makes this movie deserve its reputation as the True Science Fiction classic. The motives of the 'protagonist' are gray and shady at best, and nothing could be more sympathetic than the aims of the 'antagonists'- the desire to live, the most primal instinct there is. It touches in its obscure, enigmatic way all the themes of the source material (Philip K Dicks 'Do Andriods dream of Electric…