The Animatrix is a compendium of nine short films (ten minutes or so in length) set in the universe of The Matrix and it has been received in various different ways. One persistent criticism is that is simply a marketing gimmick designed solely to fuel hype. Well, of course it does add to the hype - despite being released after The Matrix Reloaded ( Read more... )

I guess this what you call high concept indie. Rian Johnson’s film transposes a hard boiled, old school noir to a contemporary high school. The gumshoe, the damsel in distress, the femme fatale, the heavy, the king pin: they are all there. Everyone speaks in a thick, outmoded slang. It is a slightly dubious proposition but one that works ( Read more... )

Christian Volckman first started work on this film in 1999 so he must have been slightly narked when Sin City (2005) was released. That film received acclaim for its transliteration of Frank Miller’s comics to the screen. Renaissance goes one step further in this respect by not just using a blue screen and post production but being totally animated ( Read more... )

The Jacket was part of a conscious attempt by Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney (in their capacity as producers) to bring independent filmmakers into the mainstream. In this instance at least it was a failure: this collision of two cinematic traditions bemused critics and audiences alike. It is a film that confounds expectations in much the same ( Read more... )

Strange Days is predicated on a single technological innovation. It's an SF trope that has been knocking around for a while; the idea that we might be able to record people's experiences. Here headsets like frozen jellyfish download cortical memories called clips into a portable storage medium. The film plunges us straight into this world, fading ( Read more... )

For some critics a Jim Carrey film is a prospect to be approached with some trepidation but I've always had a soft spot for Carrey and find it a shame to see him wasted in films like the intermittently amusing but philosophically incontinent Bruce Almighty (2003). So the acutely observed, and at times a very funny, Eternal Sunshine is just what I ( Read more... )

Having survived the deadly game of Battle Royale (2000) Shuya Nanahara (Tatsuya Fujiwara) founded a terrorist organisation, Wild Seven, dedicated to overthrowing the "adult" world responsible for the events of the first film. The authorities strike back by passing the second Battle Royale Bill. Another bus of teenagers is drugged and wakes to find ( Read more... )

We first meet Morgan Sullivan (Jeremy Northam) as he is being interviewed for a job as an industrial espionage agent for Digicorp. Sullivan makes an unlikely spy and Northam, in turn, makes an unlikely Sullivan - he's the sort of guy you get in to play Ivor Novello, not a twitchy, badly dressed ex-salesman ( Read more... )

The genesis of A.I. has been well documented so I won't go into too much detail. Suffice to say that Stanley Kubrick, Brian Aldiss and Ian Watson have had their fingers in the pie but Spielberg shoved his whole hand in. Scientist Allen Hobby (a stilted William Hurt) has created David (Haley Joel Osment), a robot that is human in every respect ( Read more... )

Mamoru Oshii is the well known Japanese director of anime films such as Patlabor (1990) and Ghost In The Shell (1995). Avalon marks his first venture into live action filmmaking and rather unusually it was shot in Poland, in Polish. While this was presumably done with an eye to costs and free loans of Polish Army hardware he does make interesting ( Read more... )