Edinburgh International Film Festival
I came to The Mad World of Harvey Kurtzman knowing almost nothing about the man, and not a great deal more about the magazine that made him. MAD is one of those American institutions that only ever reached these shores second-hand, through references in other things, the gap-toothed
Rating: 3.5★
By the early 2000s, Walt Disney Feature Animation was in an odd position. The so-called Disney Renaissance, that extraordinary run of films from The Little Mermaid through to Mulan, had wound down, and the studio was feeling its way forward with a string of pictures that never quite managed
Rating: 3.0★
By the early 1980s, the American animation industry was in a peculiar state of drift. Disney, the dominant force for decades, had produced a string of pictures through the late seventies that felt safe and somewhat tired, and audiences were beginning to sense it. It was into this gap that
Rating: 3.5★
There are animated films that arrive, do their job, and are more or less forgotten within a generation. Then there are the ones that come embedded in a culture so thoroughly that even people who have never sat down and actually watched them feel they already know them. The Twelve
Rating: 3.5★
Johnny Mad Dog arrives from a corner of world cinema that rarely gets much attention on mainstream screens: the co-production networks of France and Belgium that, through the 2000s, funded a number of films made on location in sub-Saharan Africa with non-professional casts and limited budgets. Released
Rating: 1.5★
Horror films shot in genuinely unusual locations tend to carry a certain curiosity value before a single frame has even played, and Gehenna: Where Death Lives arrives with that novelty in abundance. Set and partially produced in Saipan, the largest island in the Northern Mariana Islands, a United States commonwealth
Rating: 2.5★
There is a particular kind of prestige that arrives pre-loaded, and The Red Turtle carried more of it than most. A co-production between the French outfits Wild Bunch, Why Not Productions and CN4 Productions, the Belgian studio Belvision, and, most eye-catchingly, Japan's Studio Ghibli, the
Rating: 3.5★
There are films that arrive quietly, made on modest budgets by small studios in countries not traditionally associated with feature animation, and then somehow end up nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. The Secret of Kells is precisely that kind of film. Released in 2009 and co-
Rating: 3.5★
John le Carré spent the better part of five decades writing about the moral rot that accumulates quietly inside institutions, and The Constant Gardener, his 2001 novel, ranks among his most pointed indictments. Where many of his earlier books trained their scepticism on the intelligence services, this one aimed squarely
Rating: 3.0★
Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski made five films together between 1972 and 1987, and the story of that partnership has, by now, almost eclipsed the films themselves. Herzog's 1999 documentary My Best Fiend laid it all out in uncomfortable detail: the threats, the tantrums, the mutual fascination that
Rating: 3.5★
Sarah Maldoror occupies a singular position in the history of world cinema. Born in France to Guadeloupean parents, she studied filmmaking in Moscow in the late 1950s alongside figures who would go on to define Third Cinema, and she spent much of her career making films on the African continent,
Rating: 2.0★
Video game adaptations have had a famously troubled relationship with cinema, and Uncharted arrives as one of the most anticipated, and most protracted, attempts to buck that trend. The game series, developed by Naughty Dog and first released by Sony in 2007, spent the better part of two decades building
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