Gaspar Noé is no stranger to controversy, as 2002′s “Irreversible” — and, specifically, its nine-minute single-take depiction of violent rape — firmly established his reputation as a boundary-pushing provocateur. Almost a decade later, he returns to feature filmmaking with this week’s extravagant “Enter the Void,” a similarly audacious work about a teenage drug dealer’s (Nathaniel…
“Exploitative,” “mean-spirited” and “misanthropic” are just three of the many severe adjectives that tend to pepper discussions about the acidic work of Todd Solondz. The New Jersey-born indie filmmaker arrived on the scene in 1995 with the bitterly funny “Welcome to the Dollhouse,” courted critical accolades and controversy with 1998′s sharp-fanged “Happiness,” and further established,…
Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s idiosyncratic style was apparently from his apocalyptic comedy debut “Delicatessen” (co-directed with Marc Caro), and solidified with his dark fairy tale “The City of Lost Children,” his breakout mainstream hit “Amélie,” and now again with his latest, “Micmacs.” The comedy follows a lonely video store clerk who, after almost being killed by a…
Both “Alien vs. Predator” films were by and large disposable mash-up exercises, undone by plots that couldn’t convincingly meld the two series’ worlds and directors who paled in comparison to the ones behind the creatures’ original solo outings. But in theory, this marriage of H.R. Giger’s acid-blooded beasts and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s camouflage-happy intergalactic nemesis is…
The underwater city of Rapture, the setting of 2007′s Xbox and PC hit “BioShock” and its just-released sequel “BioShock 2,” is aptly named. Few video game worlds are as thrillingly conceived as the alt history utopia gone awry of 2K Games’ fantastic franchise. But if the locale is what immediately immerses players in the series’…
Role-playing games are built around talking. And talking in video games is, in most cases, seriously boring. The most appealing part of game interactivity is action — being able to control how your avatar moves, fights, behaves. Sitting through long-winded expository discussions between characters can be a monumental drag, either because you have next to…
As a kid, I loved “Choose Your Own Adventure” books, which (for anyone too young to remember the series and ignorant of its recent, ho-hum revival) offered fantastical tales that branched out in different directions depending on decisions you made during the story. If you wanted to enter the haunted mansion, you turned to page…
Thanks to better access to digital tools and improved distribution methods, indie gaming is on the cusp of a potential surge. But that rise won’t come just from established producers out to do their own thing. It’ll also happen because of upstart amateurs whose enthusiasm for gaming and technological talents lead to passion projects created…
For all the talk about narrative arcs, aesthetic razzle-dazzle and tricks and tropes borrowed from film, games are really about gameplay. And because of that, there’s often nothing as satisfying as a title that simply delivers rock-solid mechanics that let you enjoy fundamental gaming tasks: running, jumping, toggling, searching, exploring, shooting. It’s an obvious yet…
When Heath Ledger passed away in January 2008, he was in the midst of shooting his second collaboration with famed filmmaker and former Monty Python member Terry Gilliam. His death should have doomed “The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus.” But Gilliam, who’d already had “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” fall apart, as famously documented in…
Throughout 2009, the intersection of video games and films has been a seething hot spot, both culturally and for business. And though this marriage is fraught with plenty of potential hazards — best seen in the unkillable and still usually awful game-to-film adaptation — there’s no denying that’s plenty of room for both mediums to…
No filmmaker working today explores the act of watching as rigorously (and, some might say, as pedantically) as Michael Haneke, whose output largely consists of a single film, made over and over again in slightly different ways, about the viewer’s relationship to on-screen violence. The Austrian provocateur’s cinematic lectures on how we’re all to blame…
“It’s not TV, it’s HBO” goes the tagline, and in the ’00s, TV was “The Sopranos,” a series that not only defined a channel but, more fundamentally, a decade’s worth of living-room drama. When David Chase’s series about the titular New Jersey crime family debuted in 1999, it came equipped with a conceit that seemed,…
Movie stars sell movie tickets, but do they also sell video games? The latest title to put this question to the test is “Brütal Legend,” a new action-adventure title set in a heavy-metal land of mythic creatures and crushing tunes that stars Tenacious D frontman and “School of Rock” maestro Jack Black as the voice…
Like indie films, indie games are free to take chances that their mainstream competitors can’t, but in exchange have to work with limited financial resources that put a crimp on grand stabs at novelty. Because of that, indie games tend to stake out a unique ground where convention and experimentation meet. As seen in “Braid”…
With mainstream horror now defined by cruddy PG-13 originals and even cruddier remakes, Ti West’s “The House of the Devil” couldn’t have arrived at a better time. An unpredictable saga of teenage boredom and Satanic cults in which a college student makes the mistake of taking a babysitting gig at Tom Noonan’s titular residence, West’s…
For the past 20 years or so, Hollywood has seemed intent on proving that video games aren’t fit to be cinematic source material. How else to explain the dismal quality of the average game-to-film adaptation? But games and movies aren’t inherently incompatible, provided that directors use some common sense when heading down that treacherous adaptation…
Video games offer escapist fantasies in which we get to control, even virtually embody, an on-screen avatar. And most of the time, that avatar is a white guy. According to “The Virtual Census: Representations of Gender, Race and Age in Video Games,” a new study published in the journal New Media & Society by UCLA…
Disney’s $4 billion purchase of Marvel last month has major entertainment biz reverberations, one of those being that the Mouse House now gets to produce games based on the comic book giant’s fabled superhero universe. Media consolidation on this scale isn’t unexpected, especially in light of what’s been happening in the game industry. Plenty of…
Chalk it up to fluke timing or the shifting pop culture landscape, but there’s a trio of Hollywood films this fall that deal directly with gaming by way of virtual reality storylines. Headlined by last weekend’s “Gamer” and soon to be followed by the Bruce Willis action flick “Surrogates” and December’s insanely hyped James Cameron…
When it comes to the family of films based on comedy sketches, “Saturday Night Live” is Don Corleone, though in terms of quality, a more apt analogy might be Fredo, as the venerable late-night staple is responsible for some of the most inept cinematic yukfests of the past two decades. In the ’90s alone, a…
Stretching a brief comedy sketch into an 80-plus minute feature is not a task for the timid, as the process of fleshing out quick, self-contained bits is rife with inherent risks — the two main ones being that such an endeavor usually makes little sense and can spoil the original joke. Yet despite these pitfalls,…
As a kid, point-and-click PC adventure games were my be-all and end-all. Sierra, in particular, with their almost uniformly awesome “Quest” titles (“King’s Quest,” “Space Quest,” “Police Quest”), and their bawdy “Leisure Suit Larry” series, held a prime spot in my heart. I awaited their every new release with baited breath and consumed them with…
Video games aren’t movies, but they sure can be intent on acting like them, most prominently through the scripted sequences known as cutscenes, those insufferable CG-animated interludes that propel stories forward while you wait… and wait… and wait to resume playing. Cutscenes have been around, in at least some rudimentary form, since the dawn of…
