'The Boxtrolls' - Interview With The Directors (The Hollywood News)

If BAFTA could hand out an award for oddest movie, it would surely be won by THE BOXTROLLS, which is the latest animated offering from Laika, producers of CORALINE and PARANORMAN. This tale of a society dictated by cheese and overrun by cardboard-wearing creatures was in the running for Best Animated Film.

We spoke to directors Anthony Stacchi and Graham Annable to chew the fat, or at least the rind, over what went into the making of this eccentric chapter in the history of stop motion animation. I’m a huge fan of the medium – my Dad used to be such an animator back in the day – and I was interested to hear what the pair had to say about the project, which appears defiantly old-fashioned in this age of CGI…

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'Manakamana' DVD Review (The Hollywood News)

At the end of gangster film THE LONG GOOD FRIDAY, there’s a famous sequence where Bob Hoskins is captured in a close-up static shot as he sits in the back of a car. The character awaits a grisly fate at the hands of the IRA and over the course of a few minutes we see nothing but his expectant face. When Hoskins asked the director what he should be thinking, John Mackenzie suggested he try working out what was going on in the plot. An unusual way to begin this review perhaps but in my view pertinent, for documentary MANAKAMANA adopts a similar approach to a completely different subject...

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THN's Dirty Detectives: An 'Inherent Vice' Feature (The Hollywood News)

 

 

Director Paul Thomas Anderson has brought us some challenging and cerebral work in the past, from the unrelenting intensity of THERE WILL BE BLOOD to the downright headache-inducing THE MASTER. But his latest offering INHERENT VICE is seen as a bit of a change of pace.  The title (imported from Thomas Pynchon’s source novel) is as weighty as you might expect, but aside from that the focus is on slapstick and the absurd, mixed in with Pynchon’s lyrical take on the seamier side of urban society. Joaquin Phoenix stars as Larry “Doc” Sportello, a detective in 1970s LA who, like Sherlock Holmes, is often loaded on drugs but who unlike Holmes is about as organized as a cat trapped in a filing cabinet.

Sportello has his adventures rooted in the works of Raymond Chandler and, oddly for Anderson, the output of NAKED GUN producers Abrahams and Zucker – though he also carries on a long line of shambolic snoopers from movies past, the exploits of which we are about to document. So take a swig of booze, hunker down in your rusty car and prepare to stake out THN’s rogues gallery of great but grungy investigators...

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