Frankenweenie, from the science teacher who resembles Vincent Price to the Stepford Wives-looking suburban neighbourhood, is the closest in spirit to Tim Burton’s 1990 masterpiece Edward Scissorhands.
If you’re not a Woody Allen fan, subtract one point from the above rating. If you are an Allenite, you’ll still be forced to file To Rome with Love among his minor works.
James Bond’s 50th anniversary film was a phenomenal hit in the cinema, even by 007 standards – and fair enough.
Woody Allen’s latest very much feels like a bunch of half-baked ideas the auteur has been working on since he started out: a mortician who can only sing opera sublimely in the shower, an ordinary man (Roberto Benigni) who is thrust into the spotlight for no good reason.
“You’re an activist not a supplicant,†maintains Alessandro Nivola’s sleazy intellectual, Roland, to his idealistic teen daughter, Ginger (Elle Fanning, convincing), in Sally Potter’s disjointed but good-looking portrait of teenage hormones and family dysfunction in early 1960s London.
It’s bad enough that the lifts don’t work, but now an unknown sniper is picking off the occupants of a bleak tower block.
While the Ice Age series drifts on with ever-diminishing returns, the Madagascar films get better.
“You should learn to participate,†maintains Paul Rudd’s English teacher to timid high-school freshman Charlie (Logan Lerman).
Quvenzhané Wallis is astonishing as six-year-old Hushpuppy, who lives with her often absent father (“Daddy could have changed into a tree or a bug, there wasn’t no way to knowâ€) in the poverty-stricken “Bathtub†area on the Louisiana Bayou.
Charlie Kaufman and Woody Allen are clear influences for this tale of an uptight, blocked novelist (Paul Dano), who after having vivid dreams about his ideal woman, Ruby Sparks (Zoe Kazan), sees his fantasy creation become flesh in his opulent LA pad.