Jonathan Crocker

Conventional star-ratings don’t apply to INLAND EMPIRE. Yes, David Lynch insists it’s capitalised. No, he’s not saying why. Shot without a finished script over two-and-a-half years, Lynch’s first feature in half a decade is his most ambitious brain-twister ever. Teetering on the brink of his subconscious – as far inland as we’ve ever gone – this epic mystery is a branch of the then-61-year-old maverick’s DNA: strange, familiar and utterly unique. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 3% [?]

How many Bond girls write letters to Lars von Trier? Only one. Only the best one, apparently. “Oh, I’ve been tracking him,” laughs Olga Kurylenko, mischievously. And what exactly did she write to the bad-boy Danish depressive? “I can’t say… But I did get an answer,” she smiles. Von Trier sent her a photo of himself. He’d signed it, ‘To the best Bond babe.’ “That picture is on my wall,” says Kurylenko. “He must work with me. He doesn’t know what he missing out on…” Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 29% [?]

1. Fish Tank

Powerful, punishing, funny, beautifully observed… Way too easy to lob adjectives at Brit writer/director Andrea Arnold’s superb second movie. The film you probably missed this year is the film you can’t afford to.

Watch the trailer or find out more…  Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 4% [?]

Eyes wide open for six fascinating black bore-holes into David Lynch’s cinematic awakening. Dreams and reality, fears and desires, sex and death, innocence and adulthood… It’s all here. These short films, made as an avant garde art-student are pupating nightmare-glimpses of what would emerge from his amazing surrealist feature debut Eraserhead. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 10% [?]

Fairytales are dangerous places. That’s why children ask adults to read them: it’s not safe to be alone. Deep, dark and scary on such a surprising, mind-burrowing level, Coraline is a fairytale (read: horror film) that makes us feel like we’re all still frightened children. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 5% [?]

The middle of the night, a couple waking in their bed to find masked intruders watching them, the man brutally beaten to death, the bloodied woman chased screaming down the road outside… Lensed like a nightmare with grainy slo-mo, warped sonics and frightening gloom, that terrifying opening looks like it could have been plucked from the cutting-room floor of her father’s Lost Highway. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 3% [?]

Meeting the daughter of darkness at Cannes 2008…

What’s your favourite film?

I’m gonna have to go ahead and list Blue Velvet as one of them. I’m going to also list Rear Window and Sunset Boulevard. Sunset Boulevard blew my mind as a kid. I was eight maybe. I mean, it was sort of a discovery. It was like uncovering a brilliant novel or a dirty book in a trunk. I didn’t know you could tell a story in that way. That swung the doors open for me. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 4% [?]

“You’re a mad man! I love you! You’re in!” With those words, producer Mel Brooks signed up David Lynch after gawping through his surreal debut odyssey Eraserhead. It’s just one of many delightful recollections on the disc’s 24-minute interview with Lynch, whose second film again eyeballs a strange man’s lonely existence in an industrial nightmare-world: John Merrick, aka ‘The Elephant Man’, a grotesquely deformed 20something who went carnival freak-show to one of the most famous men in 19^th-century London. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 4% [?]