Jonathan Crocker

Bobbing helplessly like a tiny cork, a 12-year-old boy drifts alone in the middle of the freezing Atlantic Ocean. With every minute, he’s dragged further and further away from his father, who’s also been caught in the rip current that’s left them treading water far out to sea.

Darkness falls. By now, the father can barely see the boy. He’s scared. His son has autism. Jellyfish begin to sting them both.

The man calls into the night: “To infinity…” Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 11% [?]

1. Planet Earth
Shot on HD cameras and a £16 million budget, David Attenborough’s nature mega-doc might be Blu-ray’s most breathtaking visual experience: every colour, every hair, every tiny air-bubble and fish-scale leaps off the screen and hits your retinas like a drug.

2. Iron Man
Impossible to see where the CG starts and the live-action footage ends on Iron’s Man’s HD transfer. But it’s the lossless Dolby TrueHD 5.1 audio that really amazes: skip to Tony Stark’s first flight and feel your surround-sound ripple. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 10% [?]

Heath Ledger is dead. He’s hanging from a noose under a London bridge. And Terry Gilliam put him there.

That shocking first glimpse of the 27-year-old actor’s last ever screen appearance in Gilliam’s The Imaginarium Of Doctor Parnassus sent a shiver of electricity through the air when the film debuted at Cannes 2009. Of course, Ledger was very much alive when Gilliam shot the scene – as was Parnassus itself. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 4% [?]

Bracing themselves for a chewy line-up of arthouse horrors and hardcore psychodramas, the world’s film critics cocked a quizzical eye at the fact the 62nd Cannes Film Festival was opening with a cartoon.

Inside 15 minutes, the entire audience was choking back tears. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 2% [?]

PIXAR’S UP SOARS…

Michael Haneke and war-trauma. Lars von Trier and sex-horror. Gaspar Noe and Tokyo nightmares. Packing its most hardcore line-up in years, the 62nd Cannes film festival raises its curtain with… a Pixar ‘toon. Obviously.

Not only that, but Pixar’s (and Cannes’) first ever 3D ‘toon. Filing into the Debussy cinema, LWLies joined the rest of the world’s most battle-hardened film critics. We donned funky 3D goggles. Then we started crying. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 3% [?]

Travelling to Japan to meet the gentle genius behind Spirited Away and Howl’s Moving Castle…

They call him the Walt Disney of Japan. He’s adored by Kurosawa and Spielberg. If you ask Pixar godhead John Lasseter, “He’s the greatest director living today.” So when Hayao Miyazaki invited Total Film to visit him in Japan, take a special tour of Studio Ghibli and find out exactly why this reclusive Japanese fabulist is the greatest animator the movies have ever seen, we couldn’t say no… Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 9% [?]