DVD of the Week: Song of the Sea

Sometimes you'd be forgiven for thinking that there were only two schools of animated movie in the world, those from Japan, and those from Hollywood. Both are pretty diverse, to be fair, and it's certainly not a slight on them, but they both have evolved into distinctive visual styles that are so familiar they almost define what an animated movie should look like. Which is nonesense, of course, as the occasional breakthrough features from across the globe prove, even if they often have to fight their way out of both the "foreign language" and "animation" boxes to get there. One recent success is the Irish feature Song of the Sea, which wound up as our tea-time viewing this Sunday .

Movie Review: Inside Out

Sometimes the critical world generates a negative consensus around a show, or production company that can get quite annoying in it's unwarrented persistance. I'll probably rant about this a bit when I come to write up True Detective, but it also swirls around the idea of "peak Marvel", or the Doctor Who, or countless other examples.  Another recent recipient of the old "oh it's lost the plot now!" cliches has been Pixar, who have been written for a while now. Sure, Cars 2 is a pretty weak sequal to the weakest of their original features, but there has been a generally downbeat reaction to everything after 2009s Up. And yes, Brave is flawed, and Monsters University is fun but forgettable, and even Toy Story 3 can be written off as "not as good as Toy Story 2" if you really want, but dropping from such an insanely high standard is hardly terminal decline. Even so, Inside Out has  been billed by many critics as Pixars comeback picture, and boy is it a thundering broadside from a studio that still knows how to reduce grown adults to quivering emotional wrecks. 

Movie Review: Big Hero 6

I can occasionally be heard to complain that I don't get to watch grown up movies at the cinema very often, due to a mix of the need to sort out babysitters on the one hand, and the fact that our 12-year-old is keen to come with us whenever possible on the other. It's not the hardest problem we face, and the dominance of 12A action movies in the summer months mean we still see a lot of the big films, but it does relegate the "grown up" films to DVD nights, which can be a shame. Especially when awards season comes around and all the cinema billboards are full of films I'm sure I'll like when I see them 9 months time. But then occasionally you troop into the cinema half-filled with kids and get to see a film that is just as affecting and serious as anything vying for that Oscar nonsense, it's just disguised under -  in this case - brightly coloured Carbon Fiber plating. 

(Not a) Games Review: The Last of Us

It's been remarked on before, but video games feel like they're in an odd place at the moment, torn between increasing mainstream popularity and new-kid-on-the-block insecurity as an entertainment form. For all Angry Man Crime Simulator VII and Call of WarBattle: Explosions! and their ilk turnover enough sales to stand alongside any major blockbuster movie, gaming also seems to struggle with legitimacy as an art form, both in terms of wider acceptance as such, and in it's own ambitions. The ongoing, rolling debate within gaming about the darker side of gaming culture, and how it approaches having it's bastions challenged, is a symptom or this, I think, as the form struggles towards more complex ways of using "gamification" to tell stories or explore complex themes. Which brings us neatly to The Last of Us.

DVD of the Week: Les Miserables

If I have a shameful movie-going secret, it's that I am a crier. There is a substantial list of movies that make me cry - not just the ones that get anyone with a soul, like the opening of Up, but even blatantly manipulative stuff like Titanic can leave me all wet-faced and sniffly. Some of it is to do with music, I think, which just makes the problem worse. So it was with some glee that I was lent Les Miserables in the firm knowledge that music + pointless tradgedy = me turning into a puddle. I think I made it about half-an-hour before choking up and it was all downhill from there.