The Five Nights at Freddy's video games are easy to understand even for people who only play occasionally and are conceptually quite funny: as a night security guard in a pizzeria, you have to keep an eye on the surveillance cameras as animatronic animals that have come to life (the pizzeria's mascots) try to kill you. The premise is of course very thin for a film adaptation, and director Emma Tammi really doesn't have a single new idea to offer.…

When other people lose their sight, they simply go blind. However, Matt Murdock also develops a bat-radar-sense, the ability to jump from skyscrapers without taking any damage and can apparently hear or smell (?) when an attractive woman is nearby. Either that or Jennifer Garner is just so sexy that even the blind can see her beauty ... In Marvel Comics, the blind lawyer and part-time ninja Daredevil is one of the coolest, most urban superheroes, deeply rooted in his…

Even though Young and Innocent is one of the lesser-known talkies directed by Alfred Hitchcock, it contains one of his most brilliant scenes. In a sixty-seven-seconds tracking shot, he reveals the sought-after murderer in the grand finale. The camera hovers from a great height above a party crowd dancing to the song 'No One Can Like the Drummer Man' and then moves so close to the murderer that the camera stops right in front of his eyes. What a groundbreaking,…

Bob Marley seems to have lived a very interesting life. At least if you believe the text inserts in this biopic. At the beginning of the film, you can read about how Marley grew up, what drove him, what the political situation was like in Jamaica in the 1970s and so on. When One Love finally begins, Marley has long since become a successful musician and plans to use his music to reunite his homeland and bring about peace. Afterwards…

Who exactly decides which of the countless lousy direct-to-streaming domestic productions from China make their way to Europe and receive a home cinema release there? Normally, it is precisely the outstanding films from there that should be given the privilege of being shared with the rest of the world. Unfortunately, this is not the case, because Earth Rescue Day is absolute rubbish of the worst kind. Stupid, silly war porn with people in horribly looking mech suits (which, if you…

The cinematic debut of filmmaker Arthur Penn was stylistically ahead of its time. One murder scene in particular stands out: Billy the Kid shoots a deputy. The deputy's grimace of pain is shown in slow motion, then there's a 180-degree-cut and his lifeless body crashes to the ground with force. One of his boots remains standing, he has been shot out of his shoes. A little girl runs over and laughs at the sight.

Such scenes, which were revolutionary for…

The assassination of the Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics is presented by director Tim Fehlbaum without any major political context. His entire film takes place in one small building in the Olympic village, where an American team of sports journalists report live on the attack in real time for ABC. This is interesting first and foremost because it beautifully illustrates how media were once produced. People fought over broadcasting slots, had to develop film material at great expense…

Authors Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss can pat themselves on the back for having succeeded with the BBC TV-series Sherlock in taking the popular characters Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson out of their Victorian time period and moving them into modern-day London of 2010. The opening episode, A Study in Pink, is a wonderful modernisation of the first Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlett, written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and published in 1887, and fans will enjoy the many…

Quintessential Bond. Not just one of the masterpieces of the 007 series, but one of the best and most elegant spy films in cinema history. Director Terence Young creates an over-the-top glamour spy world, following the logic of a comic strip, always wandering between pulp and mystery. With somnambulistic coolness, Sean Connery struts as the macho agent through a finely spun intrigue that is fuelled directly by the subconscious fears of Cold War paranoia.

James Bond has to deal with…

There was no shortage of large-scale war adventures in 1960s cinema and Operation Shingle (the landing of the Allied troops at Anzio) is as suitable a template as any other battle in the Second World War. However, directors Edward Dmytryk and Duilio Coletti hardly manage to deliver anything worth remembering.

Although they take an extremely long time - it takes an hour until the first contact with the enemy - to build up the characters, most of them remain flat…

The cartoon elements at the beginning, in which a few brushstrokes introduce us to the world of nature in North America, should suffice as an indication of the documentary quality of The Living Desert. At the latest when two scorpions 'dance' with each other and the footage is rewound and rewound while the omnipresent off-screen narrator sings a song ('Three legs up and four legs down, whirl that scorpion round and round'), all doubts are hopefully dispelled.

This oblique testimony…

When Nosferatu, the German silent film classic, was released in 1922, it must have terrified film theatre audiences. In fact, it's hard to imagine how hard people must have freaked out in theatres back then. The vampire tale, which was so clearly based on the novel Dracula by Bram Stoker that filmmaker Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau later faced a copyright lawsuit, was absolutely revolutionary in its day. Murnau's use of montage is miles ahead of other cinematic works of the early…