Reviewed by Gautaman Bhaskaran

MANOJ Night Shyamalan appears so desperate to create novelty that he slips in his latest film, Lady in the Water, disappointing audiences and his new producer, Warner Bros. The movie took the lowest ever box office collection for a Shyamalan work during its first weekend in the U.S.

Reviewed by Tim Wong

A FRENCH-animation sensation touted as the must-have accessory to A Scanner Darkly’s colouring book malaise, Renaissance is, rather deflatingly, a die cut of razor-edged silhouettes inked by a Frank Miller wannabe: the contrast’s blown out, the mid-tones erased, while any trace of CMYK has virtually been obliterated from its bromide sci-fi fantasy. Literally rendered in black and white, it’s a Photoshop bender of warped image levels and stencilled-in vectors with no grey area in between. Technical marvel aside (its animators employ motion capture and a great eye for urban modernist sprawl), this is a film that wields its visual metaphor for dystopia a little too eagerly: stripped of colour, it’s also diluted of any real soul, where detail is lost in its opaque recesses, spectrum is nonexistent, and dimension is veiled behind curtains of stark white.

Reviewed by Tim Wong

LET’S NOT burn Christophe Gans at the stake just yet: though wildly ambiguous (are Japanese-inspired narratives in this genre anything but?), and guilty of squandering the talents of Radha Mitchell (and Deborah Kara Unger for that matter), his rendition of Silent Hill makes for vastly superior viewing as a visual adaptation. Whereas the survival horror milieu of nerve-wringers Resident Evil and Doom was lost in translation by two incompetent, insipid filmmakers oblivious to the source material at hand, Gans grafts every wrought iron texture, squalid interior, and hellishly deformed creature from the video game’s malaise with obsessive glee. The aesthetic is spot on.