The King of Kings review – Charles Dickens retelling of the Jesus story does a serviceable job

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The famous author tells his son and their cat the story of Jesus in this mixed-bag family animation, voiced by an impressive cast This syrupy cartoon account of the life of Jesus (voiced by Oscar Isaac) is narrated, with consummate weirdness, by Charles Dickens (Kenneth Branagh). It’s in fact based on a story Dickens wrote for his children (and wasn’t published until 1934, decades after his death). The idea is that Dickens is telling the story of the New Testament to his young son Walter (Roman Griffin Davis) and Walter’s impish cat, explaining to the King Arthur-obsessed Walter how Jesus was the real King of Kings and all that. And so we see Walter and Charles, in their mid-19th-century garb, wandering through scenes of JC’s life nearly two thousand years earlier, from the nativity to the crucifixion – much like Scrooge and his spectral buddies in A Christmas Carol as they wander through past, present and future Christmases. It rather drags out what is already a pretty long running ...
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Tod Browning: the film-maker who brought the carnival to Hollywood

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A new retrospective offers another chance to appreciate the daring and often deranged films made by a director who was once the centre of a moral panic

When a kid threatens to run away and join the circus, perhaps upon being forced to eat broccoli or go to bed, they’re fantasizing about more than just independence. The traveling carnival offered an alternative way of life that appealed specifically to those uninvested in the politenesses of the grownup world. No one can make a carny shower, wear a tie or go to church. This liberation from the strictures of civilized society was a must for an ethically spotty line of work reliant on a mix of trickery, hucksterism, prurience and morbid fascination, a low art form that attracted a certain kind of scuzzy personality. The tents of the sideshow provided a home to thieves, oddballs, creeps, chiselers, dope fiends, conmen, women of ill repute, leches, lushes and any other species of degenerate in need of a paycheck. If vaudevillians were the rock stars of the pre-cinema era, then circus folk were van-dweller punks cutting a swath of blithe misbehavior from gig to gig.

Just before the turn of the 20th century, at the ripe age of 16, a bricklayer’s son named Charles Albert Browning Jr decided that these were his people and abandoned his well-heeled family to join their grubby ranks. He would spend 10 years cutting his teeth as a barker, song-and-dance man, clown and contortionist before rechristening himself Tod, the German word for “death”, conferring a ghastly gravitas. Three years later, he’d take leave of the stage with sights set on the burgeoning silent film industry, but he’d carry the lurid spirit of the big top with him through the rest of an illustrious, disreputable career.

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