Dead Souls review – Alex Cox rides into sunset with anti-Trump spaghetti western

Rotterdam film festival The Repo Man director relocates Gogol’s surreal novella to the old west in what he says will be his final film English film-maker Alex Cox comes riding into town with this jauntily odd and surreal western which he has indicated will be his swansong, shot on the rugged plains of Almeria in Spain and also Arizona. Cox himself is the star – an elegant, dapper presence – and his co-writer is veteran spaghetti western actor Gianni Garko. The story has obvious relevance to contemporary America, and a flash-forward makes some of this clear. But it is also inspired by the classic novella of the same name by Nikolai Gogol, a mysterious parable of greed and vanity about a man who travels around offering to buy the souls of dead serfs on various estates in pre-revolutionary Russia so landowners can lower their tax bills, but plans to claim that they are still alive and therefore pass himself off as a wealthy man. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://i...

My Freaky Family review – overly quirky and unforgivably mawkish animation

This children’s film about a normal girl in a magical family strives for zany, anarchic fantasy. Unfortunately it’s just boring

This bumpy and chaotic family film is centred around a child who feels different because she’s normal. There are notes of the Addams family and the Munsters in the home and living circumstances of Betty Flood (voiced by Harry Potter actor Evanna Lynch), who belongs to a family of magical characters living in exile but is herself not supernaturally gifted. Unless you count her wildly impressive skills playing the violin, performing – for instance – a ripping rendition of When the Saints Go Marching In.

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