Gritty

The year is 1755. Captain Ludvig Kahlen (a steely, inscrutable Mads Mikkelsen) has little to his name beyond his reputation as a fine soldier, and his rather threadbare uniform. Now retired, the captain hopes to bring his soldier’s tenacity to a new challenge: the cultivation of the inhospitable Jutland heath, with the aim of founding a settlement and winning the approval of the king of Denmark. But the bleak, wind-lashed Jutland terrain is the least of his problems – he falls foul of the sadistic local landowner,…

How can I be sceptical of romantic love? Thirty-one years ago I braved my Punjabi family’s disapproval, to do a Two States, to marry my MBA classmate, a boy from Bengal. PREMIUM Relationships by Alain de Botton(Author) Three decades and dozens of disagreements later, we are still together, spending holidays reading all day. And we are both okay with bedroom windows that allow the morning sunlight to stream in (more on that later).And yet I am sceptical.Maybe it’s my age that makes me cynical, drawing me to the…

When his wife is brutally murdered, immigrant labourer Dasru (Manoj Bajpayee) flees from Mumbai with his baby daughter back to his former home in the tribal lands in the east Indian state of Jharkhand. The police regard him as a key suspect in the case, but while Dasru maintains his innocence, he has other dark secrets festering in his homeland.This gritty, propulsive chase thriller combines a heart-in-mouth survival story with a backdrop of simmering violence and political unrest – the tribal lands from which Dasru hails…

Butcher’s Creek is an upcoming action-horror game inspired by cult classics like Manhunt and Condemned: Criminal Origins, and it’s from the developer of Dusk. Set in the autumn of 1993, the player steps into the shoes of a loner seeking “authentic snuff videotapes”, bringing him to an abandoned cabin near Butcher’s Creek, Pennsylvania. However, sadistic killers hiding in the shadows capture the protagonist who force him to perform the violence that he’s been looking for in a desperate attempt to escape the darkness.…

These bikes don’t work over water unless you’ve got POWER! Akupara Games has announced that they’ll be publishing Videocult’s upcoming lo-fi hoverbike game, Airframe Ultra. Unless you count all the rust, Airframe Ultra is quite a departure from Videocult’s previous game, Rain World. In this one, you ride around on a hoverbike, winning races and eliminating the competition. While the trailer gives a good long look at the gameplay, both it and the press release I got with it suggest that there’s still much to do in…

At a time when the gap between mainstream country and heavy rock is often just a southern drawl and a cowboy hat, give thanks for acts such as Molly Tuttle, who are keeping alive the spirit and sound of country’s grittier traditions. Renowned in bluegrass circles for her guitar-picking, the 30-year-old made her breakthrough with last year’s Crooked Tree, an album that combined dazzling playing with songs celebrating feminism and renegade pot farmers and protesting gentrification.City of Gold continues seamlessly. Once…

Barbie is currently shaping up to be one of the biggest films of the year. It’s bright, it’s colourful, it’s just knowing enough, and its publicity machine has been bulldozing the general public for what seems like several years at this point. From all that anyone can tell, Barbie is going to be one of those staggeringly rare films that manages to excel commercially as well as intellectually.Although, that said, doesn’t a part of you wish that it bombs? Not because it’s a bad film, or because you wish ill upon anyone…

Eminent filmmaker JJ Abrams has shared exciting details and provided a tantalizing glimpse into his upcoming Hot Wheels movie. Hot Wheels Unleashed, (Image Credit: Mattel) Known for his work on iconic franchises such as Star Wars and Star Trek, Abrams is set to produce the long-awaited live-action adaptation of the beloved Hot Wheels toy line, which has been in development limbo since 2003. The project gained significant momentum earlier this year when Dalton Leeb and Nicholas Jacobson-Larson were brought on…

THQ Nordic has announced Last Train Home, a real-time strategy (RTS) that follows a train full of soldiers trying to return home after fighting in World War 1. Created by Comanche developer Ashborne Games, Last Train Home sees players control a commander of the Czechoslovak Legion, who must guide his men from Russia, which is wracked in civil war, to Czechoslovakia via an armoured train. While battles in Last Train Home are fought with a real-time, top-down view of the battlefield, players will also be tasked with taking…

The "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" franchise has certain built-in limits that make the stories it can tell a bit repetitive, especially in movie form. Over time, the franchise has constructed a series of tropes that every version of the story needs to hit, from the turtles' rough personality outlines to certain villains they have to face. As such, the movies we've seen so far tend to portray Leonardo as the leader, Raphael as a wild card, Donatello as a comparatively level-headed and smart gadgeteer, and…