surreal

Game design is a daring and dangerous endeavor for Niklas Åkerblad, who creates under the name El Huervo. When he describes the artistic process behind , a neon-speckled platformer set in a demonic cosmic uterus, he talks about pushing against the sharp edges of introspection and sanity, drawing from wells of creativity buried deep in his psyche. It sounds like he could’ve slipped and fallen down any of those wells at any second, never to be seen again.“I had a pretty rigorous discipline when it came to creating the world…

Julio Torres mined his own life and experiences to make his feature directorial debut “ Problemista,” in which he plays an aspiring toy designer from El Salvador caught in the nightmarish Catch-22 of the U.S. immigration system. HT Image His character Alejandro desperately needs someone to sponsor his work visa, and he thinks he may have found that person in Tilda Swinton’s Elizabeth, a caustic, put-upon art critic. Together they embark on a wild, surreal New York odyssey of setbacks, bureaucratic nonsense,…

Here is Pixar’s charming, bewildering and beautiful new animation about life after death and life before death – and that title incidentally reminds you how we got the word “animation”. It’s a free-jazz fantasia about a sad and lonely musician, with globules of Frank Capra, 60s psychedelia, 80s body-swap and an old-fashioned stairway to heaven that put me in mind of Pressburger and Powell.But the keynote is pure Pixar: that intense, childlike, ever-renewing rapture that inside all of us, there is this secret existence and…

When production designers Shona Heath and James Price were tasked with designing the dark comedy Poor Things, Yorgos Lanthimos‘ Oscar-nominated movie about a woman whose resurrected with her infant’s brain, they had several key decisions to make. For starters, how would they represent the London mansion, which included the laboratory of mad scientist Dr. Baxter, played by Willem Dafoe? The answer turned out to be simple: They’d put human anatomy along the walls and ceiling.  They stapled packing foam to the atrium…

Film: Poor ThingsCast: Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, Mark Ruffalo, Ramy YoussefDirector: Yorgos LanthimosRating: * * * 1/2Runtime: 141 min This is an incredible tale about the fantastical evolution of Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), a young woman brought back to life by the brilliant and unorthodox scientist Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe). She is someone reborn and given the chance, she is ready for everything life has to throw her. This film has some of the strangest characters you will see, yet it is believable and totally…

The hero of “Problemista” sees the world differently. He's an aspiring toy designer named Alejandro who thinks today's toys are too fun. He proposes a toy truck with a deflating tire to teach kids they’re running out of time. HT Image Alejandro is the creation of Julio Torres, who stars, directs and has written “Problemista,” an off-kilter and very winning movie from a rising artist who thrillingly reflects his own toy maker's singular, idiosyncratic mind. “Problemista” is not like a Wes Anderson-type…

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse LoughreyGet our The Life Cinematic email for freeThere’s one Oscar snub this year that’s been wildly overlooked: Messi, the well-trained border collie of Justine Triet’s courtroom drama Anatomy of a Fall. Messi plays Snoop, the guide dog of Sandra’s (Sandra Hüller) visually impaired son, Daniel (Milo Machado-Graner), and a pivotal part of the film’s twists and turns. In short, the role requires some real canine acting chops, and…

In the early 1970s mathematician Donald Knuth spent a sabbatical with his wife in Norway. The time was meant to be spent relaxing. Yet one night he woke up his partner in a state of agitation. He urgently needed to write a book. Don’t worry, he reassured his spouse, it will only take a week. To concentrate on his writing, he reserved a hotel room just for himself in Oslo.There he drafted what would become Surreal Numbers: How Two Ex-Students Turned On to Pure Mathematics and Found Total Happiness. Though Knuth did not…

Expectant parents, look away now. Deliver Us takes a leaf out of the books of the likes of Rosemary’s Baby and The Omen by giving us a nun in Russia who is apparently pregnant with twins – one the antichrist, one the son of God. The Vatican sends in Father Fox (Lee Roy Kunz, who also co-directs) to investigate, and all sorts of visions and dreams and shenanigans ensue. If you’ve ever wanted to see a naked bride of Christ plunge deliriously into a cross-shaped hole in the surface of a frozen lake in the dead of night,…

Artist Tim Andraka is known for drawing wildlife illustrations, except they are fictional and rather bizarre. You probably could find these creatures in a parallel universe, but here, they are just nonsensical science illustrations created for our entertainment.In Tim's art series, you will see animals like giraffes disguised as snails, sloths having a feature to shoot out of their body (yikes!), and many more things that are just too difficult to describe. Therefore, without further ado, we think it's best if you look…