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Artists, rarely do any group inspire so many opinions and emotions. Some deride them as charlatans living in a fantasy world while some are in awe of their creative prowess. They come across as living Bohemian lives. Too often have movies been made to show them as mythical and misunderstood creatures. I felt disappointed with these movies since they celebrated the artist but never quite celebrated their art. There was an element of fetishism in it. “Tatsumi”, released in 2011 and directed by Erich Khoo does not fall into this trap. It is based on the manga memoir, “A Drifting Life”, by Japanese manga artist, Yoshihiro Tatsumi. Most of us are aware of what manga are. They are comic books usually aimed at teenagers or younger. Gekiga is an alternative style of manga which is aimed at adults. Yoshihiro Tatsumi is the Tao of gekiga.

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Singapore’s Zhao Wei Films and Hong Kong-based Distribution Workshop are co-producing Eric Khoo’s erotic drama, In The Room, which started shooting in Singapore today.

Distribution Workshop’s Nansun Shi is producing and the script is co-written by Khoo and Jonathan Lim.

The high-concept erotic drama is set in a single room in a Singapore hotel over a time period spanning from World War II to the future.

Six short stories, all directed by Khoo, revolve around six different couples and explore Singapore’s history, along with changing attitudes to sex, love and relationships. The pan-Asian cast includes Hong Kong actress Josie Ho.

The film marks Khoo’s first feature since Tatsumi, an animation about manga artist Yoshihiro Tatsumi, which premiered at Cannes in 2011. Khoo is also one of seven Singaporean filmmakers directing a short for an omnibus film to celebrate Singapore’s 50th anniversary.

DVD & Digital Release Date: March 26, 2013

Price: DVD $26.99 each

Studio: KimStim/Zeitgeist

Ghosts from Central Europe's past haunt a train station worker in the animated feature Alois Nebel.

Alois Nebel (2011) from the Czech Republic and the Singapore/Japan animated co-production Tatsumi (2011) are two gorgeously animated, award-winning film dramas.

Inspired by classic film noir and rendered in mesmerizing black-and-white rotoscope animation (à la Richard Linklater’s Waking Life), Tomás Lunák’s Alois Nebel traces the haunted memories and mysterious visions of a troubled train dispatcher through the shifting cultural and political landscape in the waning days of the Cold War. It focuses on the experiences of a quiet man at a remote railway station on the Czech-Slovak border whose life is disrupted bu a fog that brings hallucinations of trains from the previous 100 years. These ghosts from Central Europe’s dark past ultimately send him on a nightmarish and ominous journey.

The...

Day three of the 21st Annual Whitaker St. Louis International Film Festival promises more great films and an appearance at the Hi-Pointe by director Joe Dante. And there are still 8 days to go!

Sliff’s main venues are the the Hi-Pointe Theatre, Tivoli Theatre, Plaza Frontenac Cinema, Webster University’s Winifred Moore Auditorium, Washington University’s Brown Hall Auditorium and the Wildey Theatre in Edwardsville, Il

The entire schedule for the 21st Annual Whitaker St. Louis International Film Festival be found Here.

http://cinemastlouis.org/sliff-2012

Here is what will be screening at The 21st Whitaker St. Louis International Film Festival today, Saturday, November 10th

Director Jennifer Lynch

A Fall From Grace Program is at 11:00 am at the Tivoli Theatre – A Free Event Sliff guest Jennifer Lynch (Chained.) has plans to shoot her next film, A Fall from Grace, in St. Louis. Post-Dispatch film critic Joe Williams leads a...

In this animated movie, Eric Khoo, a Singapore film-maker, pays tribute to the manga artist Yoshihiro Tatsumi, who in the 1950s created a new kind of serious Japanese comic, the "gekiga". The film artfully combines, though sometimes rather confusingly, scenes from Tatsumi's life story as told in his graphic autobiography, with five tales in the adult gekiga manner. All of them have tragic or ironic endings, and the most remarkable is "Hell", an unforgettable tale of a Japanese army journalist who becomes famous for his photograph of the shadow of two people who perished at Hiroshima. Believed to be a son massaging his mother, the image was in fact of a killer strangling a woman at the very moment the bomb exploded.

AnimationComics and graphic novelsPhilip French

guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to...

War Horse (12A)

(Steven Spielberg, 2011, Us) Jeremy Irvine, Peter Mullan, Emily Watson, Niels Arestrup, Tom Hiddleston, Benedict Cumberbatch. 146 mins

You can see why the hit boy-and-his-horse book/play appealed to Spielberg, in a sort of Et-meets-Saving Private Ryan way. It brings out the best and worst of him. There's some brazen old-school tear-jerking and rosy rural farming hardship, but there's also the first world war, thank God. Epic action frequently comes to the rescue, in what becomes a stirring, gruelling steeplechase across wartime Europe, towards an ending that's pure Hollywood.

Shame (18)

(Steve McQueen, 2011, UK) Michael Fassbender, Carey Mulligan, James Badge Dale. 101 mins

McQueen's follow-up to Hunger tackles an equally risky topic (sex addiction) with a similarly sparse and frank approach, though this is arguably more conventional. Fassbender is magnetic as usual, playing a terminally horny Manhattan man whose lone-wolf existence is disrupted by the arrival of his needy sister.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Cult manga author Yoshihiro Tatsumi gets the biopic treatment in this ode to his work produced by Singaporean director Eric Khoo. But it’s no ordinary biopic – and we don’t mean because his work is ignored in favour of a rubbish dementia plot.

Combining Tatsumi’s life, as described in his own autobiographical manga, and several of the short stories written during his prolific career so far, ‘Tatsumi’ is a stunning animation which captures the flavour of the great creator on so many levels.

The animation style absorbs and expounds the raw, sometimes simplistic style of its subject, throwing us viscerally into the worlds he created for himself. It’s clear that Khoo has spent much time in them himself, because they draw you in with minimal effort and maximum effect.

Surprisingly, this is enhanced by the brief sorties into the fictional short stories Tatsumi created.

A heartfelt, beautifully-made homage to anime director Yoshihiro Tatsumi, that fights a little shy of investigating exactly what inspired his bizarre style

Here is a striking study of the Japanese manga master Yoshihiro Tatsumi (now 76 years old) who invented the adult "gekiga" form of the genre: a kind of psychological noir. The film is rendered in the hand-drawn style of Tatsumi himself: both in the telling of his lifestory, and dramatising some of his classic tales of sexual obsession, violence and fear, particularly the extraordinary Good Bye, the story of a self-hating prostitute in postwar Japan, despised by both her neighbours and clients, who winds up drunkenly seducing her pathetic old father so as to nullify his emotional claim on her. But the slightly slushy tone of celebration rather obtusely fails to engage with the nihilist, pessimist nature of Tatsumi's work. Anyway, an intriguing event.

Rating: 3/5

AnimationWorld cinemaPeter Bradshaw

guardian.

Animation based on Yoshihiro Tatsumi's manga memoir A Drifting Life and other short stories.

The name Yoshihiro Tatsumi probably won't be familiar to most British cinemagoers unless they are afficionados of comics, Japanese comics and manga in particular. But, in fact, Tatsumi has been hugely influential in the rise of 'gekiga' manga - a form of alternative Japanese comic art and storytelling that is aimed at more adult audiences and can deal with weighty themes such as isolation, lust, suicide and the fallout from the Second World War.

Born in Osaka, Japan in 1935, Yoshihiro...

Cologne, Germany -- Eric Khoo’s Tatsumi won best film in the Muhr AsiaAfrica competition and at this year’s Dubai International Film Festival (Dec 7-14), while Susan Youssef’s Habibi took best film in the Muhr Arab section. Tatsumi, an animated biography of Japanese manga artist Yoshihiro Tatsumi, is South Korea’s official entry for next year’s foreign language Oscar race. The film also won the best composer prize in Dubai for Khoo’s teenage son, Christopher. Other multiple award winners in Dubai were The Last Friday, directed by Yahya Alabdallah; Hakim Belabbes’ Boiling Dreams; Japanese comedy The Woodsman And The Rain from Shuichi

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Today, Montreal's Festival du nouveau cinéma (Fnc), which will take place between October 12 to 23. Here's the complete line-up of feature films according to the press release we received.

Opening and closing

The 40th edition of the Fnc kicks off on Wednesday, October 12, with Declaration of War by Valérie Donzelli (France) at Cinéma Impérial (Centre Sandra & Leo Kolber, Salle Lucie & André Chagnon). This critically-acclaimed second feature by Valérie Donzelli (The Queen of Hearts) tells the love story of Roméo and Juliette who are battling to save their sick child. The director and her producer Edouard Weil will be in attendance.

Ten days later, on Saturday, October 22, Monsieur Lazhar (Quebec/Canada) by Philippe Falardeau will close the Festival. Selected to represent Canada at the Oscars for Best Foreign Language Film, Monsieur Lahzar shows the efforts of an Algerian schoolteacher to help his Grade 6 students come to terms with their teacher’s death.

I will soon post a list of films I have already seen that I highly recommend as well as a list of my most anticipated films screening at this year’s Festival du Nouveau Cinema. For now here is the press release from the festival. Make sure you read carefully because there are a ton of great films to check out.

Montreal, Tuesday September 27, 2011– Montreal’s Festival du nouveau cinéma will be celebrating its 40th edition from October 12 to 23. For the past 40 years, Canada’s oldest film festival has offered film buffs a selection of the year’s most exciting new films — a bold lineup with plenty of whimsical and surprising elements, but one that also turns its lens on social realities and the evolution of film and new technologies. Over the course of this year’s 11-day Festival, audiences of all ages can take in features and shorts, fiction films and documentaries,...

High time to round up the films at this year's Cannes Film Festival that never saw entries of their own and send them on their way. Today: Un Certain Regard.

"Bakur Bakuradze's The Hunter seems like a ficticious version of Raymond Depardon's Modern Life, a trilogy on farming that was screened in Cannes in 2008," finds Moritz Pfeifer, who also interviews the director for the East European Film Bulletin. "With no soundtrack, no professional actors, little dialogue and a minimalist plot, the film depicts the daily life of Ivan (Mikhail Barskovich) as he peacefully runs his pig farm in one of the less populous areas of northwestern Russia…. Clearly, Bakuradze wants to depict an alternative world, and the spirit of his film is more utopian than its hyper-realistic images suggest."

Grumbles the Hollywood Reporter's Kirk Honeycutt: "There is maybe 10 to 15 minutes of actual story located within this 124 minute slog,...