Dorian Gray, as directed by Oliver Parker

Cracks, the feature length debut of Jordan Scott

Directed by Jordan Scott, the daughter of Ridley Scott, and starring the sensual Eva Green, Cracks is an unsettling, yet tragically beautiful movie set in the lush surrounds of the English countryside and featuring a Lord of the Flies-ish storyline in which a group of English boarding school students turn on a new Spanish-born classmate when they feel threatened by her evident exotic-ness and worldliness. With a dark subtext in which boundaries between teacher and student and the students themselves are increasingly blurred, and beguiling cinematography, this film, which I saw at the recent Toronto International Film Festival, provides plenty of talking points, not the least of being the stunning performance of Green as the teacher whose fantasises about a life that she had never had the opportunity to live ultimately lead to a calamitous outcome. Read more

Existential game where you have to figure out the plot

Rory Viner, an experimental composer from Toronto, and Japanese developer Kanoguti have created a free art game that will leave you trying to decide what this existential game actually means as the developer wanted the player to figure out the story for themselves. The game is called Lost & Found and has five mini-games set as five stages, all different in concept. You only need to use the arrow keys and the ‘z’ button. To get to the next stage, you just beat a level or you can exit the game and just select the next stage from the title splash screen.  Read more

How Max Zorn creates his tape-art works

We first told you about Max Zorn in July this year when his fresh tape-art works were just in Amsterdam. Tinkering with nothing more than an exacto knife, some packing tape and plastic sheets, it takes wrapping his work around street lamps to see the pieces in all their glory as the complex layers of slicing and shading formations take their full effect. Read more

Maths explains the origin of superhero characters

I love the colours and simple reasoning in this clever series by Scottish illustrator Matt Cowen, which uses basic maths equations to explain how certain pop culture icons came to be. Read more

Star Wars Uncut: a fully crowdsourced version of Episode IV

The project of creative technologist, Casey Pugh, this full length version of the George Lucas masterpiece was created from multiple 15 second segments recreated from the original movie and submitted by thousands of Star Wars fans, which were then spliced together by editor Aaron Valdez to form the final product. Genius, as both a commentary on contemporary pop culture trends (there are references to LEGO, stop motion, memes and the like) and on the power of tapping your audience for quality material.

Filmmaker creates LEGO stop motion to propose to girlfriend

Now, this is one for the ages: back in 2010, Atlanta film-maker Walter Thompson created a jaw-dropping LEGO stop motion to propose to Nealey Dozier, his girlfriend of four years. The video took 22 hours of shooting and some 2,600 pictures to splice together, a small sacrifice to pay for years of happiness together. Right? Right! Oh, and she said yes. Bonus.