Series: Film / TV

La Belle et la Bête directed by Christophe Gans

If you’re going to adapt the fairy tale of “Beauty and the Beast”, you’d best make sure you do it properly, because you have to live up to the bar set by Jean Cocteau’s 1946 black-and-white film and Disney’s 1991 animated version — both classic films in their own right.

There’s also a challenge in adapting the original material, which essentially involves a loving father giving up his daughter to a monster to save his own skin, and a young girl being wooed by a terrifying beast who emotionally blackmails her into staying with him by insisting he’ll die without her.

The Walking Dead directed by Michael Curtiz

Offhand, I cannot think of another actor who gave us a more impressive run of films in the horror genre than Boris Karloff did in the 1930s. Starting with the sensation that was 1931’s Frankenstein, Boris continued to appear, year after year, in films for Universal, Columbia and (English studio) Gaumont that are now deemed eternal classics in the genre. In 1935 alone, the so-called “King of Horror” appeared in The Black Room, The Raven, and Bride of Frankenstein,

Winter’s Tale by Akiva Goldsman

I made a point of watching Akiva Goldsman’s Winter’s Tale AFTER reading the book upon which it’s based, knowing that stories are usually considered better on the page than as filmic adaptations. But having completed Mark Helprin‘s novel of the same name, I was left pretty bewildered as to how on earth the transition from book to screen would take place.

The trailers would have you believe that Winter’s Tale is a bittersweet time-travelling love story (perhaps a more fairytale-esque version of The Time Traveller’s Wife),