Director: Guillermo del Toro

Cast: Oscar Isaac, Jacon Elordi, Mia Goth and Christoph Waltz

Rating: ★★★.5

Acclaimed filmmaker Guillermo del Toro returns to the candlelit corridors of Gothic horror with his take on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a realm he last flirted with in Crimson Peak (2015). This time, the canvas is bigger, shinier and powered by Netflix money, with a marquee cast led by Oscar Isaac as Victor Frankenstein, Jacob Elordi as the Creature, Mia Goth as Elizabeth, and Christoph Waltz as the patrician benefactor, Henrich Harlander. Around them orbit David Bradley, Charles Dance and Felix Kammerer, each adding texture to a tale that’s equal parts spectacle and self-importance.

The movie opens in a frozen wasteland where a stranded captain drags a wounded Victor aboard, only to face a brutal assault from Victor’s creation. From there, the film traces Victor’s ascent from obsessive student to self-anointed god—piecing together bodies, flirting with immortality, and unleashing a being whose hunger for connection curdles into rage. Guillermo keeps the period setting, shifts character dynamics (William as an adult, Elizabeth refocused), and steers the narrative toward a collision between maker and made that comes faster than you expect.

Performance-wise, Jacob is the film’s heartbeat. He disappears into the role, toggling between naive wonder and feral impulse. The physicality sells both the creature’s fragility and his terrible force. Oscar leans into Victor’s fevered ambition—slick, persuasive, and increasingly hollowed out—as the consequences of his “invention” spiral. Mia brings a prickly curiosity to Elizabeth, especially in moments where her compassion toward the Creature reframes their dynamic. And Christoph has a ball as Harlander, the velvet-gloved capitalist who funds genius and shrugs at the fallout; he strolls through scenes with a venture capitalist’s swagger dressed in 19th-century finery.

Crucially, the film moves. Despite the weight of Mary Shelley’s text, Guillermo hits the big beats cleanly. When it wants to thrill—snapped vertebrae, bone-on-stone brutality—it does, and the orchestration of action is crisp even when the camera averts its gaze at the crucial second.

Some character recalibrations don’t land. Aging William up, reassigning relationships and compressing arcs drains poignancy from key turns—his final line to Victor barely stings because the bond hasn’t been built. Elizabeth is compelling in concept, but the script sidelines her when it matters most, handing her an exit that feels more mechanical than tragic.

NEW YORK (OSV News) – As the historical drama “Nuremberg” (Sony Pictures Classics) successfully reminds its audience, the trials held in the titular German city in the aftermath of World War II almost didn’t happen. What takes place in the uncertain lead-up to them kicks off the film’s action.

Summoned to the temporary prison for former Nazi leaders Allied forces nicknamed Camp Ashcan, Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek), a psychiatrist holding the rank of lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army, is assigned to assess its inmates. The senior — and by far most intriguing — figure among them is ex-Luftwaffe chief Hermann Goering (Russell Crowe).

Swayed by his preeminent patient’s deceptive charm, the analyst wavers between tentative friendship for him and the need to assist the military and legal authorities. The latter include Ashcan’s hard-driving commandant, Col. Burton C. Andrus (John Slattery), and, eventually, the lead American prosecutor, Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson (Michael Shannon).

Crowe’s multi-faceted performance as the wily Goering propels writer-director James Vanderbilt’s adaptation of Jack El-Hai’s 2013 book “The Nazi and the Psychiatrist.” By turns genial, cunning and — more consistently — impossibly vain, the World War I flying ace seeks to distance himself from the horrific crimes committed by the regime he subsequently served.

The principal moral point of the movie is that those bewilderingly evil actions — the full extent of which was only beginning to be understood as evidence was gathered for the international tribunal at which Goering would be tried — not only cannot be excused or minimized, they can’t even be contextualized by any feeble effort at establishing an imagined ethical equivalent.

Some moviegoers may conclude that Malek’s highly personalized performing style makes him a poor choice to play Kelley, insofar as the analyst is meant to serve as an Everyman conduit into the story for viewers. Yet his tightly wound, driven demeanor pairs well with the suave restraint with which Crowe endows Goering and helps keep the pace of the proceedings snappy.

As detailed below, “Nuremberg” includes a number of elements best suited to grown-ups. In light of the picture’s potential educational value in providing an accurate retrospective on a vital series of events, however, many parents may consider it acceptable — as well as informative — fare for older adolescents.

The film contains disturbing footage of crimes against humanity, a hanging, suicides, a scene of urination, partial nudity, several profanities, a few milder oaths, at least one rough term and a handful of crude and crass expressions. The OSV News classification is A-III — adults. The Motion Picture Association rating is PG-13 — parents strongly cautioned. Some material may be inappropriate for children under 13.

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Within the first few minutes of director Shōji Kawamori‘s Labyrinth, protagonist Shiori laments that “without smartphones, humanity would be doomed”. From the events that later transpire, I suspect Kawamori’s opinion is quite the opposite. Kawamori is, of course, best known for his lifetime of work on the Macross franchise, which features mecha battles, idol singers, and love triangles in most of its entries. If you squint a little, each of these main obsessions is also present in Labyrinth. It seems that Kawamori can’t help himself. Whether these elements mesh together to make a satisfying film is another matter entirely. Whereas his most beloved film, Super Dimension Fortress Macross: Do You Remember Love?, is a timeless classic, Labyrinth‘s reliance on modern tech and the anxieties around it almost instantly date it.

At the end of the screening, with my head in my hands, I sighed to myself, “How in hell’s name am I supposed to review this?” It’s a movie that almost defies explanation; any attempt to summarise the plot is likely to leave me gibbering incomprehensibly. I guess I’ll have to try. Suffice to say, Labyrinth is not by any means a “good” film. However, it’s certainly an entertaining one, and often (unintentionally) hilarious. Watching along with a highly engaged audience at the Scotland Loves Anime film festival was probably the best mode of experience for Labyrinth, for without my fellow cinemagoers’ stunned, disbelieving laughter, I doubt I would have survived to the end of its bloated, almost two-hour-long runtime.

Shiori is supposed to be the audience insert, an anxious high school girl who constantly apologizes for her mere existence. The daughter of a titanic judo instructor with the most impressively imposing moustache this side of Ivo Robotnik, she rejects her family’s focus on self-improvement via martial arts. Instead, she records social media videos with her female best friend Kirara. Their friendship is somewhat unequal – Kirara is far more outgoing and confident, and Shiori secretly seethes that her videos accrue far more “likes” from the faceless online masses. In fact, Shiori uses a secret, anonymous account to spew her negativity onto the internet rather than owning it as part of herself.

It’s this sublimated jealousy and insecurity that not only fractures their friendship but also Shiori’s identity. When her beloved smartphone screen cracks, it sends ruptures through her reality, as her persona splits in two – the more anxious version trapped within an almost Silent Hill-like alternative dimension, a shadowy analogue to the real world but empty of people, and a more confident “ideal” version that instantly becomes more outgoing. Ideal Shiori dons a VTuber-style two-tone wig and sets her sights on becoming a modern media superstar, the most popular Japanese high school girl, with a goal of garnering 100 million “likes.” She views her anxious alter ego as an impediment, and frequently taunts her through her apparently cloned smartphone, which seems to be able to dial its identical equivalent in the digital world, somehow without generating network errors.

We mostly view the story through Anxious Shiori’s eyes. She journeys through a dark, ominous liminal space populated by the souls of others similarly sucked into the digital underworld, where they are transformed, unsettlingly, into the smartphone stickers that best approximate their personalities. Anxious Shiori herself tended to contribute to friend group chats mainly via stickers as a way to hide her true emotions, engaging only at a surface level. The constant demand for connectivity and reciprocal communication is shown to be exhausting and all-consuming; so, when Kirara completely disconnects and ghosts Shiori, she panics that maybe Kirara has also been sucked into this world and lost her soul. The only thing preventing Shiori from losing hers is that her smartphone remains charged. Yes, in Labyrinth all that stands between humanity and devolution into mute digital emoticons is the presence of a spare battery pack. I know that I can get anxious when out and about and running low on charge, but Labyrinth takes battery anxiety to the extreme.

Human souls are bound and pressed by enormous industrial devices that pound three-dimensional bodies into flat images, with reams of red digital text spewing from between heavy plates, clearly symbolising blood. It’s cool imagery that I wish the film had leaned into a little more heavily. If anything, the aesthetic is similar to the recent Hatsune Miku movie Colorful Stage, although with significantly less music, unfortunately.

Anxious Shiori meets Komori, a sad-looking pink bunny sticker person who seems to know a lot about this world – the eventual reveal of his true identity is probably meant to be a huge shock, but I guessed it instantly. It’s not the most subtly plotted of films. Komori is quite fun, especially when he becomes so hapless and useless that Shiori has to attach a dog collar and string to drag him around behind her, floating like a balloon and bumping into things.

If it wasn’t already deranged, Labyrinth‘s central plot goes full batshit insane later on, with the evil mastermind Suguru Kagami planning to “liberate everyone’s ideal selves,” and it’s up to Anxious Shiori and Komori to try to prevent this… somehow.

Aesthetically, the film has its moments, especially in the digital underworld that acts as a dark mirror to our own. Unfortunately, all of the character animation is accomplished using 3D CG, which, while it does a reasonable job of emulating 2D animation, lacks any real-life authenticity. The characters move like dolls rather than real, living, breathing characters. There’s something about the natural exaggeration of movement, such as squashing and stretching, and other techniques often employed in traditional animation that bring life to character movement, which is all but absent. Yes, there’s some reasonably amusing slapstick here and there, and funny character expressions, but it’s a far cry from the verve and atmosphere of Kawamori’s previous works.

For much of Labyrinth, the festival audience sat in silence until some of the nuttier plot decisions were met with incredulous guffaws. Mostly, the film plays itself very straight, which is odd for a story featuring a floating pink bunny character and an evil music producer who wants to rule the world. One particular scene where Kagami takes Ideal Shiori to his bedroom and begins to suggestively unzip his tracksuit top was met with hysterical audience laughter that will become obvious if you see the film.

Multiple similar examples litter Labyrinth, and it’s hard to tell if these insane choices that trigger such hilarity are deliberate or not, and that’s why the film is so hard to rate. None of the pieces fit together properly. Anxious Shiori, for most of the film, is a fairly unengaging, dull protagonist, though her fake/ideal version is much more fun, which is probably the point. Kagami makes for a somewhat underwhelming villain, with an unclear plan that seems overly convoluted. The rules of the world seem to change upon the writer’s whim, and crazy stuff happens mostly out of nowhere. It’s like a laundry list of bonkers ideas all strung together without any coherent plan.

I found Labyrinth a struggle to endure, yet found certain aspects very entertaining. Perhaps my mistake was watching it stone cold sober. As one of my fellow festival attendees noted, it’s probably best viewed with at least a few beers on board already. I certainly can’t unreservedly recommend Labyrinth, but if you’re hankering for some good old “WTF am I even watching right now?”, then Labyrinth has you covered.