
The New York Film Academy recently published a pretty awesome infographic on their website, featuring the top 10 darkest characters in film. I’ve been known to be partial to the darker characters – I’m still a bit unsure whether I’ve a dark passenger of my own inside me or not, but I can’t help but always like the dark characters more than the happy ones. As I see it, they make any story more interesting.

A Most Wanted Man is a spy thriller that tells the story of an anti-terrorism unit in Hamburg as they try to prevent a disaster from happening. An immigrant, half-Chechen, half-Russian, is the spindle of the story: when he arrives in Hamburg’s Islamic community he is desperate to recover his late father’s illicitly acquired fortune.

According to my personal checklist, the extent to which a film can affect a viewer is a mark of its quality. Pioneer must have done something right, because it absolutely wrecked my sense of calm. A full 24 hours after watching director Erik Skjoldbjærg’s thriller for the first time, I still find myself feeling strangely uneasy – stealing glances over my shoulder, eyeing my friends and family with icy distrust…I even threw out a plate of unattended food on the off chance it had been poisoned by the shady agents of a deep-sea drilling conglomerate.

In today’s age of digital and IMAX cameras and big-budget post-production in film, no one would argue that cinema is very much a visual experience. Movies are, by definition, the recording of images to tell a story. But for those that are unable to see, whether they are born that way or became blind later in their lives, films can still be entertaining and immersive.

Unbroken tells the story of Olympic athlete and World War II hero Louis Zamperini. After the former track star survives a crash in the Pacific Ocean and spends almost two months drifting about on sea, he is taken prisoner by the Japanese forces; they force him to live in their prisoner of war camps for more than two and a half years. The movie is based on the non-fiction book by Lauren Hillenbrand, Unbroken: