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Dead Island 2 is at its best when the game is just letting you kill as many zombies as possible in the twisted town of Hell-A. Of course, the game is even more fun when you pick the playable slayer that lets you kill as many zombies as possible as effectively as possible.

While all of Dead Island 2‘s playable characters can get you through the game, some are simply better than others. That being the case, here’s a power ranking of every playable character in the game and why you should (or shouldn’t) pick them.

6. Bruno

Backstab: Bruno gets a moderate Damage boost when attacking zombies from behind.

Rapid Reprisal: Boost Bruno’s Agility and Heavy Attack Charges when he avoids attacks with a Block or Dodge.

Buno is Dead Island 2‘s version of the basic Rogue archetype, which means he boasts high critical damage and is looking to backstab zombies.

Of the 94 filmmakers who have clinched the coveted Palme d’Or prize at the Cannes Film Festival, only 10 have achieved the honor twice. The latest one to follow the dual win precedent established by Alf Sjoberg (1944’s “Torment” and 1951’s “Miss Julie”) is another Swedish director, Ruben Ostlund, whose first and second victories came for 2017’s “The Square” and 2022’s “Triangle of Sadness.” The latter film has, by all accounts, become his most successful yet and is now in the running for three Oscars, including Best Director.

In this year’s directing Oscar race, Ostlund faces Todd Field (“Tar”), Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (“Everything Everywhere All at Once”), Martin McDonagh (“The Banshees of Inisherin”) and Steven Spielberg (“The Fabelmans”). The Daniels are also first-time Oscar nominees, while Spielberg stands as the only past directing contender in the group, with a pair of wins for “Schindler’s List” (1993) and “Saving Private Ryan...

Before Tate McRae was trying to take the pop world by storm, she was a former finalist on So You Think You Can Dance? who had a vlog series where she flaunted her singer-songwriter skills. In 2019, one of the videos she recorded — a piano ballad called “One Day” — went viral on YouTube and landed her a contract with RCA. It wasn’t long until her 2020 lush dark-pop “You Broke Me First” also became a viral hit. Since then, McRae has found herself situated squarely in the “sad girl” lane, channeling...

FKA Twigs has shared a new music video for her song “Oh My Love.” Directed by Aidan Zamiri, the clip — which has a low-fi, vintage aesthetic — showcases the singer in a salon, getting her nails done.

“Oh My Love” comes off Twig’s mixtape Caprisongs, which dropped in January. The 17-song effort marked her first collection of new music since 2019’s Magdalene and features appearances by the Weeknd, Jorja Smith, Daniel Caesar, and Shygirl. The singer has released several music videos for the mixtape’s tracks, including “Jealousy.”

Prior to...

Each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit streaming platforms in the United States. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here.

All My Friends Hate Me (Andrew Gaynord)

Pete (Tom Stourton) hasn’t seen his university mates in years. Ten years to be exact. It happens. Life happens. We reach adulthood, mature, and set goals for ourselves that the people who were closest to us during that formidable period simply cannot follow—their own ambitions lie upon different forks in the road. So resentment shouldn’t factor in. Nor should jealousy. Yet Pete can’t help wondering about both. A little voice in the back of his head wonders if a decade was too long to pretend things could pick up where they left off. Would their very posh upbringing think he abandoned them to work with refugees? Do they think he thinks...

For 20 years, ever since Gilbert Gottfried made the tasteless crack that inspired it just a few weeks after 9/11, “Too soon” has been the mantra we use to jokingly suggest someone is making a joke before the time is ripe for it. But the phrase could also be applied to certain music documentaries. “Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry” caught the first chapters of Billie Eilish’s career, starting in 2015, when she recorded and posted “Ocean Eyes” on SoundCloud — and though she is still a young star (just 20), the film felt momentous, because her stardom has had such an extraordinary trajectory, and you feel, in a way, that she remade the pop-music world in her own image.

Olivia Rodrigo is a very gifted star, but it feels as if she’s living in that remade world — and The film, directed by Stacey Lee, is only 77 minutes long, and it doesn...

For the last seven years, fans around the world have had one question on their minds: “Stromae, où t’es?“

That’s how long it’s been since the Belgian singer was last seen making waves around the world with his honest lyrics and electropop sound. In the U.S., many encountered Stromae’s music in high school. (“Were you really ever in French class if you never had to translate a Stromae song?” read one tweet.) For others, it was the way his songs provided commentary on gender equality...

FKA Twigs embraces a classic throwback aesthetic in the new music video for “Jealousy,” a track featuring Rema off her recent mixtape, Caprisongs.

The video, directed by Aidan Zamiri, has a late-Eighties/early-Nineties feel, jumping between sequences of FKA Twigs performing the song and dancing alongside a small troupe, and black-and-white footage of Rema delivering his verse solo. The choreography in the clip was handled by Twigs’ regular collaborator, Kash Powell.

“Jealousy” is the latest Caprisongs track FKA Twigs has released a music video for, following “Meta Angel” and “Tears in the Club,...

“Fate’s the one to blame!”

Lies and Deceit: Five Films by Claude Chabrol – a new 5-disc set will be available on Blu-ray February 22nd from Arrow Video

Too often overlooked and undervalued, Claude Chabrol was the first of the Cahiers du Cinema critics to release a feature film and would be among the most prolific. The sneaky anarchist of the French New Wave, he embraced genre as a means off lifting the lid on human nature. Nothing is sacred and nothing is certain in the films of Claude Chabrol. Anything can be corrupted, and usually will be.

Arrow Video is proud to present Lies & deceit: Five Films by Claude Chabrol. Featuring Cop Au Vin (Poulet au vinaigre), Inspector Lavardin, Madame Bovary, Betty and Torment (L’enfer), this inaugural collection of Claude Chabrol on Blu-ray brings together a wealth of passionate contributors and archival extras to shed fresh light...

The Notebook Primer introduces readers to some of the most important figures, films, genres, and movements in film history.Above: Bungee Jumping of Their Own (2001) Jooran Lee’s seminal 2000 essay “Remembered Branches: Towards a Future of Korean Homosexual Film” begins with the assertion that “discussing Korean gay and lesbian films is like drifting in a space without sunlight or oxygen. One searches, blindly, gaspingly—and mostly in vain—simply trying to discover the existence of such films.” The gathering of these films into a holistic canon is almost as difficult an endeavor as the unearthing. Without theatrical releases or international festival runs, queer Korean films are still relatively obscure and elusive, especially for those who do not live in Korea. A copy of Han Hyung-mo's film Jealousy (1960), considered one of the earliest Korean films to display homoerotic behavior between women, remains missing.1 Other films, like Park Jae-ho’s Broken Branches...

Dave Hause may call Santa Barbara home right now, but his Philadelphia raising informs nearly everything about the singer-songwriter. In the euphoric new song “Sandy Sheets,” Hause recalls his formative years as a teenager making the rite-of-passage drive from the Philly suburbs to the Jersey Shore, where anything was possible.

“We went wild in the Jersey heat, we had ‘Hey Jealousy’ on repeat/we’d hide out on the beach,” Hause sings. “Let me remember you when it was easy.” Along with lyrical allusions to the Gin Blossoms, Hause nods...

In the first few seconds of her debut album, Sour, Olivia Rodrigo declares, “I want it to be, like, messy!” That shouldn’t be too difficult for a pop star who emerged seemingly out of nowhere in January, a Disney actress whose hit “Drivers License” ignited widespread interest in a love triangle between her High School Musical: The Musical: The Series co-stars. Rodrigo belted extremely relatable, heart-wrenching lines about doing something you were supposed to do with your partner but are now doing alone — and it gave us a glimpse of her songwriting potential.

As Italy’s film and TV industry forges ahead after bearing the brunt of the pandemic in 2020, the Filming Italy — Los Angeles fest, which is a bridgehead between Italy and Hollywood, is pulling out all the stops to drive and promote the country’s restart effort.

After Filming Italy miraculously managed to hold its sister shindig as a physical edition on the island of Sardinia last summer, the upcoming March 18-21 Los Angeles event will be mostly online. But going virtual has just prompted Italian marketing guru Tiziana Rocca, a longtime Italian industry promoter, to double her efforts.

This year the former Taormina Film Festival general manager is serving up twice the number of titles — a selection of more than 50 features, TV skeins, docs and shorts — and a marathon medley of 25 master classes, starting with Edoardo Ponti, director of Oscar-buzzed Sophia Loren-starrer “The Life Ahead,” in conversation with Diane Warren,...

Van Morrison has shared the title track from his new double album, Latest Record Project: Volume 1, set to arrive May 7th via Exile/BMG.

“Latest Record Project” is a cheeky bit of classic yet self-aware soul. It finds Morrison pairing vintage sonics — Hammond organ, shuffling drums, backing vocalists cooing “sha-la-la” — with the musings of an artist who has a back catalog packed with hits but hasn’t ceased making new music: “Have you got my latest songs I’m singing?/You got my latest songs I’m singing?/Not something...

Exclusive: Amazon Studios and Makeready, the production company behind stirring drama, Queen & Slim, have teamed up to develop The Jealousy Man feature based on the upcoming novel by Norwegian crime author Jo Nesbø. William Oldroyd has been tapped to direct the adaptation. He is best known for directing the 2016 TIFF drama Lady Macbeth, which earned him BAFTA and DGA nominations.

Roberto Bentivegna, who recently sold his high-profile Gucci screenplay to MGM with Ridley Scott directing and Lady Gaga starring as Patrizia Gucci, is adapting the script for The Jealousy Man. Set on a remote Greek island, the story follows twin brothers caught in a violent love triangle, and the detective, known as The Jealousy Man, is called in to investigate.

The Brad Weston-led Makeready will produce along with Nesbø and Niclas Salomonsson.

Nesbø works include the Harry Hole series, Headhunters, The Son, Blood on Snow, Midnight Sun, Macbeth, as...

In his latest podcast/interview, host and screenwriter Stuart Wright talks to Dan Martin (13 Finger FX & co-host of Arrow Video Podcast) about 5 Great SFX Moments in Film. Pre-watch the SFX moments or watch and listen with me and Dan:

L’Inferno (1911) – Satan eats a man: youtu.be/MU4q-ZGo_kw Blood Feast (1963) – Woman has her tongue torn out: youtu.be/Dk71_EvljaE?t=23m15s Zombie Flesh Eaters (1979) – Infamous eye scene: youtu.be/9wMOYNFlaCY Alien (1979) – World famous chest burster: youtu.be/nPQ7om598OM Final Destination 2 (2003) – Fence bisection: youtu.be/jLImV_gvwE8

Plus chat about doing SFX during Covid and how he made the wall so gloopy and gooey in Girl on the Third Floor. For more about Dan Martin’s work see www.13fingerfx.com...

For this week’s horror and sci-fi home media releases, we have some Stephen King on tap, as well as a ton of indie horror and a classic genre romance as well. If you missed it previously, you can now catch up with the second season of Castle Rock, which is coming out on both Blu-ray & DVD, and if you’re a big softie like this writer, you’ll definitely want to pick up the new Blu for Ghost, which Paramount is releasing in honor of the film’s 30th anniversary.

If you have aspiring young horror fans in your midst, Scoob! hits a variety of formats this week, and for those of you in the mood for a classic suspense film, Torment should more than hold you over for a while.

Other releases for July 21st include The Room, Parts Unknown, Creature Cabin, Deadtectives, and a Horror Thrillers 4-Film...

This fall, the Nashville-based duo the War & Treaty will be returning with their self-produced second album Hearts Town, the follow-up to the band’s 2018 debut Healing Tide. That album, which was produced by Buddy Miller, earned the War & Treaty gigs opening for Al Green and resulted in the band taking home the award for Emerging Act of the Year at the 2019 Americana Awards show.

The latest release from their forthcoming album is “Five More Minutes,” an up-tempo roots-rocker with an opening horn riff that conjures early Seventies Hi Records gold.

A little more than a month ago, the War & Treaty’s Tanya Blount-Trotter was feeling the early symptoms of Covid-19, for which she eventually tested positive. She has since recovered from the virus and is back to making music at home with her husband and performing partner Michael Trotter Jr. In their latest video, the pair turn in a soulful rendition of the Sixties soul-pop classic “Baby, Now That I’ve Found You,” also recorded by their Rounder Records labelmate Alison Krauss.

Penned by Tony Macaulay and John MacLeod, “Baby,...

The War and Treaty have returned with a pair of new songs. The duo of spouses Michael Trotter and Tanya Blount-Trotter released “Jealousy” and “Hustlin'” on Friday, marking their first music since signing with Rounder Records in mid-2019 and a preview of the follow-up to their Buddy Miller-produced 2018 album The Healing Tide.

While “Jealousy” retains the signature vocal interplay that made the Trotters’ live performances so ecstatic, it ventures into some new stylistic territory. With its four-on-the-floor beat, minor-key electric guitar stabs, and burbling synthesizer, it has the hallmarks of a disco anthem,...

Sometimes it's all about the lighting.

In a teaser for French electronic group Opale's upcoming "Sparkles and Wine" release, London-based filmmaker Nacho Guzmán created a mesmerizing video that shows just how much the appearance of one face can change under various lighting conditions.

Posted on Vimeo last week, the music video teaser features a beautiful female center-screen, seen from the shoulders up. Using colored Led and string lights (most often used on Christmas trees), Guzmán was able to make the woman's face appear as if her features are somehow transforming.

A Reddit user captured stills of the top, right, left and bottom lighting used in the video. (Photo via Imgur)

Speaking to The Huffington Post, Guzmán explained the video is actually an homage to deceased French director Henri-Georges Clouzot. In his final unfinished film, "L'enfer," Clouzot employed a similar lighting technique.

Intrigued by the visual style, Guzmán sought to determine...

Clouzot and Romy Schneider on the set of L'Enfer

"Watching a film by the French master Henri-Georges Clouzot, you often feel as if the walls were closing in on you — even when there are no walls," writes Terrence Rafferty in the New York Times. "The Wages of Fear (1953), the movie that opens the Museum of Modern Art's Clouzot retrospective [today], takes place almost entirely out of doors, yet it's as claustrophobic as a stretch in solitary confinement…. It is perhaps fortunate, for the sanity of his viewers, that he managed to complete only 11 features between 1942, when his deceptively light-hearted L'Assassin Habite au 21 (The Murderer Lives at No. 21) was released, and 1968, when his last movie, La Prisonnière, came out.... All 11 will be screened before the series ends on Dec 24, along with odds and ends like a couple of early-40s pictures for which he supplied screenplays and a 2010 documentary, Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno,...

Filmmakers -- especially French ones, and especially those working before the 50s -- are often overly romanticized amongst cinephiles. We love a great film, but we really love the underlying legends and myths of the artist and the creative process, struggling and screaming and clawing to get each film made, centralized on a whirligig of backstabbing, betrayal, and romance. Failed projects, lusty affairs, bouts with depression, creative absences, controversial ideologies, and tragic deaths: it's the stuff that makes the singular genius of the director all the more untouchable; all the more storied. Enter, then, Henri-Georges Clouzot, the 'French Hitchcock' - perhaps the most improbable canonized auteur of them all. The Tiff Bell Lightbox in Toronto won't be spotlighting him with an 'art' exhibition ala Fellini's photo show last summer, but they will be giving his modestly sized filmography a run-through from mid-October to November 29. Unpretentiously titled The Wages of Fear...

Reviewer: Jeffrey M. Anderson

Rating (out of 5): ****

The documentary Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno made its U.S. premiere at the 2009 New York Film Festival, made some festival and arthouse rounds in 2010, and finally had a San Francisco opening in 2011. It began, ostensibly, when film archivist Serge Bromberg found himself stuck in an elevator with Henri-Georges Clouzot's widow, and she told him about the late director's ordeal shooting L'Enfer (Inferno, or Hell) in the mid-1960s. The new documentary unveils a great deal of amazing-looking footage for the first time, as well as interviewing some of the surviving players.

Start: 10/13/2010 Start: 10/13/2010

Film lawyer-turned-director Ruxandra Medrea co-directs this weird genre documentary with Serge Bromberg, screening at Sitges 2010.

In 1963, Henri-Georges Clouzot wrote an original screenplay titled "L'Enfer" ("Hell"), which told a tragic tale of pathological jealousy. Victim of a heart attack, the film director never finished the film. After 43 years of oblivion, Medrea and Bromberg discovered 185 cans of negative film, all that remains of this chaotic and unfinished adventure. It is the opportunity to recount the story of a magnificent shipwreck and to at last discover these incredible images.

Romanian-born Ruxandra Medrea started her career in film as a lawyer specializing in intellectual property. Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno is her first feature documentary as director. You'll notice that she doesn't get credit as such in the trailer.

The French New Wave veteran has died aged 80. We look back over his career with a selection of clips from his films

Along with François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol ushered in the New Wave that washed over French cinema at the end of the 1950s. Like them a critic turned filmmaker, Chabrol shared their appreciation of classical genre form – to some, he appreciated it too much, exploring rather than subverting its strictures. But his prodigious output and technical mastery assure his place as one of the great figures of cinema's first century.

Born in 1930 to a middle-class family, Chabrol studied law before joining Godard, Truffaut, Eric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette in making Cahiers du Cinema, the epicentre of auteurist celebration of 'low' Hollywood. In 1957, he and Rohmer published their influential study of Hitchcock – a director who would have an enduring influence on Chabrol's work behind the camera – and,...

As you've undoubtedly heard, the French auteur Claude Chabrol passed away at 80. Both The Telegraph and Glenn Kenny have fine obits for your reading pleasure and if you can read French, Le Monde collects testimonials from many cinematic luminaries to honor him. I didn't know his career as well as I should but I quite liked both L'Enfer (1994) and the recent Ludivine Sagnier love/murder triangle A Girl Cut in Two. (The two of them are pictured to your left.) The prolific director's Le Beau Serge was the first French New Wave offering and we should all probably program ourselves mini-fests to catch up on his best work. Any suggestions? I'm reading these titles a lot: The Cry of the Owl, Les Biches and Le Boucher. I suppose it wouldn't hurt to catch up with any of his Isabelle Huppert collaborations either. Here's his available filmography from Netflix, LOVEFilm or GreenCine,...

For art and entertainment, 'making of' films can rival the movies they document, says Mark Kermode

Every now and then, a documentary about the making of a film rivals its subject for both art and entertainment. Take Les Blank's extraordinary Burden of Dreams which, arguably, documents obsession and the search for "ecstatic truth" as effectively as Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo. "I live by this movie, I die by this movie!" declares Herzog with a conviction which would shame Klaus Kinski's titular madman and which Blank backs up with breathtakingly confrontational on-set footage.

Or what about Hearts of Darkness, in which Martin Sheen suffers a heart attack and Francis Ford Coppola mutates into a modern-day Colonel Kurtz while filming Apocalypse Now? "My movie is not about Vietnam, my movie is Vietnam!" says Coppola with Brandoesque bravado, before admitting: "We had too much equipment, too much money and little by little we went insane.

Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno

DVD, Park Circus

In 1964 Clouzot, best known for French classics such as Les Diaboliques and The Wages Of Fear, was given an "unlimited budget" from Hollywood to make his next film. It was to be the intimate tale of a man consumed with jealousy over his wife (Romy Schneider). Clouzot wanted the film to employ his new, experimental notions of what film and sound could accomplish. The 300-page script was more concerned with mood than story, and was full of sequences where the pain and anxiety of the paranoid spouse distorted his perception of reality. If you've ever wondered what a producer does, then watch this. L'Enfer didn't really have one. Clouzot held the title, along with director and writer, but completely neglected the role. He had no one to argue with. No one to remind him of the realities of the job, no one to...

With the fragments of Henri-Georges Clouzot's never-completed L'enfer (1964) finally gathered together and released as part of the making-of/unmaking-of documentary Inferno (2009), now seems a good time to revisit Clouzot's last feature, the criminally neglected La prisonnière (1968).

Made at the urging of admirer François Truffaut, this perverse romance utilized many of the pop-art gimmicks and psychedelic visual tricks Clouzot had planned to use in the abortive L'enfer, but in the four years since that project had rolled over and died, nearly taking its director with it, times had changed, and Clouzot's experiments no longer looked as startling as they would have in '64. (Plus, L'enfer would have been a black and white film whose naturalistic style would have been violently ruptured by bursts of hallucinatory color.) In fact, it probably looked as if the old man was straining to be hip and counter-cultural. The film was passed over with a degree of embarrassment.

Today is Emmanuelle Béart's 46th birthday. Here she is to your left earlier this summer with another Gallic great Isabelle Huppert. Huppert is still an arthouse draw in the states but it seems like it's been ages since Béart made it to our screens in any significant way. There's been a teensy run here and there (Strayed, The Witnesses) but the last film that won any real attention was 8 Women (2002) also starring Huppert... and Catherine Deneuve and Fanny Ardant and Ludivine Sagnier. Mon dieu, je l'aime!

The last time I remember hearing other Americans talk about Béart was in college in the early to mid90s when Béart had that critically acclaimed run of Un Couer en Hiver (Cesar nom), L'Enfer, A French Woman and Nelly & Monsieur Arnaud (Cesar nomination) but international stardom is a tough thing to maintain for anyone, no matter how beautiful or talented. Exceedingly rare...