by Indy Datta

Mostly Links is unwell. Mostly Links would quite like to be somewhere where the sun is shining, or failing that, seven years old, with its mum bringing it a boiled egg and soldiers on a tray. Mostly Links can’t even summon up the energy this week to sign a petition asking film studios not to stop renting out 35mm prints of their archive. Mostly Links should really stop talking about itself in the third person, like, now.

It’s Thanksgiving week in America, which means that the deluge of big end-of-year movies vying for kudos and cash starts in earnest with a couple of family films, Martin Scorsese’s Hugo and The Muppets, in respect of which no, of course I’m not calling it James Bobin’s The Muppets, don’t be silly. The Scorsese film, which was originally entitled The Invention of Hugo Cabret, after Brian Selznick’s book, and seems to have been suffering from some kind of progressive titular wasting disease over the last year, reaches cinemas just before it became known as Hug, trailing reviews of the ecstatic variety that seem inevitable when Scorsese tackles the birth of cinema – not that there aren’t dissenters.

As for The Muppets, I believe that if you’re not excited about The Muppets, they’re allowed to kick you off the internet. If you’re currently finding yourself in this danger zone, maybe this will help: the original (pre-Muppets) version of Mahna Mahna.

In the UK, of course, the big news is the long-awaited release of Dream House – the film that will finally lay bare to all the world the blazing sexual  chemistry between Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz.

Be sure to see that this weekend! Any other Rachel Weisz movie released at the same time is bound to look cheap and puny by comparison.

Not much awards news this week, except to note that the actually pretty much perfect A Separation, which you should see without fail, picked up two end-of-year awards – the BBC World Cinema Award and the Asia Pacific Screen Award. Hurrah!

In other stuff:

How they made those opening titles for Gaspar Noe’s Enter the Void.

Next week on Europe’s Best Website:  Japanese films, digital films, classic French films, creaky old sci-fi films, and much much more.