A woman running out of time, a Grindr-using gay man, and a mermaid hit the road in search of an unwitting sperm donor in On the Go, a free-associative avant-garde road movie like little else. Co-directors María Gisèle Royo and Julia de Castro met at an artist’s residency and embarked […]
Blake Simons
Blake Simons is a freelance writer and programmer based in London. They studied Film at King's College London, where they founded Queer Film Nights - a weekly screening and discussion group for LGBTQ+ cinema. Their interests include self-reflexive romantic dramas, contemporary Japanese cinema, adaptation between mediums, and self-serious writer bios.
Your Lovely Smile (2022) The Artistic Struggle As a Japanese Comedy Drama (Review)
Unless you’ve been to any small-scale Japanese film festivals in recent years (or picked up Third Window Films’ ‘New Directors from Japan’ boxset), you probably haven’t heard of independent film director Hirobumi Watanabe. The inhabitants of Your Lovely Smile by-and-large haven’t heard of him either. Here Watanabe plays himself, in […]
Kill (2024) In the Action Tradition of The Raid, Only Lesser (Review)
One dude progressing through an enclosed location killing many other dudes in quick succession has long been one of cinema’s greatest pleasures. It’s a simple premise, a simple action, a base repetition. At its best, this elevator pitch has produced films such as Gareth Evans’ tower block extravaganza The Raid. […]
Kinds of Kindness (2024) A Sandbox for Dramatic Discovery and Play (Review)
With Kinds of Kindness, mild-mannered Greek enfant terrible Yorgos Lanthimos has finally returned home to his long-time writing partner Efthimis Filippou (Dogtooth, The Lobster, The Killing of a Sacred Deer) after an extended vacation with screenwriter Tony McNamara (The Favourite, Poor Things). Or perhaps this is the vacation. With a […]
I Saw The TV Glow (2024) An urgent personal plea that could change the world (Review)
I Saw The TV Glow should come with a warning. It’s a film you can’t prepare for, with no easy answers other than the ones you may not want to face, a film you can’t unsee. There are few adjectives more thudding when critiquing a film than ‘important’, but it’s […]
The Sympathizer (2024) Drama with a sharp, piercing gaze and political purpose (Preview)
‘Start at the cinema’, commands our protagonist’s interrogator at the open of The Sympathizer, the new HBO miniseries from Park Chan-wook. It’s a statement of intent. When literature is adapted to screen, there’s a tendency for that origin to be overly reflected in the form. For intertitles, verbosity, and establishing […]