During a particularly treacherous thunderstorm in rural Wales, a series of travellers are forced to seek refuge in an eerie and isolated house. Their hosts are an elderly eccentric pair of siblings and their mute brute of a butler. As the night unfolds, the stranded party realise that the house […]
Mark Cunliffe
Senior Contributor Mark's first cinematic experience was watching the Cannon and Ball vehicle, The Boys in Blue. He hasn't looked back since. Hailing from St Helens, he is an occasional contributor to Arrow DVD, writing booklet inlay essays on a variety of titles, including Children of Men and The Great Escape. He is a reviewer with IndieMDB and has also written a chapter for Ste Brotherstone and Dave Lawrence's book, Scarred For Life Vol II. Other sites he has written for include We Are Cult, Horrified, and America's left-leaning news outlet ZNetwork. Publications he has written articles for include Stat Magazine and the fanzine Undefined Boundary: The Journal of Psychick Albion. He is also a regular contributor to the Geek Show's podcasts, including Pop Screen and the Uncut series, and he can be found on Letterboxd.
Brakes (2016) An interesting debut with an interesting spin on the Rom-Com (Review)
London based actress Mercedes Grower makes her screenwriting and directorial debut with Brakes, a film that couldn’t be any more lo-fi if it tried. Episodic and improvisational in feel, Brakes is a multi-stranded ensemble piece that explores what it is to fall in and out of love in contemporary London. […]
Bad Day For The Cut (2017) Coen-like thriller tropes, sturdy social realism, and unique Irish flavour (Review)
When the mother he both lived with and doted on is violently bludgeoned to death in an apparent home invasion, middle-aged and seemingly mild-mannered farmer Donal (Nigel O’Neill) takes his shotgun and newly restored campervan and sets out from their remote farmstead looking for answers and revenge. What he comes […]
Pulp (1972) The Michael Caine Noir that counts Jarvis Cocker and JG Ballard among its fans (Review)
It is a film about the abuse of a young girl by people in positions of power and the cover-up this corruptible high society instigate to ensure they are never held to account for the crime they have committed. It is a film that concludes with the answers being found […]
A Clockwork Orange (1971) One of the 1970s most controversial masterpieces (Review)
I guess A Clockwork Orange is something akin to a movie buff’s ‘Where were you when Kennedy was shot?’ moment. Every self-respecting film devotee from the UK is likely to recall the first time they watched Stanley Kubrick’s controversial masterpiece and, if you’re of a certain age, chances are you […]
The Wall (2017) a War movie with an element of Carpenteresque B movie about it (Review)
Thankfully not a film about Trump’s intentions regarding the US/Mexico border, The Wall is, in fact, a tense, psychological war movie from director Doug Liman. The Wall is essentially a three-hander (though in truth the vast chunk of its running time sees it operate more or less as a two-hander) […]
The Yakuza (1974) A seminal product of Hollywood’s disillusioned 1970s output (Review)
Sydney Pollack’s 1974 neo-noir The Yakuza is one of those films that leaves you wondering what the hell was wrong with the cinema-going public and film critics of the day. Performing poorly at the box office and receiving (at best) mixed reviews, this east-meets-west thriller failed to cash in on […]
Dunkirk (1958) A poignant and near peerless World War II Movie (Review)
As a child obsessed with war, I well remember watching Dunkirk, Leslie (father of Barry) Norman’s 1958 film that depicted the events of May-June 1940, when the besieged soldiers of the British Expeditionary Force were stranded on the coast of France, and the combined efforts of the Royal Navy and […]
The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger (2016) Intentionally Incohesive Portrait of a Simple Man seeking Nourishment (Review)
When it comes to John Berger, I seem to have inadvertently become The Geek Show’s go to guy. I previously reviewed Taskafa, Stories of the Street, a 2013 documentary film from Andrea Luka Zimmerman which used Berger as a narrator, reading excerpts from his own novel King. But I have to […]
My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) One of the most important and influential British films of the 1980s (Review)
I’ve long since said that if you want to know what life in 1980s Britain was like, what it felt like, looked like and sounded like, then there is really only two films to check out: one of them is Alan Clarke’s Rita, Sue and Bob Too and the other […]