When I reviewed Sam Raimi’s excellent The Quick and The Dead, I knew I’d scratched an itch that was not going to subside for a while. Seeing a director like him offer his box of tricks to a genre and setting that wouldn’t normally go with his style yielded fantastic […]
Culture
Documentary Shorts (Slamdance Film Festival 2024)(Review)
Like any industry film festival, Slamdance has its different strands – Graham talked about the experimental shorts, joining that there are animated shorts, and narrative shorts as well as the more traditional documentary and narrative feature sections that are also sub-divided. Fields that have some impressive alumni, with the festival […]
Experimental Shorts (Slamdance Film Festival 2024) (Review)
Even in a festival as dedicated to the unexpected as Slamdance, there’s only one strand where you can see a film whose descriptive subtitles specify the sound of “[downpour of fish]”. It’s the experimental shorts strand, a useful opportunity to press your ear to the film-making underground. The fishy rain […]
The Complex Forms (Slamdance Film Festival 2024)(Review)
Slamdance is a film festival positioned around micro budget productions, giving writers and directors an early step in their career – a step with considerable lineage given its on the doorstep of its third decade. That qualifier, micro-budget, gives a certain impression of what sort of narrative films the festival […]
Demon Mineral (Slamdance Film Festival 2024)(Review)
Now just a year away from its thirtieth birthday, Slamdance remains focused on low-budget films from emerging directors. This doesn’t necessarily mean it’s alienated from the mainstream, though. The 2024 festival has specialist strands dealing with two areas that have been unexpectedly prominent in mainstream media of late. One of […]
20 Movies for Japanuray
Between Social Media and Marketing agencies, Japanuary is one of these traditions that happen every year, in which people portmanteau months to programme month long sessions into a particular movement – or, in this case, national cinema – into their cinematic diet. Giallo January is another common theme that people […]