Released with a brand new 4K digital restoration by Criterion to Blu-ray and UHD this week, Shoeshine is a 1946 neorealist drama from Vittorio De Sica that has often been hailed as the Italian filmmaker’s first masterpiece and became the first film to win the Academy Award for Best International […]
Movies & Documentaries
Trouble Every Day (2001) Laying the foundations for New French Extremity
A pair of lovers are seen making out in the front seat of their car as an accompanying song slowly intensifies, “there’s trouble every day, trouble every day, trouble every day…”. The snogging sesh becomes increasingly passionate, bodies writhing around uncontrollably. Yet things start to creep beyond a so-called love, […]
Finis Terrae (1929) An Early Example of Realism in Film
I admit that I’m not as well versed in silent cinema as I should be. I’ve seen the odd classics like Metropolis and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, but it’s mostly the out-there genre films and comedies are mostly what I’m aware of from the silent era. Out now on […]
Burning (Ot) (Fantasia International Film Festival 2025)
The famous quote about movies is that they are an “empathy machine”, and personally I believe that is at it truest within the genre space – whether it be marginalised voices or something from an otherwise culturally “uncharted” part of the world – horror has it all. Whenever I see […]
Noise (Fantasia International Film Festival 2025)
Horror works when it taps into something primal that you can feel in your bones. As dramatic as that sounds, it doesn’t need to something hard, deep or physical, it can invoke something mundane, twist it and there we have it – the uncanny. The uncanny is not only where […]
Dog of God (Fantasia International Film Festival 2025)
The awards success of Gints Zilbalodis’s Flow over the last year has really put the Latvian film industry on the map in a big way, animated entirely through Blender, it’s been called one of the best films of the decade so far and is the highest-grossing Latvian film of all […]
Enemy Territory (1987): Arrow Rescue Another Empire Pictures Hidden Gem from VHS
1987’s Enemy Territory has often been described as a knockoff of John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13. I decided to watch the two together, mainly since I hadn’t actually seen the latter film before. I originally planned on doing an in-depth comparison of the two, yet I found that similarities […]
The Banished (2024) Aussie Folk Horror a little lost amidst its stellar location & production design
The old ways are truly alive and well in the deep, dark corners of the Australian landscape – by which I mean, of course, the country’s great tradition of folkloric genre fare. The Banished, the new “folk horror” feature from Observance (2015) director Joseph Sims-Dennett, follows in the footsteps of […]
Essential Polish Animations (1957-1987) Testament to art made under difficult regimes
The reappraisal of animation as an art form, one capable of tackling adult themes and topics beyond its cereal-box public image, could be seen as the result of contemporary animated offerings. Adult Swim’s foul-mouthed comedies or the hyper-violence, sexuality and general intensity of anime (a subgenre rapidly entering the Western […]
Witness (1985) Harrison Ford’s Finest Hour
Upon first glance, Peter Weir’s Witness appears as a straightforward detective thriller with some romance and fish out of water comedy. An Amish mother and son, Rachel (Kelly McGillis) and Samuel (Lukas Haas) are involved in a murder investigation once Samuel witnesses a murder in Philadelphia. A homicide detective, John […]