Whether in the age of Star Wars, The Avengers or something smaller, Sci-fi has always been overshadowed by spectacle, which is an odd state of play for a genre fundamentally concerned with ideas. Even if the likes of Star Trek reign supreme on small screens, yet even as spectacle dominates, […]
Movies & Documentaries
Hamnet (2025): A Quietly Devastating Portrait of Grief
On August 11, 1596, a small coffin was laid to rest in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-Upon-Avon. Famine and bubonic plague were sweeping through Warwickshire and though the cause of death was not listed on the burial register, it has been widely theorised that the eleven-year-old Hamnet was one of […]
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (2026) A Sequel That Gains Focus and A Whole Lot More Darkness
By arriving just six months after the previous instalment, The Bone Temple might have unknowingly set itself up for a fall. Those who weren’t particularly keen on 28 Years Later, and particularly its bizarre cliffhanger, might not like a follow-up that dives headfirst into the cult that were responsible for […]
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Trilogy (1990-1993) Putting the 90’s original to the Ultimate Test
In 1984 Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird released a little known black and white comic on their very own Mirage label, following the adventures of four teenaged mutant ninja turtles and their surrogate father, a Rat named Splinter, only 3000 copies were produced of that initial run, hoping to cover […]
István Szabó: Mephisto/Colonel Redl/Hanussen (1981-1988) Faustian Pacts & A Landmark Trilogy on Complicity
Released to Blu-ray by Second Run this week is a boxset of films from acclaimed Hungarian director István Szabó. Made between 1981 and 1988, these three films (Szabó himself is loathe to term them as a trilogy, though they have thematic- to say nothing of geographic and historical – similarities) […]
City on Fire (1987) How Ringo Lam Defined Hong Kong’s “Heroic Bloodshed” Genre
In the early 80s there was a new breed of action film starting to plant roots. A genre that kept a lot of the righteous chivalry of old but now it was no longer the pursuit of mastery in the martial world, it was the gun that ruled supreme. Stories […]
Testimony (2025): sensitively reopening the case on Ireland’s darkest secrets
The Magdalene Laundries were never really a secret. The official McAleese Report into the institutions claimed that around 11,000 Irish women were held in these institutions after the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922. Aoife Kelleher’s documentary Testimony, released in UK and Irish cinemas this weekend, draws on […]
The Maiku Hama Trilogy (1994-6) Film Noir through a Vividly Japanese Lens
Anyone mourning the recent cancellation of Rian Johnson’s Poker Face might find a more than acceptable substitute in the form of Third Window Films’s new Blu-Ray release, The Maiku Hama Trilogy. They may be a series of films rather than a television series, but they have exactly the right stand-alone […]
Pocket Money (1976): joyful, humane, ripe for rediscovery
François Truffaut’s empathy for, and skill at directing, children stretches all the way back to his first feature The 400 Blows, which launched the career of Jean-Pierre Leaud and is frequently cited as one of the all-time great directorial debuts. Pocket Money, released on Blu-Ray by Radiance Films, is rarely […]
Shelby Oaks (2024) Chris Stuckmann’s Confident If Cluttered Directorial Debut
Watching Shelby Oaks in cinemas was a far more cathartic experience personally than previously anticipated. Chris Stuckmann is, in my humble opinion, the best movie critic to come out of YouTube throughout the 2010s. He’s always been more critically-minded than Jeremy Jahns (no disrespect to him, who I also watch […]