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 […]
Movies & Documentaries
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 […]
Superman (2025) Rebooting for a more colourful universe
Is it a bird! Is it a plane! No, it’s James Gunn – the strange filmmaker with a Troma background who’s come to DC Studios from another comic book franchise, and as the writer-director of Superman, he’s rebooting the DC Extended Universe (DCEU), into the new DC Universe (DCU), for […]
The House With Laughing Windows (Fantasia International Film Festival 2025)
Every seasoned horror fan knows that small British towns are home to pagan cults and ritual sacrifice, and small American towns are home to backwoods cannibal clans and strange locals who worship the Great Old Ones – but what danger lurks behind the sun-baked walls and seemingly welcoming storefronts of […]
Films by Zoltán Huszárik (1963-1979): life, death and one incredible box set
As Blu-Ray upgrades go, it’s a hell of a glow-up. Second Run released the Hungarian director Zoltán Huszárik’s debut feature Szindbád on DVD in 2011; its cult in Anglophone countries can be largely attributed to this, given that neither the film nor the works of its source author Gyula Krúdy […]
Reputation (2024) A Micro-Budget Feature with a Rising Star
Released on digital platforms from Monday 28th July, Reputation is the feature debut from Martin Law. Its star is James Nelson-Joyce, a Liverpudlian actor who, after some solid supporting work – in productions such as Jimmy McGovern’s Time, Stephen Merchant’s Outlaws, Steven Knight’s A Thousand Blows, and the Brink’s Mat […]
Human Traffic (1999): Confident, Brash But Simple Look At Late 90’s Culture
Human Traffic is one of the many films from the 1990s and 2000s that explores the social lives of young idealistic men and women in their twenties: we watch them exchange banter in pubs, go out on the town, indulge in as much sex and drugs as is humanly possible, […]
Life is Cheap… But Toilet Paper is Expensive (1989) Even Wilder than the Title Suggests
For all its association with high style, there’s always been a documentary element to film noir. The genre is rooted in social commentary, and took every opportunity to get off the sound stages and into the streets once camera technology became lightweight enough to do that. You can even point […]