So you’ve all seen that movie poster over the last couple of months in which a horde of shadowy hands all reaching for a dog, right? It’s awesome, it’s unique, and it looks like a great concept. Good Boy has had a huge positive reception, not just because of its irresistibly […]
Movies & Documentaries
Iron Ladies (2025) The Women of the Working Class
Released in selected cinemas from 10th October, Iron Ladies is the latest documentary feature from Daniel Draper – the Liverpudlian filmmaker behind such films as Almost Liverpool 8, Manifesto, and last year’s Liverpool Story. As a storyteller, Draper’s chief passions are left wing politics and tight-knit community, and in Iron […]
Wendy and Lucy (2008): Pedigree take on a dog’s life
Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy – now released on Blu-Ray by Second Run – is a great film about animals, which is to say it’s a great film about people. Most films about the animal kingdom are sentimental, Disneyfied looks at nature, or at least ones that anthropomorphise their star […]
She Loved Blossoms More (2024): Headsplittingly Surreal Sci-Fi Family Drama
After making the festival circuit last year, the second feature film from Yannis Veslemes, She Loved Blossoms More, arrives over five years since he contributed to the anthology The Field Guide to Evil. This film shares some of the sensibilities with one of his fellow contributors to that anthology, Peter […]
Time Travel is Dangerous (2024) “My God, it’s full of stars!”
Arriving on digital platforms from 29th September is Time Travel is Dangerous, Chris Reading’s sci-fi comic mockumentary which enjoyed great success at the Austin Film Festival last year and a limited theatrical run here in the UK earlier this year. Written by Reading with producers Anna-Elizabeth Shakespeare and Hillary Shakespeare, […]
The Long Walk (2025) King adaptation shoves you to the ground and keeps on walking
The Long Walk doesn’t ease you in- it shoves you onto the pavement and you hit the ground walking. From its first shot, there’s no buffer, no warm-up, just the relentless rhythm of feet on asphalt and the unshakeable knowledge that this journey has only one possible ending. Adapted from […]
Derelict (2024) Grimly realistic Franco-British Revenge Thriller and the Grief of Vengeance
Derelict is a curious combination of gritty social realism and arthouse stylistics, the former coming from the locations, characters and narrative. Set, and largely filmed, in the English Midlands (but including Hereford, Manchester and London), we’re introduced (via the title card), to Abigail (Suzanne Fulton), who lives in a small […]
Takashi Ishii: 4 Tales of Nami (1992 & 1994) – A hard-edged quartet of torment worth enduring
William Shakespeare asked “what’s in a name?” in one of his most famous works. Takashi Ishii asked “what’s in a Nami?” in four of his. Between 1992 and 1994, one of Japanese cinema’s greatest lovers of neon wove this name through a streak of subversive and sleazy films, making his […]
The Pee Pee Poo Poo Man (2024) – Bonafide outsider cinema with intent to provoke
Some titles just sell themselves. My local cinema recently held a double-bill night of decadent steaming trash with the original and updated Toxic Avenger films, attended by good-hearted cult film fanatics with laughter loaded in their bellies. Ready for an evening of yucks and yacks, they were not prepared for the trailer […]
Saving Face (2004): a happy ending for Alice Wu’s cult romance
The late Patricia Highsmith was not widely known as a ray of sunshine, yet for much of her life she was the recipient of fan mail from women saying she’d saved them from despair, suicide or simply a lonely, unfulfilling life. The reason for this was her novel Carol, initially […]