How should a biopic go about expressing a person’s life: from cradle to grave, or a hop skip and a jump through chronology for what feels most relevant to the subject? 2023 offered us Maestro and Oppenheimer – two films that portrayed the lives of two titanic figures of 20th […]
Movies & Documentaries
Autism and the Arts: Poetry with Peter Street (2025) Claiming Your Space as a Working Class Creative in the Cultural Landscape
Nottinghamshire born and Greater Manchester based filmmaker Brett Gregory (director of the self-financed, coruscating, and multi-award winning 2022 indie feature Nobody Loves You and You Don’t Deserve to Exist and the 2024 short film adaptation of Kafka’s Before the Law), returns to his documentarian roots for his latest production. Autism […]
The Invisible Swordsman (1970) Breezy and charming family fun featuring a rare unseen hero
There aren’t many invisible heroes as when a person is able to lurk unseen in the world and get away with almost anything, the tendency to be bad is so very tempting. From the original Invisible Man to his 2020 counterpart (and all the Hollow Mans in between), the stereotype is that in […]
Dark City (1998) — An unfathomably influential cult classic
Picture this: you wake up naked and vulnerable in a bathtub, in a room that you swear you’ve never entered in your life. You don’t know where you are, how you got there, or even your own name, and absolutely everything about your life is a total mystery to you. […]
Heart of Stone (1950) DEFA Fantasy Full of Whimsy, Hope, Darkness, and Modern Relevance?
Over the past decade-and-a-half, distributors Eureka Entertainment have been responsible for remastering and resurrecting a vast number of pre-war German cinema classics, including such landmark works as Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) and Lang’s Metropolis (1927). Recently, however, Eureka have turned their sights towards another, oft-overlooked area of German filmmaking history – […]
Goebbels and the Fuhrer (2025) Exposé of Nazi Propaganda Machine Fails to Convince (Review)
At a time of somewhat renewed interest in the proliferation of propaganda in Nazi Germany with the recent release of Andres Veiel’s Reifenstahl, a documentary covering one of the most controversial directors in history Leni Reifenstahl, this straight-forward historical biopic from German writer/director Joachim Lang covers the close but at […]
Talk to Me (2022): A Riveting & Confident Indie Horror Debut
In light of the upcoming release of Danny and Michael Philippou’s sophomore feature Bring Her Back, Second Sight have released a limited 4K/Blu Ray edition of Talk To Me – their directorial debut that put them on the map. It’s a film that I lump in with other recent horrors […]
Bleeding (2025): Indie Horror Drama with More Bark Than Bite
Following its world premiere at Grimmfest in 2024 where it won Best Screenplay, Bleeding arrives on Screambox as the latest attempt to refresh the vampire genre. The film starts as a drama about Eric (John R. Howley), helping out Sean (Jasper Jones), who owes a lot of money to some […]
The Wind Will Carry Us (1999): Kiarostami in the country
The theme of the stressed-out, materialistic big city professional finding renewal and redemption in a small town is one mainstream cinema goes back to time and time again, and it usually makes my teeth itch. If big-name American directors really found Midwestern small towns as life-affirming as they claim to, […]
In the Lost Lands (2025) A refreshingly middling blast from the past
Nostalgia can hit you when you least expect it. Just when you’re feeling a lull with the state of cinema, where long-running brands seem to be running shorter and shorter, when genres grow as tired as your heavy eyes, along can come a blast from the past to remind you […]