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 […]
Movies & Documentaries
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 […]
Anora (2024) Best Picture Oscar Winner Joins the Criterion Collection
Sean Baker is a filmmaker who’s always interested me, but until Anora I’d never seen anything made by him. I had the chance to see it at a film festival in October 2024 – the peak of its festival buzz period, but instead chose to see The Order (2024). Fast […]
Zero (2024): Senegalese suspense from a new studio with a big mission
Asked why Superman isn’t performing as well in international markets as it is in the States, James Gunn wondered whether a hero so linked to “truth, justice and the American way” would always suffer in the current political climate. Whether you buy that as an explanation in this particular case […]
Chungking Express (1994) Wong Kar Wai’s Masterpiece Looks Glorious in 4k
When I first watched Chungking Express (1994), I didn’t enjoy it and didn’t finish the film, and even though it was my first experience of Wong Kar Wai, I was rushed so it didn’t hook me. I decided to give it another chance while going through a boxset of the […]
Cobra (1986) Stallone’s Clunky Hard Body Classic Shows it Age
Somewhere between Dirty Harry and Lethal Weapon is a man called Marion Cobretti, aka Cobra. Released in 1986, at the height of Hollywood hard bodies action cinema, Cobra re-teams writer-star Sylvester Stallone with Rambo: First Blood Part Two director George P. Cosmatos. Like that film, Cobra features much violence, one […]
Hotspring Sharkattack (2024) Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the sauna…
For all its naff reputation, maybe Deep Blue Sea said it best: sharks really are “God’s oldest killers”. Many filmmakers have taken that idea as gospel, from Spielberg to Turtletaub, Anderson (Wes) to Wheatley (Ben), taking great glee in putting their characters in harm’s way via a ginormous aquatic beastie. Yet shark […]