This series of reviews has led us writers down some very peculiar avenues, ones we perhaps weren’t expecting to take. Personally though, I’ve been using it as an excuse to explore my parameters and start ticking off things I hadn’t seen before (not that you’d notice since over on Patreon […]
Pop Culture
She’s the He (BFI London Film Festival 2025)
The past few years haven’t been an easy time to be transgender (if there ever truly has been an “easy” time to be trans), not least in the United States, so it’s not surprising that the majority of films by trans creatives in recent memory have been on the angstier […]
Doctor Who A-Z #85: The Seeds of Doom (1976)
Doctor Who has existed for just under sixty-two years, and in all that time it has produced one (one) era which all fans agree is really good. That’s part of its strength: every stage of the show is someone’s golden age and someone else’s nadir. You would struggle, though, to find […]
Rose of Nevada (BFI London Film Festival 2025) A Ghost Story That Gets Under The Nail
After working on his Bafta-winning feature Bait and folk-horror follow-up, Enys Men, Mark Jenkin vowed that he would never work with boats again: too many logistical problems, unpredictable tides, sea sickness, etc. Thank goodness he went back on his word, as it is hard to imagine a better impetus for […]
Doctor Who A-Z #84: The Brain of Morbius (1976)
Aside from the grand experiment of The Deadly Assassin, most of the scripts Robert Holmes was primarily responsible for during his time as script editor were heavy reworkings of other writers – John Lucarotti in The Ark in Space, Lewis Griefer in Pyramids of Mars, Robert Banks Stewart in The […]
Doctor Who A-Z #83: The Android Invasion (1975)
At the height of his early success, Terry Nation left Doctor Who to try and launch an American TV series based on the Daleks. He returned for the show’s tenth anniversary in 1973, when he wrote Planet of the Daleks, then followed it up a year later with Death to the Daleks. The most […]
Relentless (Grimmfest 2025)
An underrated aspect of the horror festival is the programming process as you need to satisfy the demands of the genre faithful, whilst also providing palate cleansers since a weekend of nothing but horror is exhausting. After previously playing Grimmfest in 2019 with his movie, Artik, writer/director Tom Botchii returns to […]
Frankie Maniac Woman (Grimmfest 2025)
It can be tempting, when reviewing a low-budget film you have no real preconceptions of, to compare it with a recent hit. In the case of Pierre Tsigaridis’s Frankie, Maniac Woman, a graphic horror movie about a woman driven mad by unreasonable beauty standards, the obvious comparison point would be […]
Doctor Who A-Z #82: Pyramids of Mars (1975)
Pyramids of Mars is one of those stories so enshrined in fan mythology as one of the series’ maximum highs that it can be hard to think clearly about it. When asked about it, we know exactly what to say: this is a great serial because it has a darker […]
Doctor Who A-Z #81: Planet of Evil (1975)
Season Thirteen is the first of two consecutive seasons where Louis Marks will turn in a very good script that nevertheless gets ignored because of all the consensus classics around it. Perhaps this is why he’ll leave the show next year, twelve years after his first story was broadcast. That […]