The awards success of Gints Zilbalodis’s Flow over the last year has really put the Latvian film industry on the map in a big way, animated entirely through Blender, it’s been called one of the best films of the decade so far and is the highest-grossing Latvian film of all […]
Pop Culture
Doctor Who A-Z #70: The Time Warrior (1973-4)
It’s not always easy to judge which Doctor Who stories are important – not at the time, and not even in retrospect. A retrospective view, for instance, will probably pick Dennis Spooner’s The Time Meddler as being the story which set the template for all modern-day stories set in Earth’s […]
Hellcat (Fantasia International Film Festival 2025)
Isn’t it funny how time can heal all wounds in the world of movies? Just a few short years ago, the words “contained”, “chamber” or “one location horror” had utterly exhausted the genre audience – to the extent that people didn’t want to see another film set in one place […]
Hold the Fort (Fantasia International Film Festival 2025)
William Bagley’s Hold the Fort had its world premiere at the 2025 Fantasia Festival, and two films in, the director of The Murder Podcast seems to be flying his flag for comedy horror with gleeful abandon. It’s a sub‑genre often deemed unbankable by the studio system and those who finance […]
The Well (Fantasia International Film Festival 2025)
Apocalypse cinema is fairly self-explanatory and, if you listen to certain fatalistic people in the media and on social media, we’re currently living through one. Post-apocalypse, in which the end has happened and society falls into a violent anarchy, has been endlessly mined as part of the zombie sub-genre – […]
Saint Clare (2024) Fun, Atmospheric Play on the Cycles of Vengeance
“Everything I have said and done is in the hands of god” Clare Bleeker (Bella Thorne), has been plagued with voices since she was a child. Righteous justice, only to be brought by her down on the heads of those who deserve. But how will she live with the shadows […]
Outside the Blue Box: Murder Most Horrid (1991-1999)
The Great British anthology series has had many vestiges throughout the broadcast years. Often finding a home in the mysterious or macabre genres, horror anthologies and the BBC go together like strawberries and cream and arguably peaked in the 70’s with series like Dead of Night and Supernatural, individually produced […]
Fantasia Festival 2025: What We Are Looking Forward To!
The dog days of summer are upon us, along with a season of mania, chaos, and high strangeness – all of which can be found in the line-up for the 29th edition of the Fantasia International Film Festival, which continues to bring attendees the best, boldest, and often most bizarre […]
Outside The Blue Box: Jackdaw (2023)
Jackdaw is a film that’s interested me for multiple reasons, the first and perhaps most important one being that it’s the feature debut of director Jamie Childs – who cut his teeth on a handful of episodes during Jodie Whittaker’s first series as The Doctor. The 11th series made an instant […]
Outside the Blue Box: Casualty: Results by Ben Aaronovitch
To understand where Casualty was in 1990, we must first go back in time one year earlier, to 1989. The fourth season of the hit BBC medical drama, which had begun life three years earlier in 1986, saw the show undergo some changes. The original producer, Geraint Morris, had left […]