When I reviewed Sam Raimi’s excellent The Quick and The Dead, I knew I’d scratched an itch that was not going to subside for a while. Seeing a director like him offer his box of tricks to a genre and setting that wouldn’t normally go with his style yielded fantastic […]
Pop Culture
Documentary Shorts (Slamdance Film Festival 2024)(Review)
Like any industry film festival, Slamdance has its different strands – Graham talked about the experimental shorts, joining that there are animated shorts, and narrative shorts as well as the more traditional documentary and narrative feature sections that are also sub-divided. Fields that have some impressive alumni, with the festival […]
Experimental Shorts (Slamdance Film Festival 2024) (Review)
Even in a festival as dedicated to the unexpected as Slamdance, there’s only one strand where you can see a film whose descriptive subtitles specify the sound of “[downpour of fish]”. It’s the experimental shorts strand, a useful opportunity to press your ear to the film-making underground. The fishy rain […]
The Complex Forms (Slamdance Film Festival 2024)(Review)
Slamdance is a film festival positioned around micro budget productions, giving writers and directors an early step in their career – a step with considerable lineage given its on the doorstep of its third decade. That qualifier, micro-budget, gives a certain impression of what sort of narrative films the festival […]
Demon Mineral (Slamdance Film Festival 2024)(Review)
Now just a year away from its thirtieth birthday, Slamdance remains focused on low-budget films from emerging directors. This doesn’t necessarily mean it’s alienated from the mainstream, though. The 2024 festival has specialist strands dealing with two areas that have been unexpectedly prominent in mainstream media of late. One of […]
20 Movies for Japanuray
Between Social Media and Marketing agencies, Japanuary is one of these traditions that happen every year, in which people portmanteau months to programme month long sessions into a particular movement – or, in this case, national cinema – into their cinematic diet. Giallo January is another common theme that people […]
Alex’s Favourite Films Of 2023: End-of-Year Roundup
2023 is quickly approaching its end, and this year has been massive for me. A-Levels and starting university in the same year is a whole new level of responsibility that I would not wish on my worst enemy. However, despite all of these mad changes and busy workloads, I’ve actually […]
Doctor Who: The Giggle (2023) – A Fantastic (for now) Collision of Past, Present and Future (Review)
After a short but sweet run of 60th anniversary specials, the era of the Fourteenth Doctor is over and Ncuti Gatwa is now officially the iconic Time Lord, though this handover process hasn’t happened in the usual way. We will get to this in due course, never fear, because there […]
Doctor Who: Wild Blue Yonder (2023) A Wacky But Wonderful Subversion of Expectations (Review)
SPOILERS AHEAD I can’t remember a Doctor Who episode like Wild Blue Yonder in my time as a fan. Perhaps the closest thing I can think of is the monumental Peter Capaldi showcase Heaven Sent, which similarly had a barebones cast in a mysterious location with something deeply sinister lurking […]
Onyx the Fortuitious and the Talisman of Souls (Soho Horror Fest 2023)(Review)
5 fans are invited to the ritual to end all rituals. So starts the hilarious intro to a rollercoaster ride that has all the wit, nostalgia and laughs of Tenacious D and Clerks 2. It reaches into how we all felt as teenagers. Surfing the internet, finding the things you […]