Watching Marco Polo as part of a chronological rewatch of Doctor Who means confronting three oddities of the show’s 1960s incarnation for the first time. The first, and most glaring, is that this story no longer exists in the archives. During the 1970s the BBC had a crisis of storage […]
Pop Culture
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power – Season 2 (2024) Round-Up
How big a budget is too big a budget? There’s a lot to be said for being economy-wise with blockbuster IP; if your fanbase rejects the latest mushed-up remix of their childhood, it’s probably better to keep things cheap. In that respect, there’s perhaps no bigger gamble currently in production […]
Doctor Who A-Z #03: The Edge of Destruction (1964)
For its third story, Doctor Who attempted a character-driven bottle episode, a bold move for a show whose characters didn’t have much to bottle at this point. The series needed a quick two-parter in order to complete its initial order of thirteen episodes; the decision to set it entirely on […]
Amsterdam Alert (Grimmfest 2024)
Amsterdam Alert (NL-Alert), played at this year’s Grimmfest, and it’s a hard-hitting, claustrophobic drama/real-life horror sitting perfectly at the 37-minute mark runtime. Directed by Loïs Dols de Jong, this short film tells the story of a young mother in Amsterdam who’s trying to get home to her baby, but during […]
The Black Hole (Fantastic Fest 2024)
The Black Hole – recently played at Fantastic Fest – is a comedy/sci-fi anthology from Estonian director Moonika Siimets. My only experience with Estonian cinema is November (Rainer Sarnet, 2017), a historical, mythic, folkloric fantasy, which will tell of modern Estonia but those cues will primarily be identifiable to the […]
Animale (Fantastic Fest 2024)
When it comes to the combination of body horror and monstrous feminine-centered stories, nobody is doing quite like the French are. With filmmakers like Coralie Fargeat and Julia Ducornau currently pushing the genre to bold new places and creating these complex, disturbed heroines, we’re almost in the middle of a […]
Other ways of creating: In conversation with María Gisèle Royo and Julia de Castro on ‘On the Go’ (2023)
A woman running out of time, a Grindr-using gay man, and a mermaid hit the road in search of an unwitting sperm donor in On the Go, a free-associative avant-garde road movie like little else. Co-directors María Gisèle Royo and Julia de Castro met at an artist’s residency and embarked […]
Bookworm (Fantastic Fest 2024)
There is no finer innovation than a family trying to get out of financial trouble. The second feature film by Ant Timpson (Come to Daddy), Bookworm at its core, is a testament to the spirit of survival and the notion that no matter how grim things are, imagination and family […]
Girl Internet Show: A Kati Kelli Mixtape (2022) (Fantastic Fest 2024)
Do you ever wonder about how people will remember you after you’re gone? Girl Internet Show: A Kati Kelli Mixtape (2022), is a film which is hard to discuss via conventional means – largely because it’s not a conventional film. The act of reviewing this mixtape is more akin to […]
Respati (Fantastic Fest 2024)
Respati recently played at Fantastic Fest 2024, Sidharta Tata’s movie is the latest in a growing trend of Indonesian horror and thrillers making it to Western screens large and small. Named after the lead character (Devano Danendra), Tata tells the story of a teenage boy who struggles to sleep with […]