Part [The] Babadook and part David Lynch fuelled nightmare, Matthew Holness’s directorial debut, Possum, is as bleak and oppressive as psychological horror gets. Unfortunately, I get the impression that Holness would’ve been better suited turning Possum into a portmanteau film rather than a feature of its own. And that’s fine, […]
Reviews
Sink the Bismarck! (1960) A British Stiff-Upper Lip Vision of Heroism (Review)
Directed by Lewis Gilbert, the 1960 film Sink the Bismarck! tells the true-life story of the Royal Navy’s mission to track down and destroy the eponymous pride of the German fleet and scourge of Atlantic shipping. Making it’s UK Blu-ray debut on the Eureka Classics label, it’s a distinctive film […]
The Boys In The Band (1970) After Stonewall, Before Pride (Review)
He may be associated with the tough, transgressive American cinema of the 1970s, but there’s a part of William Friedkin that would have made a first-rate Old Hollywood journeyman. Peers like Francis Ford Coppola and Paul Schrader have recently been making personal, self-penned projects, but Friedkin’s 21st-century career renaissance came […]
Ring (1998) The Most Important J-Horror For Good Reason (Review)
Hideo Nakata’s Ring is famously the film that triggered the western world’s awareness that yes, Asian countries do make horror films. It also famously triggered a slew of sequels and remakes, from the Korean The Ring Virus to the recent American Rings. It’s undeniably important in horror cinema, but being […]
Parents (1989) Anti-Cannibal Comedy-Horror via John Waters & David Lynch (Review)
In 2019, Bob Balaban’s known for his roles in Wes Anderson’s films (most prominently as the narrator in Moonrise Kingdom), his acting has also seen him work with the likes of Spielberg, Altman, Ken Russell, and Christopher Guest. He has also carved out a side career as a director, only […]
The Unholy (1988) The Fine Line Between Religious Horror And Satanic Panic (Review)
Many things came to mind when I watched this new Vestron video release, the Unholy. Horror is thought of as a safe place for outsiders. Mostly that is true but if you dig deeper into the subtext you’ll find that isn’t really all that accurate a truism. Slashers, for example, […]
Shoah The Four Sisters (2018) Chamber Pieces From A Historical Nightmare (Review)
Even before his death in July 2018, Claude Lanzmann was always easier to imagine in retrospect. He remained a public figure into his nineties, and a valuable one at that: thoughtful, eloquent, combative when necessary. His work, though, was dominated by two time periods. The first was the period from […]
Dawson City: Frozen Time (2016) … Long Lost Figments Of A Beautiful, Experimental Documentary (Review)
I find it hard to review Dawson City: Frozen Time without writing about the background context behind Bill Morrison’s visually euphoric documentary. In 1978, construction workers unearthed a long lost silent film collection from a subarctic swimming pool in a Yukon mining village, not far from the titular Dawson City, […]
Boy Erased (2018) Not Quite Erased, But Not Fully Drawn (Review)
One of the defining depictions of evil on film, for me, is Robert Mitchum’s character in Night of the Hunter. It’s the way he balances menace and clumsiness, a wolf who is also a Wile E. Coyote, slipping on bottles and suffering head injuries and yowling as his fingers jam […]
Climax (2018) Gasper Noe: The Dark Lord of Dance (Review)
So, Climax, we finally meet. Since breaking into the arthouse scene in 2002, Gasper Noe and controversy have never been far apart. In 2002 he gave the world a brutal and unsympathetic tale of rape in Irreversible, following that up in 2009 he directed Enter the Void and with that, […]