Somewhere between Dirty Harry and Lethal Weapon is a man called Marion Cobretti, aka Cobra. Released in 1986, at the height of Hollywood hard bodies action cinema, Cobra re-teams writer-star Sylvester Stallone with Rambo: First Blood Part Two director George P. Cosmatos. Like that film, Cobra features much violence, one […]
Reviews
Hotspring Sharkattack (2024) Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the sauna…
For all its naff reputation, maybe Deep Blue Sea said it best: sharks really are “God’s oldest killers”. Many filmmakers have taken that idea as gospel, from Spielberg to Turtletaub, Anderson (Wes) to Wheatley (Ben), taking great glee in putting their characters in harm’s way via a ginormous aquatic beastie. Yet shark […]
Lethal Weapon (1987) Melancholia, Balance & Brotherhood in this 1980s Cop Action Classic
When approaching movies from prior decades, there is always the question of whether they will hold up. Sometimes this concern relates to outdated attitudes or forms of representation, and other times it relates to more recent discoveries about the people involved. In the case of Lethal Weapon, there is a […]
Narc (2002) A granite-solid crime classic, as grim and gritty as they come
Who said buddy cop movies should be fun? Shane Black has a lot to answer for when it comes to making the fuzz funny, with his distinct brand of chalk-and-cheese banter inflecting the extrajudicial antics of those who serve and protect for decades after his heyday. Echoes of that can […]
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007) — A bloody masterpiece of a musical
You’ll have to pardon me if my excitement is quite noticeably more palpable than usual, but my inner 10 year old self is jumping for joy at the opportunity to rewatch and review one of my absolute favourite films of all time. Directed by Tim Burton and released in 2007, […]
The Box Man (2024): Far from Boxed-in Cinema from sporadically productive genius
Gakuryu Ishii is one of those artists like Terrence Malick, Thomas Pynchon and Daniel Day-Lewis, whose legend rests in part on their long absences. He spent a decade in the wilderness after directing his extraordinary black comedy The Crazy Family before returning with 1994’s Angel Dust, and he currently averages […]
Divine Love (2019): An All-Too-Conceivable Dystopia
Satirists these days are given to complaining that their job is impossible, that the slate of clownish authoritarian world leaders cannot be made more preposterous than they already are. Spare a thought, though, for writers of dystopian fiction. For decades, these stories enjoyed an exalted status. They were the fictions […]
32 Short Films about Glenn Gould (1993) Challenges the Grand Tradition of the Biopic
How should a biopic go about expressing a person’s life: from cradle to grave, or a hop skip and a jump through chronology for what feels most relevant to the subject? 2023 offered us Maestro and Oppenheimer – two films that portrayed the lives of two titanic figures of 20th […]
Autism and the Arts: Poetry with Peter Street (2025) Claiming Your Space as a Working Class Creative in the Cultural Landscape
Nottinghamshire born and Greater Manchester based filmmaker Brett Gregory (director of the self-financed, coruscating, and multi-award winning 2022 indie feature Nobody Loves You and You Don’t Deserve to Exist and the 2024 short film adaptation of Kafka’s Before the Law), returns to his documentarian roots for his latest production. Autism […]
The Invisible Swordsman (1970) Breezy and charming family fun featuring a rare unseen hero
There aren’t many invisible heroes as when a person is able to lurk unseen in the world and get away with almost anything, the tendency to be bad is so very tempting. From the original Invisible Man to his 2020 counterpart (and all the Hollow Mans in between), the stereotype is that in […]