Home Invasion (2023) is not your standard style of documentary; there’s no talking heads here, no voiceover, no familiar features as such. Instead, it all unfolds via on-screen text, which displays to viewers via what looks like an aperture, representing the film’s key subject matter (or at least, key for the first hour): the home […]
Слава Україні Героям слава!Glory to Ukraine, Glory to the Heroes! In the early hours of February 22nd, 2022, the Russian state began an illegal and unprovoked military invasion of the sovereign state of Ukraine, heralded by a nationwide blitzkrieg air attack. The country was thrown into instant chaos, as two million people fled their homes […]
The ‘Satanic Panic’ of the latter decades of the 20th Century serves as a deeply unedifying lesson in paranoia, exploitation and groupthink. It also reminds us of the human capacity to ignore the overt to fantasise over the covert: this impulse is still with us, now aided and abetted by the internet and social media; […]
Hippo (2023) isn’t a particularly easy film to sum up, much less to recommend along easily definable lines: it’s an often moody, deeply eclectic, art-house-leaning project with a storyline which is both minimal and yet…profound, at times. It doesn’t sit snugly in any one genre, it moves from vast or unpalatable topics into domestic familiarity […]
By Darren Gaskell Leaping on to the screen, Jean Kayak (Ryland Brickson Cole Tews) celebrates his successful applejack distillery in a cheerful musical number to lift the spirits, right up to the point at which a lack of vigilance due to imbibing too much product combined with some sneaky, tree-based vandalism ends with said distillery […]
Don’t be misled by the title ‘Unfriending’ – as I was at first – into thinking this film has anything much to do with the kind of ‘unfriending’ we associate with social media and the internet (and for which the term was coined). Whilst this film covers the kinds of attitudes to friendships which are […]
As the gap between science fact and science fiction narrows year on year, some of the best sci-fi simply takes recognisable elements from our day-to-day lives and gives them a tweak or two; that’s often enough to make us question the new normal in some way, and some great cinema has already appeared as a […]
The cinematic monsters made famous by Universal nearly a century ago continue to appear on our screens today, though often now imbued with much more modern symbolism; the vampire, Frankenstein’s creature (or versions of it) and of course the werewolf are used to represent current predilections, anxieties and fears. You could even say the werewolf […]
A crisis of belief besets a West African village in Mami Wata, as corruption and greed sweep in behind it. A dark, often cruel story unfolds, painting a devastating picture of the repercussions of change. The film does this without being overly simplistic, and it does it without any chiding, even if its message is […]
We get some on-screen preamble before the events of The Lair (2022) unfold before us. Locating the film in conflict-ridden Afghanistan in 2017, we’re told that a US bomb strike on a certain province, intended to destroy an insurgent stronghold, occurred after alleged ‘disturbing activity’ in the area. So there we have it: we’re going […]
By guest contributor Darren Gaskell Following an energy-sapping battle against an evil giant turtle, five superheroes known as the Tobacco Force are instructed by Didier, their chief, to head for a rural retreat in order to work on their cohesion as a team. Soon after they reach their swanky recovery pad, bickering and uncertainty among […]