Is it me, or do even the most improbable dystopian situations feel a whisker away these days? Perhaps The Running Man (2025) feels oh-so close at hand because the novel on which it’s based, with its novel-contemporary analogue tech and big budget gameshow format blends so nicely with our world, billionaire media conglomerates with their […]
Ah, here we go then. An older man who seems to be living and bill-dodging at a hotel on the French Riviera (Fabio Testi) becomes fixated by a young woman on the beach; the diamond jewellery in her nipple (!) prompts him on a fractured and somewhat looping trip down Memory Lane, as he recollects […]
As Dangerous Animals gets going, we first observe tourists and sightseers Greg (Liam Greinke) and Heather (Ella Newton) popping up on a Queensland quayside, hoping for a ‘marine experience’ with a local: they’ve just missed their organised tour doing something similar. The gaffer, Tucker (Jai Courtney) is straightaway signposted as a bit of a wildcard, […]
A dog lies sleeping the sleep of the righteous before being awoken by …something. It could be the mobile phone buzzing away on the arm of the chair – or it could be something far more ominous. Todd, the human at Indy’s side, is unconscious and unresponsive. The room seems odd, too – there’s weird […]
Amber (Sharlene Cruz) is woken in the early hours of the morning to an upset call from her boyfriend, Justin (Dario Vazquez), but what is he ‘so sorry’ about exactly? We don’t discover that immediately, but we can soon glean that he’s not hurt or sick or anything like that: judging from Amber’s furious response […]
Freddy (Thom Mathews) is a new employee at the Uneeda Medical Supply Warehouse in Louisville, Kentucky. Supervisor Frank (James Karen) attempts to give this thoroughly unglamourous form of employment some umph by taking Freddy to the basement, where drums of a toxic gas called 2-4-5 Trioxin have been stashed by the military. Frank accidentally breaks […]
God bless Netflix money. In common with the similarly vast, similarly monolithic Disney, whatever the complaints and concerns about this level of power and influence may be, there’s at least the comfort that, when they pull in one direction, they can support eminently worthwhile projects – just like Frankenstein, or in Disney’s case, like their […]
Whilst director Julia Ducournau has made just three features to date (taking roughly a decade to do so), it’s a case of quality over quantity. Any minor quibbles with her work aside, the films she’s produced so far have offered intriguing takes on what could, in other hands, be quite simplistic body horrors. But in […]
There’s a serial killer on the loose in LA. As a shock jock-type DJ jokes about it being someone with ‘mommy issues’, your thoughts turn pretty quickly to the standard: a man who loathes women. Which, to be fair, it usually is, but not today: the killer we see dispatching a terrified woman on the […]
Tattoo artist Tales (Lorn McDonald) is living in his place of work after being kicked out by his girlfriend. In the middle of the night, he’s awoken by a phone call from a guy called Truth (Michael Akinsulire) who represents a well-known figure who needs some new ink right now and has heard Tales is […]
After the death of her father, Charlotte (Kelsey Cooke) faces a mountain of debt and the prospect of losing the fabulous holiday villa she currently resides in. Via social media, she hooks up with Danni (Sophie Ablett) who joins her in sunny Spain and the two concoct a plan to stream – and charge for […]