It seems that gone are the days when social commentary in cinema happened as a matter of chance; more and more, in our hyper-aware times, filmmakers actively tackle hot topics such as attitudes to sexuality, race or class – it’s there from the start, right from the beginning of the writing process. So when I […]
Tatsumi is a troubled young man. He doesn’t know what he wants to do with his life, and we first meet him at an abortive encounter with a careers guidance officer which sees him, exasperatedly, told to go back to his parents. Yet he doesn’t ask for their advice, either: instead, he withdraws from the […]
Western audiences have had their pick of Japanese crime thrillers in recent years, as more and more films, old and new, have received releases. This means perhaps that a new generation of audiences has become enraptured by the idea of Japan’s seedy underworld, with its molls and its gangsters, its ultraviolence and its gore. That […]
The dour, yet pacy and surprisingly graphic take on Stephen King’s novel IT was a pleasant surprise when it hit our cinema screens a couple of years ago, and the promise of a second, and closing chapter has been something which fans of the film have kept an eye on ever since. Picking up, as […]
For most readers of this site, director Alexandre Aja is probably best known for his work within the horror genre. When Switchblade Romance (or High Tension) burst onto the scene in 2003, it very much formed part of the new wave of unflinchingly nasty European ordeal cinema; films made since then, such as The Hills […]
Placing monsters on screen – as in your vampires, or your aliens, or so on – has its own share of challenges, but at core, there’s a fairly obvious requirement to, well, get the monsters on screen. When you are aiming to represent monstrous behaviour or thoughts, however, this can be rather more tricky, even […]
By Matt Harries With the weather in this country finally starting to resemble the heat and humidity of last year, summer, it seems, is finally well underway. Swiftly following on from the critically-praised Midsommar is a second piece of folk-horror for these warmer months. But while Ari Aster’s film is replete with the fertile imagery […]
2017’s Get Out proved to be quite the milestone for 21st century cinema. Establishing TV funnyman Jordan Peele as a writer-director to be reckoned with, it proved to be that rare combination of both critical and commercial darling, making back its $5 million budget many, many times over (bravo to producer Jason Blum’s business model), […]
Whatever way you look at it, Michael Moynihan and Didrik Søderlind’s book Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground has been responsible for some serious myth-building in metal circles, not least in the minds of many of those involved in the spate of arson and violence which enveloped the emergent underground […]
I have to say right away, it takes some balls to slap a title like that on a low-budget indie horror from a largely unknown cast and crew. It’s almost as if writer-director Justin McConnell and company are inviting the likes of me to snidely declare that it’s far from a life-changing experience. By extension, […]
The first clue that all is not well with friends (and fast food connoisseurs) Tan and Javid is that, as they leave a Berlin kebab restaurant which has apparently not passed muster, they have to step over a lot of dead bodies as they go. In a neat move, then, Snowflake establishes key elements in […]