The ‘heist gone wrong’ is a surprisingly popular motif in genre cinema lately. From Livide (2011) to Don’t Breathe (2016) through to Peppergrass (2021), to name a few, ideas about what could happen in such an unfamiliar, high stakes situation have given a fair few filmmakers food for thought, and each subsequent film uses varying […]
Welcome to Purgatory. In the tradition of updating the afterlife mythos – from Beetlejuice to The Lovely Bones – directors and writers the Butler Brothers have turned their hand to the ultimate hinterland in Purgatory Jack (2023), taking for a setting the place where souls wait to be cleansed of residual sin before getting into […]
“Everything I have said and done has been in the hands of God”: a young woman, lying on her bed, intones this sentence over and over, like a mantra, as Saint Clare (2024) begins. This is apparently a Joan of Arc quotation, but it’s hopefully no spoiler to point that Joan figures but little in […]
“Take your chances – you don’t get many.” How far can a person be pushed before they finally, irrevocably snap? It’s a question horror cinema has seemingly enjoyed mulling over for as long as it’s existed, pushing for ever more disturbing conclusions as the decades pass. And, as the intense focus on distressed and vulnerable […]
A wonderfully desolate beach and the surrounding countryside clash with a ramshackle nearby house and its sole occupant (Nick Searcy), whom we see frantically writing – against the clock, as some kind of supernatural phenomena seems to be goading him, making him hallucinate, fear for his sanity. So who is this letter for? We get […]
If Broken Bird (2024) begins unusually literally, then it soon becomes something far more complex and symbolic than that: its depiction of the nervy, prim Sibyl (Rebecca Calder) suggests from the earliest moments that something about this character is barely restrained, and that we will discover more anon. But in getting there – despite a […]
Ecocriticism looks at the relationships between humankind and nature; it reinterprets our place in the natural order of things, looking at how we live, where we live and how our decisions as a species impact upon the world around us. As such, science fiction and dystopia offers a rich source of ecocritical ideas: this seems […]
Getting a new Aliens film? Great, but after a few misfires (you can decide which were misfires, but I bet you think there were some) it can feel like a mixed blessing, perhaps. Wars have very nearly been fought over these movies, because the first two instalments set the bar so extraordinarily high; if the […]
In 1814, a group of French soldiers fighting for Napoleon are lost in bleak Serbian territory. Exhausted, starving and on unfamiliar ground, matters are looking desperate for them until they encounter a local woman who offers them a tasty looking horse. The soldiers have no plans to lead it to water in order to make […]
High school wrestling star Lee Fletcher (Jordan Doww) is a clean living, God-fearing asset to his community, respected by his peers and adored by his churchgoing family. The world Lee thought he knew is about to change as he finds himself developing a crush on openly gay classmate Kyle (Pablo Castelblanco). Fearing that the Fletcher […]
Before getting into this review of Duchess (2024), I’d like to draw attention to the film’s poster art. Tell you what, let’s have a look at it now. Does that look right to you? The proportions are all off; at first glance it looks passable, but then perhaps something catches your eye and you notice […]