The Ghost Stories film comes to us off the back of a much-praised stage play of the same title by two of our finest writers, Andy Nyman and Jeremy Dyson: at the time it was doing the rounds some years ago, I managed to immure myself against hearing even the barest hint of what it […]
It’s been pleasing to see an apparent rise in films about girls and the aftermath of adolescence in the horror genre of late, with 2016’s Raw perhaps being the stand-out example. Blue My Mind is the latest, and it’s a striking and engaging film. The young woman at the centre of the film is Mia […]
In a stark opening scene, composed largely from a colour palette of black, white, and tiny amounts of red – a young woman awakens. She is in a mysterious room, has crippling injuries to her legs, and is clearly shocked and confused by her predicament. As soon as she wakes up, she’s addressed by a […]
I’m very glad that filmmakers seem to be returning to aesthetically-pleasing supernatural tales these days, rather than endless found footage or excruciating ordeal horror. You could argue that there’s plenty of space for all the above, of course, and you needn’t stick with just one genre of horror (or any other genre for that matter) […]
I don’t think I ever anticipated seeing the day when the release of a Steven Spielberg-directed sci-fi adventure would be greeted with such widespread disdain as we’ve seen for Ready Player One. Sure, as the king of the blockbuster, more or less responsible for inventing the format as we know it along with George Lucas, […]
Re:Born marks the grand return of action star Tak Sakaguchi, in what is obviously a bit of a passion project. More a showcase of raw talent than a particularly coherent film, Re:Born is nevertheless hugely enjoyable if you like watching a whole load of remarkable fight choreography. The narrative is familiar: former special operative Toshiro […]
I feel as though I’ve been here before. Not just because there was a film called Bong of the Dead a few years ago, which my co-editor Ben reviewed, nor indeed because this very day he has reviewed another stoner horror (4:20 Massacre) but also because I’ve also reviewed a film which sounds very similar to Bong […]
In some ways it’s hard to believe it’s been a full five years since Pacific Rim. A lot’s happened in the interim, though: director Guillermo del Toro returned to his signature Gothic territory with Crimson Peak, then bagged a bunch of Oscars for The Shape of Water; and giant monster epics have returned to the […]
Nothing sells a slasher like a holiday association. You really don’t need me to do the list; if it’s been deemed a day of rest or celebration which is in some way marked annually, then it’s fertile ground in which to cultivate 80-odd minutes of hapless, sinful youngsters getting hacked up by a maniac. Small […]
The arrival of this new big screen take on the digital adventures of Lara Croft brings with it mass cries of, “will this finally break the video game movie curse?” Well, not unlike this new live action incarnation of Lara, I don’t really believe in curses. While the good is undoubtedly outweighed by the bad, […]
Whilst I have something of a handle on Japanese cinema of the 70s and 80s – well, in so far as the films have made the great leap to Western screens – I know comparatively little about Chinese cinema of the same period, and in that I have to include Hong Kong/Taiwan. I’ve seen a […]