Follow your dreams. It’s arguably the one message Hollywood has sold us most consistently over the decades. Passion, determination and perseverance will ultimately pay off, they say, so long as you’re true to yourself and stay strong in the face of adversity. Alas, as years of singing-based TV talent shows have so sadistically emphasised, ambition […]
Vampirism is something monstrous, something impossible, but it’s a broad enough kind of monstrosity to mean it can be explored in a number of ways on screen. Unto Death, by director Jamie Hooper, uses the vampirism theme to explore a relationship, and how it is put under extraordinary pressure by the most extraordinary of circumstances. […]
It’s always interesting when an emerging filmmaker contacts us to share their work, so here – inside fifteen minutes for the lot – is a showreel from Andrew J. D. Robinson, which we are free to share. Making films this short is bound to be a challenge, but this is one of the ways in […]
Sometimes a film self-consciously goes for the ‘epic’ tag, and it’s clear from the very outset that this is the case with Park Hoon-jung’s 2015 movie The Tiger. With its sweeping Korean vistas, Sturm und Drang musical score and lone figure set against an unforgiving world it clearly fits the bill, and actually that’s just […]
Much as they have at the multiplexes, Marvel have carved out a real niche for themselves with their Netflix shows. Whilst their big screen ventures remain resolutely big budget, globe/universe-hopping fantastical adventures bringing the comic label’s most grandiose superheroes to life, these small screen offshoots, while ostensibly still set in that same (buzzword alert) cinematic […]
For a filmmaker largely forgotten by the wider audience, the late Bob Clark’s directorial career had a surprising impact. With 1981’s Porky’s, he blew the doors wide open on the teen sex comedy boom; and I understand 1983’s A Christmas Story is something of a perennial festive favourite in the US (I myself have never […]
Any horror fan of a certain age can tell you that 1996 was a big year for Neve Campbell. Off the back of that year’s The Craft and (more pointedly) Scream, the then-23 year old Canadian actress was elevated from “one of the girls off Party of Five” to a genre movie star, a status […]
Johannes Roberts has long been a director we’ve held in high esteem around these parts. 2010’s F was one of the most attention-grabbing British horror movies of the past decade, and he’s been steadily on the ascent in the years since. 47 Metres Down would seem to be his highest profile film yet, with a […]
Hammer is best-known for its Kensington Gore and its literary monsters, usually shot against a 60s-coloured 19th Century which is a distinctive aesthetic all of its own; the studio deviated from this formula quite considerably at times, though, in a range of films which seem to have divided critics ever since. Fear in the Night […]
I will confess that I have had no prior experience of director Yorgos Lanthimos’s work, but based on his most recent film, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, I’d imagine that a little goes a long way. That isn’t to say that I wasn’t completely drawn in to this twisted story of unhappy families, but […]
I have a real love/hate thing going with Japanese director Sion Sono. On one hand, his so-called ‘hate’ trilogy contains, for me, some of the most genius, subversive films I have ever been immersed in; they’re absolutely jaw-dropping, to the point that I don’t know if I can feasibly revisit Guilty of Romance for fear […]