By Matt Harries I’ll begin my preamble by holding my hands up and admitting that I lag somewhat behind my cohorts on BAH when it comes to the latest horror – especially the independent variety. Perhaps because I spend so much time digging around in the musical underground, I tend to arrive upon the lesser […]
By Quin I realize that last year I proclaimed just how much I love lists, but I must echo something that was always said by Roger Ebert, especially in the last few years of his life. When making his end of the year favorites lists he insisted that the best are the best – ordering […]
By Helen Creighton 1974’s Il Portiere di Notte, aka The Night Porter, is a film that uneasily straddles the line between art house movie and outright Nazisploitation flick. It deals with the post-war meeting and subsequent doomed relationship between a young female concentration camp survivor, Lucia (Charlotte Rampling) and the oddball, sadistic SS officer […]
By Stephanie Scaife Overall I think that 2014 has been a strong year for film, and genre film in particular. In a time when we see endless remakes, reboots and sequels it has been refreshing to see a number of high profile original and independent films being released. As always there have been a few […]
By Ben Bussey Good grief, Brutal As Hell is two days shy of its sixth birthday. You’d think these end of year review things would have gotten easier by now, but I’m not sure they ever will. There will always be some notable movies that the writer didn’t see (this year, I’ve missed Only Lovers […]
By Svetlana Fedotov Disney has always been a solid go-to for feel-good times and sing-a-longs about ice and snow and love or some junk. Bright-eyed princesses solving all the world’s problems with equally bright-eyed forest creatures skipping around their toes like the black plague of happiness has made the animation giant its own world power, […]
By Keri O’Shea (For the first part of Keri’s Top Ten list, please click here.) 4 – Cold in July I’ve been a big fan of Michael C. Hall since his work in Dexter – particularly the early series – so it’s testament to his skill as an actor that here, in the dark and […]
By Nia Edwards-Behi I feel like my end of year list this year’s going to be a little bit of a weird mix. Finishing off my PhD (and working full time and doing that whole film festival thing) has somewhat limited my ability to watch many films this year. If there are some cracking films […]
Review by Ben Bussey Whilst it may be a dish best served cold, revenge has been pretty damned hot in indie filmmaking in recent years. Pretty much any neo-grindhouse movie to have come along since Rodriguez and Tarantino set that particular ball rolling has featured at least one lone survivor with a serious score to […]
By Keri O’Shea It’s become customary, as we approach the end of a year, to complain about the dearth of good cinema in said year. It’s almost a new Christmas tradition for film writers. There were no classics; there were too many lazy efforts; why do we still have to contend with all these remakes? […]
Review by Matt Harries ‘Art House horror’. I don’t know about you but that term immediately causes an arterial explosion of words to issue forth from my mental recesses. ‘Bloody’, ‘visceral’, ‘warped’, ‘unconventional’, ‘non-linear’…’Lynchian’ of course. There are conventions even within the language of the unconventional. Reference points which we check off, co-ordinates we follow, […]