My initial review for The Coffee Table was going to be one word and one word only. Fuck. As gimmicky, nay, lazy and clickbait-inducing piece of film commentary as that would have been, it summed up the overriding thought in my head as the end credits rolled. It was also an approximation of the sound […]
On seeing the title of this, you’d be forgiven for having the initial thought of “Not another film about the making of The Exorcist, but Robin Bextor’s documentary is certainly not just another film about the making of The Exorcist, choosing to focus much of its runtime on the lead up to the production and […]
Horror and art: it’s a faithful, longstanding relationship which continues to turn out a few films – good and bad – every single year. And then we come to The Portrait, a film which you could be forgiven for assuming was a fairly straightforward horror story – but it isn’t. Paring back the horror to […]
It’s the most terrible time of the year: it’s the present day, and – Santa has mysteriously stopped delivering presents, ending winter. Writers and directors Manuel Camilion and Benjamin Edelman have created a retro-feeling homage to both Mary Shelley and Father Christmas here that sometimes finds its feet, but other times feels frail. With few […]
Cinema teaches us that female travellers in remote climes are not in for an easy time of it. Perhaps it’s sending a message: get straight to work. Don’t risk a gap year or a prolonged vacation; it’s just not worth it. The Royal Hotel (2023) certainly starts out along those lines, though it shifts things […]
Well, Adam Chaplin certainly doesn’t mess about. If the opening few minutes are to be taken as a calling card, then this is nothing if not an honest film: the first ‘characters’ we see are in the process of being decapitated, their faces are getting pummelled, blood is flowing – all, as of yet, inexplicably. […]
A mainstay of science-fiction, by this point in time, is often in how it manages the human consequences of scientific change. Risks, dilemmas, emotional impacts: what awaits mankind when it truly breaks free of the bounds which constrain it? Well, we go a step further in Tropic (2022), to the extent that it’s not exactly […]
40 Cult Movies: from Alice Sweet Alice to The Zombies of Mora Tau by Jon Towlson “Why do we like these movies so much?” It’s a question author Jon Towlson asks in the introduction to this book as he reflects on his own tastes, which – to go by his writing career to date, as […]
There’s a strong sense of finality from the very earliest moments of Saltburn (2023) – but how so? The film opens with a monologue – either a confession, or a survivor’s statement – and whilst it feels fairly clear it’s going to be one of those things, it holds off for the lion’s share of […]
A man awakes in a mysterious room… Okay, so the very opening scene of Share? (2023) will sound eminently familiar to a lot of audiences. Men wake up in mysterious rooms a lot in cinema, and it’s probably no spoiler to add that, when they do, things don’t tend to go well for them, often […]
Wherever we go when we die – if we go anywhere at all – it seems to be an increasingly anonymous, formless kind of a place, if horror is anything to go by. Those strict old religious ideas about Heaven, Hell, and even Limbo and Purgatory seem to have muddied. Now, if you go ‘over […]