A bar – it could be any bar, albeit it seems to be in a particularly bleak, remote place. It’s snowing outside. A beer bottle, not quite drained, occupies the foreground; unseen but audible, it seems a violent attack is taking place in the background. This first few minutes of coverage sums up a great […]
I go backwards and forwards on director Ben Wheatley’s work to date, but I can never resist the promise of one of his passions – folk horror: in that respect, the opening scenes of In The Earth certainly don’t disappoint, foregrounding the promise of ancient practices and beliefs – and things going wrong, at a […]
My knowledge of Mongolian cinema, or even Mongolian language cinema is slim to none, so I was interested by the premise of In The Land of Lost Angels, a crime drama which follows the story of two ethnic Mongolians, one an ex-pat, who hit on a way to make some easy money. So begins a […]
The dismal, disorientating horrors of TV series The Terror have been an antidote to the rolling-on of Spring. This ten-part series is based on a true story, and draws from the Dan Simmons novel of the same title. Set in the Northwest Passage during an abortive mission to find a new shipping passage through the […]
Please note: this article discusses key plot points from The Terror and as such contains spoilers. Please don’t read this unless you have already seen the series. It’s been noted elsewhere that we seem to have developed a taste for isolation horror over the past year or so. Sure, it’s always been a key factor […]
Held (2020) presents us first of all with some uncomfortable scenes relating to women travelling alone: after an initial scene, which we return to later, we begin in full with Emma (Jill Awbrey) who is on her way to a weekend retreat: as she responds uneasily to the taxi driver who asks her if her […]
Science fiction has become very low-key these days, hasn’t it? Perhaps it’s as a result of the way we’re already living with a lot of the technology – and repercussions – which much of classic sci-fi could only imagine. Now, we’re left to play catch-up, wondering what all of these developments and further developments can […]
In the first decade of the new millennium, Christopher Smith – alongside his contemporaries like Neil Marshall, Simon Rumley and Ben Wheatley – formed part of a new wave of British genre cinema, delivering some of the best, or at least most-discussed horrors of the Noughties along the way. Smith’s first feature-length was Creep (2004), […]
Now I’ve seen a lot of different genres and homages to genres in my time, but this is a first: I’ve never seen a Welsh Western before, much less imagined one which managed to add in more than a few elements of (dark) comedy. The Toll (not to be confused with last year’s Russian horror […]
Far From the Apple Tree is an engaging, if oblique study of the creative process: it takes in ideas of the ‘muse’, although it does so from a different perspective than usual, and it’s a considered, thoughtful piece of film which looks fantastic. We start out with an opening night at a gallery: one of […]
Sci-fi of all stripes has often been naturally inclined towards exploring quantum theory: this alternative means to define reality lends itself to intriguing examinations of the human condition, which potentially makes for good cinema. It’s very much the case in Infinitum: Subject Unknown, a low-key but adventurous and thought-provoking low-budget film which spins together some […]