By Matt Harries Despite professing to not be a political film maker, William Friedkin demonstrated his social conscience at the very beginning of his directorial career. The People Vs Paul Crump was Friedkin’s 1962 debut and follows the story of the titular Crump, sentenced to death by electric chair for his part in a bungled […]
Winter in Poland. A woman is taking the train from Warsaw back to her dilapidated home town, a part of the world evidently undergoing a spate of child disappearances, given the newspapers and news bulletins we soon encounter. This is Alicja (Magdalena Cielecka), a journalist, who has chosen to return to her old home in […]
When I read some of the blurb for Imperial Blue and saw that its story revolved around drug use, I expected to get one of two things: either a brutal crime drama, where cartel is pitched against cartel, or else a surreal, even overblown imagining of substance abuse on-screen. In truth, Imperial Blue contains some […]
By Helen Creighton At first glance, Certain Kind of Silence has the whiff of a certain kind of Stepford: vague parallels could be drawn between the classic 70s sci-fi The Stepford Wives and Czech director Michal Hogenauer’s tale of a young au pair slowly but inexorably drawn into an oppressive cult environment against her better […]
Tatsumi is a troubled young man. He doesn’t know what he wants to do with his life, and we first meet him at an abortive encounter with a careers guidance officer which sees him, exasperatedly, told to go back to his parents. Yet he doesn’t ask for their advice, either: instead, he withdraws from the […]