The ‘heist gone wrong’ is a surprisingly popular motif in genre cinema lately. From Livide (2011) to Don’t Breathe (2016) through to Peppergrass (2021), to name a few, ideas about what could happen in such an unfamiliar, high stakes situation have given a fair few filmmakers food for thought, and each subsequent film uses varying […]
“Everything I have said and done has been in the hands of God”: a young woman, lying on her bed, intones this sentence over and over, like a mantra, as Saint Clare (2024) begins. This is apparently a Joan of Arc quotation, but it’s hopefully no spoiler to point that Joan figures but little in […]
If Broken Bird (2024) begins unusually literally, then it soon becomes something far more complex and symbolic than that: its depiction of the nervy, prim Sibyl (Rebecca Calder) suggests from the earliest moments that something about this character is barely restrained, and that we will discover more anon. But in getting there – despite a […]