Set in the town of Salem, Assassination Nation is a dystopian fantasy about the consequences for four high school girls when their town goes into meltdown, after half of its residents have their text messages and emails hacked and released on to the internet. Because everything is terrible now, we...
Bisbee ‘17Reality, in any sense wider than the confines of the frame, is something cinema can never truly capture. Even in the purest of non-fiction films, there is a starting and stopping point and the question of how the very presence of a camera alters the reality it observes. Robert...
Having made her debut with stranger than fiction doc The Wolfpack, Crystal Moselle appears to have almost literally stumbled on the genesis of her first fiction feature. She ran in to the all girl skateboarding crew Skate Kitchen on the New York subway and, fascinated by them, bought them coffee...
ShadowZhang Yimou’s three previous martial arts films have been explosions of both colour and action. Whatever else you thought of them, they were retina-searing spectacles of the highest order. Shadow sees Yimou returning to martial arts cinema, but with a very different aesthetic. The story manages to be simple yet...
I was born in 1981 and while I was a fan in my childhood, I came of age as a movie nerd in the mid-90s. At a certain time, as far as I was concerned, Quentin Tarantino may as well have invented cinema. It wasn’t just his movies (though they...
Frances (Hazel Doupe) is from a traditional traveller family, and she’s always been a fighter. When she was nine, her pregnant mother was accidentally killed in a fight between the Garda and Frances’ dad Michael (Dara Devaney). In 1972 Frances is fifteen and even more determined to fight her own...
The title of actress Tuva Novotny’s film alludes to something you can’t see coming, and that’s what happens both to the characters and the audience in this emotionally intense real-time drama. Things start slowly, with 12 year old Tea (Nora Mathea Øien) and her friend Anna (Ellen Heyerdahl Janzon) walking...
King of the HillBetween the Palme D’Or winning triumph of his 1989 feature debut sex, lies and videotape and his 1998 mainstream breakthrough in Out of Sight, Steven Soderbergh made several more esoteric films that struggled to win over a wide audience. If any of them should have broken through,...
Snuff is one of the best known and likely one of the least seen of the video nasties. The title and its reputation have passed into urban legend and served as one of the major boogeymen of the moral panic around the nasties, with the rumour always circulating that this...