I have no rhythm and I can’t carry a note, let alone a tune, but still, I love music. As much as I love music in and of itself, as something to listen to while I’m writing a review for instance, it’s at gigs that I find myself most transported...
It seems that every comedian with a movie or two under their belt turns pretty quickly to the romantic comedy, and with good reason. The rom-com is a fascinating genre, at once rigid in its long established rules and structure, yet infinitely malleable in the genre hybridisations that can be...
The 1993 murder of James Bulger was shocking both in its brutality and in that its perpetrators were just ten years old. It seemed that both the public and the press were at a loss to understand how it happened, how two children ended up committing such a violent murder....
For decades, the Soviet Union was the staple movie boogeyman. Spy films, sci-fi, action movies and more often had an accented bad guy from mother Russia (or an alien analogue for one), the spectre of the all encompassing evil of communism. Then Rocky punched communism and over the next few...
I remember Free Willy less as a film and more as a playground joke. Willy, you see, is British children’s slang for penis. The many jokes inspired by the potential misunderstanding of the title of - get this - a KIDS film were clearly the very apex of sophisticated humour....
Peter Bogdanovich got off to a filmmaker’s dream start. Between 1968 and 1973 he made his first four films. Targets was a highly promising debut; a tense thriller, a triumph of ingenuity to use a few days of filming that Boris Karloff owed to Roger Corman. Then he made The...
The famous list of so called ‘Video Nasties’, which was pivotal in bringing cinema style censorship to home video through the Video Recordings Act of 1984, was divided into two sections. Section 2 is the list that anyone with a passing interest in censorship and extreme cinema knows. These films,...
In a world that so often looks hopeless, can we still have faith and what does it mean to have faith? In First Reformed, Paul Schrader, seemingly reinvigorated as a filmmaker, wrestles with these questions through Reverend Toller (Ethan Hawke), the priest at a historical church with only a few...
16 year old Iona (Lily Newmark) and her mother Lyn (Joanna Scanlan) have just moved to a new town. Iona, wanting to be part of the crowd, says that she has become friends with the popular girls in her class. Eventually she gets invited into the group but they, particularly...