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Author’s Introduction When I was young, my parents were pretty strict about what I was and wasn’t allowed to watch. My viewing had to remain within appropriate age boundaries. I couldn’t get into higher certificate films at the cinema or rent them on video because at 15 I still looked like I was about 12. Then we got a VCR, and I figured out how to set the timer and started delving with a vengeance into films my parents would...

Last week I talked about Jurassic Park and how, at 11, it felt like my movie. Sleepless in Seattle isn’t that. It’s my mum’s movie. I honestly don’t know where I got the movie bug, none of my family are cinephiles. My parents, generally speaking, like their movies safe. I used to have to assure my mother that a film would have a happy ending if there was even the tiniest bit of suspense during it. My folks are great,...

When I was very little I wanted to be a paleontologist. By the age of 11 this had changed, because I had become obsessed with movies, but I was still very interested in dinosaurs and would pick up fossils whenever we went to a (British) beach on holiday. I had quite a collection of Ammonites. This, along with that obsession with movies I mentioned, meant that the looming release of Jurassic Park was one of the most important moments of...

I didn’t grow up with Tina Turner’s music. The first time I was aware of her was through her 1991 blockbuster Simply The Best collection, which swept up the highlights of the second phase of her career and seemed to be in every single CD collection I saw in the 90s. It was probably this that meant I didn’t see What’s Love Got To Do With It? for some years after it came out, because my overriding experience of Turner at...

I have been finding many of the more political films I’ve been watching for this series more relevant than I’d like, and Romper Stomper, sadly, doesn’t feel like an exception in that respect. Neo-nazism is again on the rise, enabled and encouraged by the so called Alt Right. Much of this rise is online, but we have seen it, in the UK, in Charlottesville, and in Dylann Roof’s attack in Charleston becoming an ever more present and dangerous issue on...

I was always a movie guy. We had consoles (a Sega Master System, followed by a Mega Drive) in the house and I did play them, and some PC games, when I was a kid, but gaming was my brother’s thing. Despite that, and despite the fact we never had a Nintendo console, I was very well aware of the Mario Brothers. I had played the games only briefly (and badly) at friends houses, but I knew Mario (played by...

“The stairs to our industry must be accessible to all,” declared Cate Blanchett as she stood on the steps of the Cannes Palais during the premiere for Eva Husson’s Girls of the Sun. Below her stood 81 other woman from within the industry, representative of the number of female filmmakers who had walked that red carpet to see their film play in the Official Cannes Competition over the course of the festival’s 71-year history. By contrast, some 1645 men have...

In 1993, Sylvester Stallone was going through, shall we say, a challenging period. He’d had a few box office disappointments. The Rocky series seemed to have played itself out with 1990’s poorly received fifth entry, and Stallone had attempted to shift into comedy, making disastrous choices in Oscar and Stop Or My Mom Will Shoot! The latter is one of Hollywood’s great practical jokes, as Stallone’s longtime box office rival Arnold Schwarzenegger pretended to be interested in making the film...

As opening statements in a film career go, the pre-credits sequence of Menace II Society is a powerful one. Two young black men, Caine (Tyrin Turner) and O-Dog (Larenz Tate) are carefully watched by the Korean husband and wife owners as they buy themselves beers in a convenience store. They’re pissed off by the implication that they are planning to steal from these people, but it’s only when the husband says “I feel sorry for your mother” that things turn....