Articles and Lists

John McNaughton couldn’t have made a more auspicious debut film than he did with 1986’s Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer. An unforgiving, punishingly hopeless insight into the mind and crimes of a serial murderer, the film was well received at festivals in 1986 but struggled to find a distributor, apparently being passed around by industry figures on VHS until it finally found a release in 1990. I hadn’t even heard of his follow up film, a sci-fi called The...

With contributions from: Christopher Marchant (CM), Jim Mackney (JMack), and Linda Marric (LM) Even for those of us who are fortunate enough to spend many-a-day indulging in our love of film, Awards Season is more a marathon than a sprint; an annual slog through the year’s most entitled set of cinematic releases. This year’s honours culminate this evening with the 90th Academy Awards, and one can’t help but be gripped by a cynical sense of celebration that I won’t have...

In 1993, Falling Down probably looked like a reaction to the LA riots, events which had in fact happened during its shooting and forced it to move and delay certain scenes. Today it’s a strange watch; of its time in casting as much as politics, but those politics can also be seen through a variety of contemporary lenses, depending on the audience. The film casts Michael Douglas as laid off defence contractor William Foster, initially known only by his licence...

Over the years, as it has accumulated two sequels and as Robert Rodriguez’ career has grown and diversified, El Mariachi’s backstory has arguably become better known and more important than the film itself. I had seen Desperado and Once Upon A Time In Mexico, but until watching it to research this piece, I had never seen El Mariachi before, but I was very much aware of the legend of how it was made, with Rodriguez literally selling his blood in...

“I’m sweating here. Roasting. Boiling. Baking. Sweltering. It’s like a sauna. Furnace. You could fry an egg on my stomach,” narrates Ray Winstone’s Gary “Gal” Dove, before The Stranglers “Peaches” kicks in and he takes a break from crisping himself under the white-hot heat of the Spanish sun to place an iced hand towel over the nether regions he has concealed behind a skimpy pair of yellow swimming trunks. So begins Jonathan Glazer’s cooler than cool, gangster-heist, love story hybrid:...

Okay, campers, rise and shine, and don't forget your booties 'cause it's cooooold out there today. It’s coooooold out there every day. On Friday we discovered that the winter of 2018 will continue for another six weeks, based on the fact that a Groundhog - a type of large ground Squirrel - saw its shadow. To be honest, it’s probably not the least accurate weather forecasting system we use. I’d wager that if you’re reading this anywhere other than the...

Andrew Niccol’s Gattaca, set in a dystopic near future, is a sleek sci-fi thriller that imagines a world where eugenics dictate people’s standing in society. It was Niccol’s directorial debut, released before The Truman Show - the script for which Niccol’s would earn an academy nomination - and made on a relatively tight budget of $36 million.  It was a box office flop, only recouping roughly $12 million and was poorly received by critics.  However, over the years Niccol’s film continues...

Joe Dante loves movies. That’s one of the defining qualities of his filmography. He made his debut 50 years ago with The Movie Orgy, a seven hour compilation film of clips from movies and tv. He later re-edited that film to ‘just’ four and a half hours, but it remains all but impossible to see. His debut proper was Hollywood Boulevard, in which he and co-director Alan Arkush parodied the experience of working for Roger Corman (the fictional company in...

The critic Roger Ebert once said, “movies are like a machine that generates empathy”, which perhaps explains why so many of us feel compelled to turn towards the loving embrace of cinema to console us in times of great trouble. Yet somehow, in much the same way he has seemingly managed to encroach on every other sphere of our existence since deciding to run for President, Donald Trump has managed to ruin this most comforting of pleasures too. These days...