★★☆☆☆ British filmmaker Robert Heath returns to screens with Truth or Dare (2012), a low-budget horror that attempts to put a generic spin on the well-known party game of the same name. The film follows five university friends – Paul […]
★★★☆☆ Francis Ford Coppola Rumble Fish (1983) is the latest cult favourite to be given the Blu-ray treatment thanks to the Masters of Cinema. It’s easy to see why the teen odyssey has been given precedence, with its artful monochrome […]
★★☆☆☆ A heady combination of Werner Herzog and dinosaurs should be enough to draw people to David Krentz and Erik Nelson’s pseudo-documentary Dinotasia (2012), a dramatic retelling of a the age of the ‘terrible lizards’, leading up to the destruction […]
★★★☆☆ Director Daniel Lee’s White Vengeance (2011) follows a long precession of Chinese period action epics which have been released in the UK with growing frequency. Yet, Lee’s film represents a refreshing shift of focus – albeit a shift which […]
★★★★☆ Jiang Wen’s Let the Bullets Fly (2010) is now one of the highest-grossing Chinese films of all time, and it’s not difficult to see why. The title of the film seem to suggests a return to the classic heroic […]
This August, Somerset House’s Film4 Summer Screen season played host to a very special screening of British ‘Master of Suspense’ Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 classic The Birds, featuring a digitally re-mastered version of the film shown for the very first time […]
★★★☆☆ International bestselling author-come-screenwriter Nicholas Sparks has made a name for himself over the last few years as his novels have one-by-one been turned into lachrymose-heavy romantic comedies, from The Notebook (2004) to Dear John (2010) and The Last Song […]
★★★★☆ The inaugural series of AMC’s The Walking Dead (2010) was a refreshing, but often slow and frustrating adaptation of Robert Kirkman’s award-winning comic book series. For some viewers, the lethargic pace and lack of character development proved to be […]
★★★☆☆ As mainstream US horrors go, Scott Derrickson’s latest twist on the found footage formula, Sinister (2012), provides an enjoyable ride of bumps-in-the-night thrills and spills. The traditionally solid Ethan Hawke stars as a true-crime writer (a clear link to […]
★☆☆☆☆ You won’t find many more misguided and excruciatingly dull features at this year’s Film4 FrightFest than Ryan Smith’s disastrous cut-and-paste job After (2012). Shamelessly plundering a number of the very best horror fantasies from recent years including Donnie Darko […]
★★☆☆☆ To misquote the crows from Disney’s 1941 classic Dumbo; “I’ve seen a horse fly, I’ve seen a dragon fly, I’ve seen a house fly, but I ain’t never seen sushi fly.” Many of the good folks who attended this […]
★★★★☆ One of the stand-out films of this year’s Film4 FrightFest, Jaume Balagueró’s Sleep Tight (Mientras duermes, 2011) is an incredibly nuanced Spanish chiller, featuring a magnificent central performance from Luis Tosar. With nods to voyeuristic classics such as Michael […]
