For over a century, Hollywood has seen itself as the king of entertainment, riding out challenges from both television and home video. However, after years of waiting in the wings, the gaming industry is now starting to blur the lines between cinema and video games. Tentpole releases now have budgets Continue Reading
★★★★☆ The reverberations of loss in a small town awaken the spirits of the recently deceased in Denis Côté’s chilling adaptation of Laurence Olivier’s Répertoire des villes disparues. Occupying a peculiar space between life and death, arthouse and genre, Ghost Town Anthology isn’t a horror story exactly, but a portrait Continue Reading
Writing and cinematography have a lot in common. At the end of the day, they both have the same objective, and that is to tell a story. Essays on books have always been a staple in most educational institutes. However, with time, teachers slowly realise the potential of films to Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ New York hip hop antagonists Beastie Boys are a group who have often defied the very notion of pigeon-holing, blending elements of rap, punk and a myriad of samples into their own unique sound. So it feels somewhat fitting that any documentary on the trio should do the same. Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ Matvey (Alexksandr Kuznetsov) waits at the front door of his girlfriend’s father’s apartment, priming himself for the bloody task ahead of him. Priming himself, he utters the mantra, “evil won’t touch me”. It may not touch him, but over the next 100 minutes of this hyper-violent comic thriller, it Continue Reading
★★☆☆☆ Ours is the age of the poisonous neologism. Never have so many words been spawned to express disdain and hatred, like a speckled fungus crawling up a shower curtain: ‘incel’, ‘snowflake’, ‘libtard’, ‘feminazi’, and our very own ‘Brexit’. ‘Cuck’ has two uses: one in politics, where it denigrates liberals, Continue Reading
Once the Oscar season is here, there is always a level of excitement that comes up. You will start seeing the old classics on your TV in preparation for the new ones to win the awards, and the best films are always in the cinemas around that time, making everybody Continue Reading
★★☆☆☆ In his fifth feature, French director Safy Nebbou marshals a game Juliette Binoche through a twisty-turny plot that is equal parts psychological melodrama, romance, and genre thriller. But while Binoche is reliably magnetic and the fitfully pretty visuals match a ripped-from-the-headlines script, Who You Think I Am’s pot never Continue Reading
★★★★★ After wowing festival audiences at its world premiere at Locarno back in 2018, Jodie Mack’s hypnotic, experimental film-cum-documentary finally finds its way on to release via MUBI. Now that it’s finally here, what are we to make of Mack’s journey into textiled abstraction? The Grand Bizarre is Mack’s first Continue Reading
★★★★☆ The seismic psychological ripples of China’s one-child policy – so recently and wonderfully explored in Wang Xiaoshuai’s So Long, My Son – are keenly felt in this curiously titled and boldly played family drama. At the heart of this domestic narrative is a fractious, decade-spanning relationship between a mother and Continue Reading
★★★★★ Andrew Kötting is a filmmaker and Professor of Time Based Media. A visual artist who uses film and photography to explore the gaps between dreams and reality, autobiography and self-mythology. It’s hard to put the multi-disciplinary Kötting’s work into a box, and yet he has made an entire film Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ Fans of text adventures and the sadly defunct Telltale Games series can get their latest fill of branching narratives and choosing their own storyline courtesy of the new interactive sci-fi film, The Complex. “Here is a brand new idea in fiction – a story which ends in any one Continue Reading
With cinemas closed, major releases postponed, and current productions in limbo, this is a dark time for filmmaking. It’s horrible to imagine that after months in shutdown with no revenue, cinemas already struggling may not survive this crisis. The Covid-19 pandemic has potentially catastrophic consequences for film culture and for Continue Reading
★★★★☆ After his wife drowns in a tragic accident, Juha (Pekka Strang) enters a lengthy bout of depression, unable to connect with either his daughter, Elli (Ilhona Huhta), or his own feelings. A chance encounter with dominatrix Mona (Krista Kosonen) sets him on a new path of discovery. An erotic, Continue Reading
★★★★☆ It’s easy to think that our lives have become bottle episodes in recent weeks: single location stories cut off from the grand narrative of our ordinary lives and the usual onrush of world events, culture and sport included. Current uncertainty makes this hiatus feel like it’s stretching out to Continue Reading
