Reviews

Director: Zach Cregger Writer: Zach Cregger Cast: Georgina Campbell, Bill Skarsgård, Justin Long, Richard Brake, Matthew Patrick Davis Running Time: 102 mins The title of writer/director Zach Cregger’s superlative thriller, Barbarian, is – at least at first – a bit of a puzzler, even though its associations and implications cast their shadow over the rest
0 Comments
Director: Neil Marshall Cast: Charlotte Kirk, Jamie Bamber, Jonathan Howard, Hadi Khanjanpour Running Time: 90 mins It is April 2017, in Nangarhar Province, Afghanistan, and if there is one thing that we know, it is that Neil Marshall’s The Lair is going to end with a bang. We know this because text at the very
0 Comments
Director: Travis Stevens Writer: Travis Stevens, Nathan Faudree Cast: Sarah Lind, Josh Ruben, Malin Barr A Wounded Fawn opens with a quote from Leonora Carrington about the sudden realisation of her embodied vulnerability – and later we will see a copy of Susan L. Aberth’s book Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy and Art (2010), while a
0 Comments
Director: Jacob Gentry Cast: Brea Grant, AJ Bowen, Scott Poythress, Sandra Benton Running Time: 96 mins Near the end of Night Sky, someone will menacingly promise protagonist Oren (AJ Bowen) “a long excruciating couple of agonisingly painful hours while you – you helplessly wait to bleed out,” adding,  “a sensation with which I think you’re
0 Comments
Director: Michael Hazanavicius Cast: Romain Duris, Berenice Bejo, Finnegan Oldfield, Gregory Gadebois Running Time: 111 mins Final Cut (Coupez!) opens with a conflicted young woman (Matilda Lutz) fending off a young man (Finnegan Oldfield) with an axe, while trying to reconcile herself to the fact that he is no longer her boyfriend but a braindead
0 Comments
Released: September 2022 Certificate: PG Director: Kogonada Writer: Kogonada Cast: Colin Farrell, Jodie Turner-Smith, Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja Distributor: Sky Cinema Running Time: 96 mins If you like this, try… Sans Soleil Chris Marker’s trippy essay film examines time, ritual, memory and place with profound insight. The sudden loss of Yang (an android played by Justin
0 Comments
Certificate: 12A Director: Tetsuro Kodama Writer: Akira Toriyama Cast: Masako Nozawa, Toshio Furukawa, Ryou Horikawa (Japanese) Distributor: Crunchyroll Running Time: 200 mins Dragon Ball is one of the biggest and most popular anime franchises of all time and one that is many fans’ gateway anime, the one that turned them from normies into weebs. It
0 Comments
Certificate: 15 Director: William Brent Bell Writer: David Coggeshall Cast: Julia Stiles, Isabelle Fuhrman, Rossif Sutherland Distributor: Signature Entertainment Running Time: 86 mins If you like this, try… Greta Isabelle Huppert has loads of fun playing a psychopath in Neil Jordan’s trashy and twisted horror-thriller. Isabelle Fuhrman who played a con artist and psycho-killer in
0 Comments
Released: 5 August (on Netflix) Director: Various Cast: Tom Sturridge, Boyd Holbrook, Vivienne Acheampong, David Thewlis, Jenna Coleman, Vanesu Samunyai Distributor: Netflix If you like this, try… American Gods Another show in which ancient beings have personal problems and humans get caught in the middle? It’s almost like Neil Gaiman has a type… (in the
0 Comments
Director: Carlota Pereda Writer: Carlota Pereda Cast: Laura Galán, Claudia Salas, Carmen Machi, Pilar Castro Pink is a colour associated with girlishness, and with pigs. The opening credits of writer/director Carlota Pereda’s feature debut Piggy (Cerdita) are pink, to match the colour of its teenaged (anti)heroine’s trainers – yet the film also begins with the
0 Comments
Director: Dario Argento Writer: Dario Argento, Franco Ferrini Cast: Ilenia Pastorelli, Asia Argento, Andrea Gherpelli Giallo king Dario Argento’s Dark Glasses opens with a wide establishing shot of residential buildings in Rome’s leafy suburbs, and then various mobile shots looking upwards at roadside trees and apartment blocks. As it is revealed that the perspective belongs
0 Comments
Director: Rodrigo Gudiño Writer: Nick Cutter (book), Ian Weir (script) Cast: Natalie Brown, Emily Alatalo, Allan Hawco The Breach begins where Friday the 13th (1980) ends, with a canoe free-floating in the water – which is to say that as the vessel drifts downstream, the film is both advertising and literalising its own derivativeness. Yet
0 Comments
Director: Andy Mitton Writer: Andy Mitton Cast: Stephanie Roth, Haberle Raymond, Anthony Thomas, Laura Heisler The Harbinger is a film of virus, infection and masks. It is set in the early wave of the pandemic when there was no vaccine and the Coronavirus was decimating New York City’s elderly and middle-aged populations. Monique ‘Mo’ Cartwright
0 Comments
Director: Mali Elfman Writer: Mali Elfman Cast: Gavin Powers, Joe Powers, Katie Parker, Karen Gillan, Rahul Kohli The road movie is, famously, a metaphor for life. Where the journey starts and ends is arbitrary, but as our travellers have strange encounters with passers-by, take various unexpected detours, and look back over what they are leaving
0 Comments
Director: Carter Smith Writer: Carter Smith Cast: Jena Malone, Mark Patton, Cooper Koch, Jose Colon Swallowed is a film of mouth, cock and anus. Like writer/director Carter Smith’s previous Jamie Marks is Dead (2014), it is a genre piece with a queer element that is simultaneously foregrounded and sublimated. Its protagonist Benjamin (Cooper Koch, whose
0 Comments
Author: Karen Heuler Publisher: Angry Robot Released: Out now Price: £9.99 After deliberately (and maybe just a little accidentally-on-purpose-permanently) transforming her despicably risible co-worker Stan into a black cat, novice witch Eleanor finds herself excommunicated from her coven in Karen Heuler’s The Splendid City. Now intrinsically bound to her feline frenemy, her only hope of
0 Comments