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Steamy, weird and gorgeously shot, this is an admirable attempt to bring Matthew Lewis’s classic 18th century gothic novel to the big screen. It’s a shame so few people in the UK saw it in cinemas, as there is much to enjoy here from a cinematic point of view. Director Dominic Moll stages everything so […]
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Barnaby Walter takes a look at brutal horror films A Serbian Film (2010) and Kill List (2011).
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Last year, US TV show 90210 did something radical. It shouldn’t be radical, but in the world of American teen dramas, it was radical. It was revealed one of the hot leading male characters, Teddy, was actually gay. The third series of the show saw him coming out to his close friends and becoming confident […]
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To appreciate the light, one has to sample the dark, and unfortunately for me this means watching films as terrible as Amusement. It’s boring rubbish and pointlessly horrid. Unsurprisingly it did not get a cinema release in the United Kingdom. The story is split into a series of segments which follow the traumas of a […]
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Women Without Men is the debut feature of Shirin Neshat, a brave and talented Iranian artist who is daring to talk about a topic many stay away from: women in a conservative Islamic society. Her film is a beautiful, poetic adaptation of a 1990 novel by Shahrnush Parsipur, a work which is banned in Iran. […]
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A woman believes her 17 year-old son has murdered a man. She covers up the killing the best she can, but the case is still investigated by the local police. To make matters worse, there is a tape of her son and the deceased guy having sex, and a group of criminals threaten to hand […]
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I love horror films, providing there is evident skill and purpose to the horror. But when I come across a movie that misuses the genre and exploits it, with no apparent artistic competence, I get very angry. 2007’s The Hills Have Eyes II is such a film. Alexandre Aja’s reworking of Wes Craven’s original The […]
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Filmmaker, television writer and producer Ryan Murphy has had – and hopefully will continue to have – a brilliantly successful career. He has a collection of established, highly popular television shows to his name (Glee, Nip/Tuck and American Horror Story) and he also directed the Julia Roberts drama Eat Pray Love. Murphy is openly gay, […]
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Michael Haneke is the king of uneasy cinema. This film, from 2001, is one of his strangest works (although saying that about a Haneke film is is like singling out a Transformers movie and labelling it the most stupid – the adjective is stitched into the cinematic territory). Code Unknown doesn’t try to tell a […]
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Kimberley Chambers’s new novel is gripping, easy-to-read and a dramatic reflection on modern families.
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Prisoners of War is the Israeli series, recently shown on Sky Arts 1 HD, that inspired the hugely successful US series Homeland. It’s very different to its American cousin, and fans of that show may be disappointed if they watch this expecting the same levels of stomach-churning tension. Prisoners of War is a very human […]
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Sometimes the films that don’t work – the failures, the hit-and-misses, the ones that never quite manage to achieve what they set out to do – are the most interesting. This is how I feel about a much maligned film Exorcist II: The Heretic. As you can hopefully guess from the title, it is a […]
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Astonishingly prolific director Steven Soderbergh keeps on threatening to give up filmmaking for good. It’s unclear whether or not he is serious about this, or whether it will actually happen (a recent interview on Radio 4 suggested that he is now totally serious about retiring). I really hope this doesn’t happen, as Steven Soderbergh is […]
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This disastrous romantic comedy is loosely inspired by the far superior German film Run Lola Run. The practically non-existent story involves a woman named Lola (Ashleigh Sumner, who some may recognise from TV series The Event) running through San Francisco, desperate to make it to an important meeting. We are lead to believe that her […]