Ciaran Conliffe 258 posts 6 comments

French cinema has always had a reputation for artistic flair. The very word for a great director who brings his vision to the screen, auteur, comes from the French word for author. In France cinema is idiomatically known as le septième art…

The idea of a “genre mashup” is a lot less surprising these days than it used to be, though some (like the superhero/comedy style of Takiki Watiti’s Thor movies) still raise a few eyebrows. Genres, though, are a purely cultural phenomena.…

One fun aspect of watching foreign shows is learning about the folklore of other lands; whole unfamiliar mythologies. One of these is the fashion in Korean drama for the last few years of shows about “grim reapers”, messengers of death…

Netflix users at the beginning of 2021 were justifiably confused when they noticed two new movies, both Chinese fantasy films, and both with almost identical names. One was The Yin Yang Master, while the other was The Yin-Yang Master:…

Born in the 18th century, “gothic fiction” is a genre defined by three key elements: supernatural elements (either actually present or implied), the fear of the unknown, and the idea of the present being haunted by the past. While we most…

Hello and welcome to Subtext, a new irregular column looking at the hidden gems among the foreign language shows and movies available on streaming services. On the 18th of June, a show will arrive on Netflix that promises to be one of…

Video game movies have a bad reputation. Some of this is from video game funs upset that films make sild divergences from the source material (Super Mario Bros, for example). Some of it is that the movies are often not very good (like any…

Wayne’s World began life as a recurring Saturday Night Live sketch about two metalhead slackers who broadcast a TV show from their basement. The skits became a fan favourite part of the show, and after a proposed sketch anthology film…

The post-apocalyptic genre is older than you might think. It has its roots in the “Dark Ages” of European history, after the Western Roman Empire had fallen and left its former subjects wandering around the ruins of buildings they could…

I love heist movies, for much the same reason that I love classic detective stories: the excitement of seeing a trick slowly dissected and laid out in front of you. A proper heist movie is about deception. Yes, there’s the core element of…