Ciaran Conliffe 250 posts 4 comments

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…

Remakes are a pretty contentious topic among film fans. Oftentimes they’re derided as unnecessary (such as Gus Van Sant’s 1998 shot-for-shot remake of Psycho), while equally often they’re marked down for diverging too far from the original…

The phrase “cult classic” gets thrown around a lot when people are talking about films. Mostly it’s used to describe a film that wasn’t very popular on release but has since become extremely well-regarded. The Big Lebowski is an example…

There’s a phrase from the mid-90s that described the explosion in use of the Internet (specifically Usenet forums) at that time: “Eternal September”. Before this, with internet access primarily available in universities, new users had only…

America has always feared its cities, and no city has inspired more fear than New York in the 1980s. From the 1960s onward crime rates gradually increased in the Big Apple, driven by ideologically motivated underinvestment in social…

One of the most influential moments in the history of film took place in March of 1933, when a young Ray Harryhausen first saw the film King Kong. The primitive stop motion effects in the film fascinated the 13-year-old Harryhausen, and it…

The opening of The Abominable Dr Phibes feels like an unnerving dream. A mysterious figure robed and hooded in black plays the pipe organ for a mysterious beautiful woman, accompanied by an eerie orchestra of animatronic robots, before the…

I don’t think anyone working on Death Stranding would have guessed that their game would be the perfect encapsulation of 2020. In fact, the game didn’t even initially release last year; the PS4 version came out in 2019. But it was the PC…

Realistic science fiction films, as a general rule, don’t age as well as fantastical space operas. When you set your film “fifteen minutes into the future” it’s hard for that to stay relevant when that becomes the past. Those that manage it…