Film Features

Part of the Disney Renaissance saw the release of Mulan in 1998: a gorgeous animated film that told the tale of a woman heading into battle against the Huns in a time of war in China. Featuring the voice talents of Ming-Na Wen and Eddie…

The vast majority of us don’t fully realize the impact that film has on our lives. Not only does it provide a significant portion of many people’s weekly entertainment, but it also profoundly influences our unconscious biases and belief…

Kung Fu Panda tells the tale of Po (Jack Black), the dragon warrior, an overweight panda from China who wants nothing more than to study kung fu. It is a comedic ride full of gorgeous animation, comedy and drama, allowing all ages to gain…

The classic murder mystery has been making a resurgence in recent years, with Rian Johnson’s Knives Out one of the most prominent examples. This hasn’t been confined to just English-speaking movies, and today we’d like to look at a couple…

Over the last few years the Swedish Film Institute have blessed us with some amazing restorations of crime films from the 1950s. We previously looked at a collaboration between two giants of Swedish crime writing, as well as the first two…

House of 1000 Corpses was the debut of rock star Rob Zombie (Robert Cummings to his mother). Zombie started out with the excellent industrial-tinged rock band White Zombie. Exploding out of the New York underground they cut a distinctive…

Romance between humans and otherworldly entities is a common theme in fantasy dramas. It’s not hard to see why. It creates a natural tension, and it gives us a familiar emotion to ground us in an otherworldly story. Plus people like…

“Nordic noir” has been a popular genre in the English-speaking world since the 2000s, with the 2007 Danish drama The Killing’s breakout success a large factor. (In fact The Killing was much more successful in the UK than it had been in…

I love anime. Wait, no, that’s not quite true. I love what the artform is capable of, and I love many of the stories told through it, but I will admit there’s plenty of trash anime out there. A lot of anime started out as manga, and moving…

Much is revealed about How the West Was Won in the title alone. “The West” about which we are concerned is less a place than a way of thinking. With locations in Utah and California, we are geographically in recognisable terrain. What is…