Film Review

Blood Brothers: Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali charts the friendship between two of the towering figures of the twentieth century. Through breathless narration, personal reflections from family members, and commentary from diverse backgrounds,…

Bob Viddick, the grunting, grizzled and scruple-light hitman from the frenetically fun Copshop, informs us at one stage that he received a degree “from the university of common sense”. Is this a good line? It would be a struggle to…

In 2020 as Covid lockdowns ramped up around the world, Canadian animator Rob Jabbaz was presented with an opportunity. With SARs in recent memory, his adopted country of Taiwan locked down hard and early. This meant life continued more…

Prisoners of the Ghostland represents a perfect artistic marriage: the gonzo Japanese auteur Sion Sono (Suicide Club, Love Exposure, Tag) and “the California Klaus Kinski", Nicolas Cage. While Sono's English language debut may not fulfill…

Emanuela Rossi’s directorial debut Darkness screened at this year’s Dublin Feminist Film Festival. Her feminist apocalyptic family drama is a nuanced exploration of control and freedom seen through the eyes of a teenaged girl, aspects…

In pre-CGI Hollywood, if you wanted fantastical creatures or robots, Phil Tippett was the man you'd go to. He created the AT-AT Walker for Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back and, my personal favourite, ED-209 in Robocop. And if that…

Video nasty – a film on video considered to be gratuitously and offensively violent or pornographic. A controversial subject ever since the early 1980s, this was thanks to the unwavering determination of Mary Whitehouse and the National…

It’s a shame we won’t be able to see Beckett on the big screen. While the film is far from perfect, director Ferdinando Cito Filomarino delivers something far more appealing than its dreary trailer would suggest. There are exotic locales,…

Just Philippot has become something of a phenomenon in recent years with his striking efficiency to deliver high quality short films with artistic execution most can only dream of. Both Acid (2018) and Ses Souffles (2015) showcased his…

Technological anxieties concerning relationships with artificial beings really have had something of a stranglehold on the world of grounded, sci-fi dramas recently. Spike Jones’s Her, which concerned a lonely Joaquin Phoenix and his…