“The end is coming, but we’re here to stay” go the lyrics of the song that plays over the prologue to George Henry Horton’s Project Dorothy. That prologue comprises an impressionistic montage of white coats working in a massive facility, and then a ringing alarm and a tannoy announcement of security lockdown, and finally the…
“You already know why I’m here,” says a woman in a white wedding dress to an enthroned, horned Satan, in the opening scene of writer/director Julian Gowdy’s debut feature The Devil’s Tongue. “You held up your end of the deal, so now it’s my turn. My only hope is that you – fuck!” Here, before…
Writer/director Charlotte Le Bon’s debut feature Falcon Lake opens with a wide shot – or as wide as is possible in squared-off Academy ratio – of an idyllic lake at dusk. As insects can be heard buzzing with life, the camera slowly tilts down to reveal something closer to death: a human body floating still…
Transformers: Dark of the Moon first published by EyeforFilm, 1 July 2011 Cast your mind back to 9/11. Lost for words to express the enormity of the horrific spectacle unfolding on their screens if not before their very eyes, people kept incredulously repeating the mantra: “It’s like something out of a movie.” Well, Transformers: Dark…
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen first published by EyeforFilm, 15 June, 2009 A title baldly declares that the film we are about to see has its origins in Hasbro toys. Over images of a one-sided battle between men and mechas in a rocky landscape, a booming voice-over declares: “Earth – birthplace of the human race…
Transformers first published by EyeForFilm “Cool, mum!” says the little boy in the passenger seat of a car as above him two towering robots fight each other, in the process destroying anything (vehicles, pylons, the freeway itself) that gets in their way. The mother, needless to say, looks less pleased.Little boys are certainly one target…
Freshly released from a mental institution, a young, taciturn ‘Man’ (Rory Alexander) with a history of violence and a head full of elusive childhood memories heads back to the only people he knows – the fatherly Dunleavy (Mark Rylance), plus old playmates Daisy (Nell Williams) and Toby (Sebastian Orozco). Yet in writer/director Fridtjof Ryder’s first…
The Card Player (Il Cartaio) first published – in a slightly different form – by Movie Gazette, Nov, 2004. The Italian term giallo denotes both the colour ‘yellow’ and a lurid film genre which, like the series of sensationalist Italian crime novels whose distinctive yellow sleeves provided its name, is full of masks, murder and…
“I’m a fucking pianist, that’s how I make my living,” says Sebastian Poe (Billy Blair) near the beginning of writer/director Derek Presley’s Tonic. “I got these fingers, that’s it.” In mentioning his ‘fingers’, Sebastian is unconsciously alluding to James Toback’s Fingers (1978) which, like Jacques Audiard’s remake The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005) and…
After a series of brightly coloured illustrations depicting vodou death spirit Baron Samedi together with, and then apart from, his beloved wife Maman Brigitte, Richard Elfman’s Bloody Bridget begins with its Van Nuys trailer park heroine Bridget O’Brian (played by Elfman’s wife Anastasia) performing a burlesque on stage with fellow artists Pepe (Marcos Mateo Ochoa)…
Jack Dignan’s After She Died may open with various evening shots, first exterior and then interior, of a multi-storeyed, modernist family home set on an enviably Edenic Australian waterfront – but there is trouble in paradise. As Jen (Liliana Ritchie) struggles to revise for her high school finals, she is distracted by the sound of…