After writing and directing the self-financed, darkly comic cult film Murder Party (2007) and the slow-simmering, lo-fi revenger Blue Ruin (2013) – the latter being selected for the Director’s Fortnight at Cannes where it won the FIPRESCI Prize – Jeremy Saulnier has now turned his craft to the genre-inflected siege thriller Green Room that…
First published by TwitchFilm If one thing is certain in life, it is that none of us will survive it. With the end already written into every breath we take, who we are is defined by what we do with our brief time here. Such ethical and eschatological concerns are presented in intensified form by…
Punishment Park first published by EyeforFilm [Note: this was published in 2005, during the depths of the Bush era] After becoming bogged down in a foreign conflict, the US Government has declared an “internal security emergency” at home and begun detaining citizens – young radicals, authors, activists, pacifists, draft dodgers, protest singers, feminists and poets –…
Edvard Munch first published by Film4 Synopsis: Peter Watkins’ recently restored telefilm documents the angst of an artist and an era. Review: Peter Watkins’ Edvard Munch opens with both a text (in Norwegian) and a voice-over (in English, narrated by Watkins) that impart introductory information about both the film’s use of Munch’s diaries as source material and Munch’s…
The Hexecutioners first published by TheHorrorShow The road to death can be easy or hard. In the past, different cultures have tried to ease this inevitable transition with rituals designed to expiate past sins and console those left behind – whereas in our more secular age, the stages of death have increasingly become sanitised and medicalised….
First published by Little White Lies How do you bring a book to life? How does a figure dreamt up on a page become embodied by a flesh-and-blood person? Anyone tasked with adapting a much-loved work to the big screen must face these problems – and it is precisely the mysterious processes of metamorphosis, adolescence…
First published by Little White Lies Much as womanising slacker Richard Bone (Jeff Bridges) finds himself late one evening in a rainy Santa Barbara alleyway at the same time as a silhouetted figure dumps a young woman’s body there, Cutter’s Way suffered the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Adapted…
Asmodexia first published by Little White Lies, as the sixth part of my Cinema Psychotronicum column Sleeping rough near a cemetery on the outskirts of Barcelona, elderly Eloy de Palma (Lluís Marco) tells his teenaged granddaughter Alba (Clàudia Pons) a campfire story from his own boyhood: in the village of Alba’s great grandparents, the cemetery became a…
The Last Horror Film first published by Little White Lies, as the fifth part of my Cinema Psychotronicum column “I’d like to point out that for the first time in the entire history of the Cannes Film Festival, this prize is awarded to an actress playing in a horror movie.” It is 1981, but these words…
Alienate first published by Little White Lies, as the fourth part of my Cinema Psychotronicum column “It’s ok, baby, I’m fine,” says the young man (Nathan Day) to his anxious partner (Courtnea Hyland) in the opening scene of Michael Shumway’s feature debut Alienate. “It’s going to be alright.” All this is shot up close, and could…
Carnival of Souls first published by EyeforFilm Carnival Of Souls may open with that most conventional of scenes from the movies of the Fifties/Sixties, a drag race, but there is something not quite right, something jarring, in the way that the sequence draws the viewer right into the middle of the action. At a set of…