Torn Hearts first published by SciFiNow “We’re like sisters,” says Leigh Blackhouse (Alexxis Lemire) about herself and her best friend/bandmate Jordan Wilder (Abby Quinn). Their country band Torn Hearts is starting to gain traction in Nashville’s bar circuit, but not nearly fast enough to match their aspirations. Jordan has the talent, Leigh has the star…
Incredible But True (Incroyable mais vrai) first published by SciFiNow In the opening sequence to Quentin Dupieux’s Rubber (2010), a police officer inexplicably steps out of the boot of a car in the desert and addresses both the camera and an intradiegetic audience about what he calls “the ‘no reason’” in films, “that most powerful…
The Hunger on-stage introduction for the Ultimate Picture Palace’s Blood & Celluloid: Vampire Film Festival, 15 Oct 2022 In the late Seventies and early Eighties, there was a new movement identifiable in British cinema: the rise of the adman director. For filmmakers like Hugh Hudson, Adrian Lyne, Alan Parker, Ridley Scott and his younger brother…
The Amusement Park first published by Little White Lies Ushering in – along with Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby from the same year – a new Golden Age of horror that would last throughout the following decade, George A. Romero’s 1968 feature debut Night of the Living Dead shifted horror from the gothic castle to America’s…
Relic first published by Sight & Sound, November 2020 Review: Edna (Robyn Nevin) is missing. A concerned policeman has summoned her daughter Kay (Emily Mortimer) and Kay’s own young adult daughter Sam (Bella Heathcote) from Melbourne to the family property in Creswick, but they cannot find any trace of Edna there, besides some strange noises…
It is a dark and stormy night, and right from the get-go, Erik Bloomquist’s Ten Minutes To Midnight is clearly going to be a genre film. First, there is the fact that it opens with the arrival of Caroline Williams, whose breakout rôle was playing the DJ Vanita ‘Stretch’ Brock in Tobe Hooper’s The Texas…
Enough Said first published by EyeforFilm “I’ve missed you,” says Eva (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) to Albert (James Gandolfini, The Sopranos) near the end of Enough Said. It is a line that now comes with a poignancy transcending anything that writer/director Nicole Holofcener (Walking And Talking, Lovely And Amazing, Friends With Money, Please Give) could ever have intended, given that…
As the titles from his filmography – Life Between the Waters (2017), The Forgotten Mountain (Mali i Harrum, 2018) and Encounter in the Air (2019) – suggest, Albanian writer/director Ardit Sadiku is an auteur of the elements. His sophomore feature opens with a spectacular vista of the sublime, in a montage of aerials revealing cloud-girt…
Videoman (Videomannen) first published by SciFiNow “I feel like King Kong in New York,” says Ennio Midena (Stefan Sauk) to Simone Karlsson (Lena Nilsson) in Kristian A. Söderström’s Videoman (Videomannen), “I should have been extinct a long time ago.” Ennio is a fish out of water in more ways than one. A ‘flat broke’ migrant who…