When we first meet Matt (Rob Grabow), he is at rock bottom. Having been arrested 48 hours earlier for drunk and disorderly behaviour (he punched a bartender), Matt is released from the police lockup at night, and doubles over with delirium tremens on the station’s outdoor stairs. Such withdrawal, Matt says in voiceover, is “like…
Boiling Point first published by VODzilla.co There is a scene in the middle of Philip Barantini’s Boiling Point when TV celebrity chef Alastair Skye (Jason Flemyng) flamboyantly adds a sprinkle of za’atar that he has just ostentatiously requested from waitress Robyn (Áine Rose Daly), to bring to his idea of perfection a dish that he…
Julia first published by Film4 Summary: French director Erick Zonca has crafted a tale of alcoholism, abduction and alienation in L.A. and across the border. Tilda Swinton stars. Review: Make a movie about an aging alcoholic, and you ought to have a tragic drama, like Le Feu Follet (1963), Trees Lounge (1996) or Factotum (2005)….
Archenemy first published by Little White Lies strap: Adam Egypt Mortimer’s ARCHENEMY uses myths of empowerment and alienation to create a messily subversive maybe-superhero film We live in the era of the superhero. Those costumed crusaders have been all over our screens, mythologising the politics of our times, while exploiting adolescent dreams of empowerment. Yet…
Doctor Sleep first published by Little White Lies Let’s call it the battle of the SKs. In 1977, Stephen King publishes his best-selling novel The Shining, translating into the allegorical language of horror fiction the toll that his own alcoholism was taking on his professional and domestic lives. in 1980, Stanley Kubrick turns that novel…
Rondo begins with the sound of five loud shots, and Paul (Luke Sorge) waking in sweaty shock on the couch in the home of his younger sister Jill (Brenna Otts). “Paul came home from the war with a fire in his head and a dishonourable discharge under his belt,” states the narrator (voiced by Steve…
Whether it takes us back to childhood, or to ‘better times’, the appeal of nostalgia is the fantasy it offers of regaining paradise lost and returning to a state, however illusory, of innocence. Bullitt County, the second feature from writer/director David McCracken (Daylight, 2013), comes with a double dose of nostalgia: not only is it…
Street Trash first published by VODzilla.co “In 1965, I bet it all,” says an ageing derelict (Morty Storm) in his thick Brooklyn accent, as he buys a discount bottle of hooch from low-rent liquor store owner Ed (M. D’Jango Krunch). “I bet everything. My wife, my kids. Everything went.” It is a brief and elegant hard-luck…
Beyond The Gates begins with a mother, father and their two young boys at the grand opening of their new video store. It is a moment tinged with hope for the future, but also, from our hindsight perspective, with tragedy – as is hinted by the grave look on the father’s face at the end…
Review first published by Grolsch FilmWorks In the new Millennium, most genre filmmakers were busy remaking the 1970s, to see how that Vietnam-, Nixon- and Manson-tinged Golden Age of horror might map onto our own post-9/11 experience of global terror, local insanity, Bush-brand torture and economic meltdown. Yet several younger, (slightly) more forward-thinking directors were…
Review first published by Film4. Synopsis: Ted Kotcheff (The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz) directs this paranoid tale of a teacher’s lofty ideas brought low in the Australian outback. Review: In the opening aerial shot of Ted Kotcheff’s Wake In Fright (aka Outback), the thin line between civilisation and bestiality, education and addiction, discipline and excess,…