Discontinued opens with Sarah (Ashley Hutchinson), filmed from behind, sitting and contemplating an idyllic lake, as a male voice calmly intones: “Return to a place where you are at peace, and reflect on the idea of impermanence. The universe keeps moving, and nothing will remain as it is, good or bad.” This is the film’s…
One of the ways that cinema can portray the end of innocence is to take things that would normally appeal to children and to infuse them with fear, distress or disgust. David Hand’s animated Bambi (1942) for Disney might have been very much aimed at children, but also traumatised many of its young viewers with…
A Banquet first published by Sight and Sound, April 2022 Review: A Banquet may begin with a scene of frenzied food preparation, and its very title may point to a formalised, indulgent meal, but in fact director Ruth Paxton’s film will concern itself with abstinence in extremis. Right from the opening scene, consumption is pathologised:…
Don’t Look Up first published by Sight and Sound When Michigan family man and astronomy professor Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio) first realises what is coming, he spends the night checking and rechecking the calculations, and is quick, the following day, to call the White House with the bad news. Mindy’s urgency matches the speed of…
Everyone Will Burn (Y todos arderán) had its UK première at FrightFest 2022 Like David Hebrero’s debut feature Dulcinea (2019), his follow-up Everyone Will Burn (Y todos arderán), co-written with Javier Kiran, concerns a would-be suicide, and uses genre to explore the ramifications of this damning desire. A brief text introduces us to the small…
Glorious has its world première at Fantasia 2022, and is coming to Shudder later this year Rebekah McKendry’s Glorious begins with its protagonist Wes (Ryan Kwanten) in a dark place. It is not just that he has had a bad breakup with his girlfriend Brenda (Sylvia Grace Crim), but also that we first see him,…
Alone (Seuls) first published by SciFiNow The stylised font of the original French title for Alone, Seuls, raises the second upstroke of the ‘u’ higher than the first, so that it is possible to discern, encoded in the end of the word, the vestiges of Ils, the title of David Moreau’s feature debut (called Them…
Psycho Goreman first published by VODzilla.co The Canadian filmmaking collective known as Astron-6 has over the last decade made a specialty of lovingly resurrecting the sensibilities of different kinds of genre cinema from the Eighties, whether in wildly comic parodies (Manborg, 2011; Father’s Day, 2011; The Editor, 2014) or occasionally in a more serious mode…
The Turin Horse (A Turinói Ló) first published by movieScope The Turin Horse (A Turinói Ló) opens with an anecdote, narrated to a plain black screen, about an incident that took place on the streets of Turin in early 1889. Seeing a horse being whipped by its enraged owner, Friedrich Nietzsche intervened, tearfully embracing the…
The Crazies first published by EyeforFilm, 26 Feb 2010 In George A. Romero’s original The Crazies (1973), the insanity of post-Sixties America – where soldiers were firing live rounds at unarmed students and the spectacle of flaming corpses and chemical warfare in Vietnam was playing out nightly on the TV news – was contained within…
![[Rec]2](https://i0.wp.com/projectedfigures.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Rec2.jpeg?resize=640%2C440&ssl=1)
[Rec]2 first published by Film4 Summary: Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza return to direct this nerve-shredding sequel to Rec (and its quickie US remake Quarantine), further documenting the twists and turns of an unfolding demonic apocalypse. Review: The original Rec (2007), with its terrifying tale of resident evil in a Barcelona apartment building, may have…