Down Terrace first published by Little White Lies MONDAY. TUESDAY. The events of Down Terrace are regularly punctuated by intertitles stating in bold capitals which day of the week it is. These fit in perfectly with the film’s quotidian concerns, as a family’s kitchen sink dramas are played out in a Brighton terrace house measured…
In The Earth first published by VODzilla.co In The Earth begins with an image of the object at its centre: a menhir with a circular opening in its middle through which the arboreal foliage beyond is framed. It is like the monolith from the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) – a mysterious, numinous…
Ben Wheatley on In The Earth first published (in a slightly different format) by Sight & Sound, Summer Edition 2021 Seeded from small beginnings, the filmmaking career of Ben Wheatley has grown steadily. He has gone from making viral online comedy clips and animated shorts in the early Noughties to ever larger rôles contributing to…
New Year’s Eve is the time to redress past regrets and to make future resolutions; the time when traditions are preserved, even as change is embraced; the time when, Janus-like, we look backwards and forwards simultaneously; the time when it’s out with the old and in with the new. It is also when the events…
Free Fire first published by RealCrime Magazine Like Ben Wheatley’s previous feature, his latest is set in the 1970s, and features an ensemble of players turning on each other inside a building. There, however, all similarities end. For where High-Rise (2015) was a sprawling Ballardian folly that teased out the shifts and tensions in Britain’s socioeconomic…
First published (in a shorter version) by Little White Lies “Sometimes he found it difficult to believe in a future that had not already taken place.” In Ben Wheatley’s High-Rise, this line appears as a prefatory voice-over from protagonist Robert Laing (Tom Hiddleston), who, three months after he has moved into the titular tower block,…
First published by Little White Lies Diary Day 4 – Sunday, 27th August Today saw FrightFesters agonising over Andy Nyman’s torturous Quiz From Hell, and then being mildly disappointed by a showcase of ten international horror shorts. From the latter the best were probably the hilarious fake trailer Demonitron: The 6th Dimension (spoilt only by…
Review first appeared in Sight & Sound, September 2011 Review: Kill List opens with married couple Jay (Neil Maskell) and Shel (MyAnna Buring) having a loud argument while their seven-year-old son Sam (Harry Simpson) plays in the living room. Jay, a pill-popping Gulf War veteran, has been unemployed for eight months, complaining of various ailments…
The ABCs of Death first published in Sight & Sound, May 2013 Synopsis: An anthology of 26 short films, each named for a different letter of the alphabet, each directed by different genre filmmakers, and each focused upon death. Review: “I’m sorry, it was going to be better – but we didn’t have time.” The…