Zeros and Ones first published by Little White Lies, as entry 151 in my Cinema Psychotronicum column Masked, armed and uniformed American soldier J.J. (Ethan Hawke) is in the middle of a nocturnal, locked-down Rome under explicit threat of explosive terrorist attack. For purposes that are never entirely clear, he shoots – with his camera…
The Captor (aka Stockholm) first published by VODzilla.co Following the excellent Chet Baker biopic Born to Be Blue (2015), Robert Budreau’s latest feature to star Ethan Hawke comes with a dual identity. For it was originally called Stockholm (where it is also set), but is now being released under the name The Captor. Bring those…
Assault on Precinct 13 (AP13) first published by Movie Gazette It is a story that has been told many times before: in the Seventies, Hollywood’s studio system gave way to an auteur-oriented movement embracing creativity and the counterculture, and producing some of the most innovative and confronting films ever to have emerged from the United States….
First published by Sight & Sound, December 2015 Review: Films trafficking in religion and evil must eventually decide where they stand on their own Satanic mechanics. While, e.g., Scott Derrickson’s The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005), adapted very loosely from the true story of German teenager Anneliese Michel, flirted at first with rationalism and reality,…
First published by Little White Lies Just when you think the whole shakicam subgenre has come to its natural end, ‘found footage’ finds a way to haunt its viewers (both internal and external) afresh. Like Lovely Molly before it, Sinister does not comprise first-person footage alone, but rather includes some ‘home movies’ within its more conventional ‘objective’ camerawork. In…
Review first published by Sight & Sound, March 2015 Synopsis: Armed with a time machine, an agent hopes to stop the elusive Fizzle Bomber before he can commit a massive terrorist attack on New York in 1975. Given a new face after his containment of an earlier bomb leaves him disfigured, the agent is sent…
Daybreakers first published by Sight & Sound, March 2010 Review: Emerging in 2003 – after 28 Days Later… (2002) but before Shaun of the Dead and the Dawn of the Dead remake (both 2004) – Michael and Peter Spierig’s self-funded feature debut Undead (2003) was at the forefront of the Noughties’ cinematic zombie revival, and had enough energy,…
Review first appeared in Sight & Sound, August 2013 Synopsis: 2022, America. On the night of the annual Purge, a legalised “countrywide catharsis” of mayhem and murder, security salesman James Sandin, wife Mary and children Zoey and Charlie lock down. Zoey’s boyfriend Henry is killed confronting a disapproving James. Meanwhile, a posse of local bourgeois…