Stone Turtle has its UK première at Glasgow Film Festival 2023 “Same island, different myths,” comments Samad (Bront Palarae). After all, Turtle Stone Island is said to be uninhabited, but he has found Zahara (Asmara Abigail), her young niece Nika (Samara Kenzo) and a few other women living there – and while he has read…
Bermuda Island (2023) Most of Adam Werth’s Bermuda Island may be set in the location of the title, where a planeload of pilots, passengers, flight attendants and FBI personnel has crash-landed in a freak storm en route from the United States to San Juan, Puerto Rico – but the film begins on the mean streets…
“Sometimes people just need solitude, you know,” says Eric Black (Tom Hughes) in writer/director Russell Owen’s Shepherd. Eric is explaining what has drawn him to become sole resident – apart from his dog Baxter and hundreds of sheep – on a remote coast island. His addressee, the gruff, half-sighted boat woman Fisher (Kate Dickie) who…
A Pure Place screens at Grimmfest Easter Edition 2022 A Pure Place begins with a wide shot of Athens, and then shows two young siblings shoplifting for their junkie mother (Chara Mata Giannatou), who waits for them on a littered beach. This is an impure world, where even the innocence of childhood is tainted. The…
OffSeason first published by Movies On Weekends Aside from an attention-grabbing prologue and the occasional flashback, OffSeason is set entirely on the coastal island of Lone Palm just as the last summer tourists leave. The key word here is ‘off’ – for although this is a pleasure resort whose blue-skied beaches are for half the…
Mothra first published by Little White Lies, as the 116th entry in my Cinema Psychotronicum column In 1954, director Ishiro Honda released his black-and-white Godzilla, which was to be Japan’s first kaiju, or ‘monster’, film. Unleashed from the ocean floor by nuclear testing in the Pacific, this gigantic radiation-breathing lizard would become an embodiment of…
Brain Freeze has its international première at FrightFest 2021 “Another win for Biotech M,” says a masked man in a team of similar men, all got out in hazmat suits, as they spray a green chemical over a snowy field at night, in what is the opening scene – and line – of Brain Freeze,…
6:45 begins (and indeed ends) with close, loving sex. Bobby Peterson (Michael Reed) and his girlfriend Jules Rable (Augie Duke) adopt a variety of positions in bed together, directly engaging with each other through the contact of their bodies and adoring eyes, to their clear mutual satisfaction. Low lit and idealised, this union seems to…
Limbo begins with a smile, and with a cautionary tale about the mixed signals that a smile can send. Its first image is a large, crudely chalked smiley-face on a blackboard, as Helga (Sidse Babett Knudsen) and Boris (Kenneth Collard) rôle-play a scenario in which a man on the dance floor misconstrues a woman’s smile…
Apostle first published by VODzilla.co Welsh writer/director Gareth Evans found improbable success with his Indonesia-set film Merantau (2009), which drew international attention to local martial art pencak silat, and introduced the world to its extraordinary exponent Iko Uwais. Uwais would go on to star in Evans’ two best known titles, the intense Indonesian action thrillers…
Arachnid first published by VODzilla.co “I basically did it for the money and it was a stupid script … I got to live in Barcelona for six months and, you know, they paid me well. Everything was good except I had to go to work everyday and shoot a dumb script.” In 2012, this is what…