Isaac had its world première on Sat 26 Aug in the First Blood Strand at FrightFest Isaac opens with a primal scene. Its first shot moves at ground level through sun-dappled wheat stalks – a Malickian image of homespun, idyllic nostalgia, and of the melancholy that comes with Paradise lost. As though to underscore the…
Earwig (2021) Earwig first published by Sight and Sound, Summer 2022, as was the appended sidebar on other films by Lucile Hadzihalilovic Synopsis: Europe, the mid-1950s. Albert Scellinc ensures that the icy false teeth of his young ward Mia are regularly replaced. This routine is unsettled by instructions to ready Mia for her new home,…
Breathing Happy has its European première at Soho Horror Film Festival 2022 “I’m at one year sober today. I dunno, technically I’m not gonna get it until another hour and 40 minutes, but even I can’t fuck that up, right? I miss you guys. Merry Christmas.” This is the voicemail message that Dylan Bradley leaves…
New Religion had its world première at FrightFest 2022 After a brief impressionistic prologue in which abstract shapes, transforming bodies, fluttering moths and fractal patterns – all red in colour – emerge from the darkness, and a red-filtered cityscape and its inverted image are seen mirroring each other, New Religion opens with a primal scene,…
Tony Takitani first published by Film4 in 2004 Summary: Issei Ogata finds loneliness, love, loss, and then loneliness again, in Jun Ichikawa’s stylish adaptation of a Haruki Murakami short story. Review: In the writings of Haruki Murakami, style is every bit as important as content. The events may be somewhat surreal, the characters eccentric, but the prose…
Woodland Grey screens at Grimmfest Easter 2022 A man heads from his rusty caravan into the rainy night, holding up a hurricane lamp to the shadowy tree-line beyond, from which a four-note lilt is repeatedly whistled by someone – or something – unseen. This opening scene from Woodland Grey – Adam Reider’s feature debut which…
It is 4pm, and Kerrie (Laura Bayston) is closing up for the day at the greasy spoon which was previously run by her father, and before that by his father. This empty, faded establishment is something of a time warp. For it has layers, with old black-and-white pictures and tattered posters alongside newer framed football…
It is no spoiler to say that Agnes ends with two people at a diner quietly and earnestly engaged in an intense theological discussion. In fact, one might even suggest that this latest feature from Mickey Reece, which he co-wrote with John Selvidge, is one long extended religious discourse – albeit not always so quiet…
Anything For Jackson first published by VODzilla.co Satanists come with their own stereotype. The picture that they present in the popular imagination usually goes something like this: young, male, long hair, black leather, listens to heavy metal, incel. What you probably do not picture – unless your internal iconography is dominated by Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s…
When I Consume You had its UK première at Celluloid Screams 2021 Perry Blackshear‘s feature debut They Look Like People (2015) featured two friends, played by Evan Dumouchel and MacLeod Andrews, working together through the demons and delusions of mental illness. So when, some way into Blackshear’s third film When I Consume You, David Castille…
The first word in the title of Ruth Platt’s Martyrs Lane might suggest that the film is going for something extreme like Pascal Laugier’s Martyrs (2008) – but in fact the lane in question is a leafy country road leading from the village church where Thomas (Steven Cree) is the local priest, to the big…