Kill Bill: Volume 1 first published by Movie Gazette, 13 Oct 2003 With only three feature films to his name – Reservoir Dogs (1992), Pulp Fiction (1994) and Jackie Brown (1997) – Quentin Tarantino has a peculiar status. On the one hand he is the most influential director of the 1990s, whose postmodern resuscitation of…
Bolt first published by Film4 Summary: Disney’s latest 3D animation is a comic odyssey, tracing three pets’ journey through delusion towards some essential home truths. Review: “That is totally unrealistic!” It is a reasonable enough assessment of the events in Byron Howard and Chris Williams’ Bolt – and when the line comes from a talking hamster named…
#AMFAD: All My Friends Are Dead had its world première at Tribeca 2024, 8 June, and will be released in select theatres, on demand and on digital from 2 August. Like Sarah Pirozek’s #Like (2019), Cho Il Hyung’s #Alive (#Saraitda, 2020) and Travis Bible’s #chadgetstheaxe (2023), the title of Marcus Dunstan’s feature comes with its…
JCVD first published by musicOMH, 30 Jan 2009 This truly is a postmodern age. Everyone got their 15 minutes of fame in the body of John Malkovich (played gamely by himself) in Being John Malkovich (1999). A woman (played by Julia Roberts) managed to blag her way into a luxury hotel owing to her resemblance…
The Atrocity Exhibition first published by Little White Lies, as entry 160 in my Cinema Psychotronicum colimn In 1970, J.G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition was first published by Jonathan Cape in the UK. This anti-novel has had a complicated publication history: all 15 of the (linked) stories that make up its chapters had already been…
The Dead Next Door first published by Little White Lies as part of my Cinema Psychotronicum column Horror may have hit the doldrums in the early Nineties, but its resurrection came in the postmodern movement which was spearheaded by Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994) and Scream (1996) and then run into the ground by a whole…
The Last Horror Film first published by Little White Lies, as the fifth part of my Cinema Psychotronicum column “I’d like to point out that for the first time in the entire history of the Cannes Film Festival, this prize is awarded to an actress playing in a horror movie.” It is 1981, but these words…
Most Likely To Die first published by TheHorrorShow “I’m over it, it’s in the past,” declares Gaby (Heather Morris), as Brad (Ryan Doom), her one-time school boyfriend turned TV star, tries to apologise for the circumstances in which he left her so many years ago. Her words may well resonate with the way that viewers feel…
The Human Centipede 3 (Final Sequence) first published by Sight & Sound, August 2015 Review: It all started with a sado-surrealist idea, and a man crazy enough to execute it to its bitter end. After joking with friends that the best way to punish a child molester was to stitch his mouth to the anus of…
Little White Lies #56 (Nov/Dec 2014) was presented as though it had been written and published exactly two decades earlier. Here (in slightly lengthened form) is my contribution to that issue. Before the new, the old. It’s not always appropriate to include a history lesson in a contemporary review, but Wes Craven’s New Nightmare comes…
“I’m going to reinvent the entire production and cover it with a postmodern face.” So says Artie Getz (Brandon Uranowitz), a pretentious director of musical theatre brought into Center Stage Camp to get their latest production noticed by Broadway before the camp’s manager Roger McCall (Meat Loaf) is overtaken by debt. What Artie has in…