Fresh Meat world première at FrightFest, 29th and 31st August 2026 June Nolan (Joelle Farrow) and her friends Valerie (Hannah Galway) and Brett (Alex Sands) record their explorations of abandoned spaces, and then post the finished pieces on their vlog Abandoned with June. They are diligent, good-natured and safety-conscious – which is to say unsuccessful…
Jailbroken had its world première at FrightFest for Glasgow Film Festival, 5 March 2026 Muscle-bound, tattooed hard man Joe (Bryan Larkin, in riveting form) may be just days away from the end of a five-year stint in prison, but he is hardly reformed. For he is already making arrangements over his illicit mobile phone (one…
The Watched (aka The Watchers) first published by SciFiNow, 10 June 2024 No matter whether you are seeing it under its US title The Watchers (which was the original title of A.M. Shine’s 2021 source novel), or its UK title The Watched, it is clear even before its very first frame that writer/director Ishana Night…
Dante 01 first published by Film4 The directorial coupling of Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet on the mannered dystopian fantasies Delicatessen (1991) and The City of Lost Children (1995) was also a pairing of the deeply dark and the wilfully whimsical. When they parted company, it quickly became clear that the whimsy was all Jeunet’s,…
Planet B (Planète B) had its UK première at the Glasgow Film Festival, 5 Mar 2025 Writer/director Aude Léa Rapin’s Planet B (Planète B) may be set in the Grenoble of 2039, but the constituent elements that make up this world of tomorrow – the mainstreaming of authoritarianism, the proliferation of mass surveillance, the wilful…
Farang (aka Mayhem!) first published by SciFiNow ‘Farang’ is the Thai word for ‘Caucasian’, or more generally for ‘foreigner’ – and while Xavier Gens’ film of the same name begins in France, its Algerian protagonist Samir Darba (the extraordinary Nassim Lyes) is already an outsider, even if we first see him on the inside, in…
The Escapist first published, in slightly different form, by musicOMH, 11 April 2008 Frank Perry (Brian Cox) is a man looking to escape. As an aging lifer, he has long accepted the criminality, corruption and constant danger of his prison surroundings as his permanent lot, and has kept his head down – but now all…
Alive first published by Film4 Summary: In Ryuhei Kitamura’s dystopian prison sci-fi, it is not just the humans who are trapped inside and looking to get out. Review: If Ryuhei Kitamura exploded into the world of cult cinema with his low-budget feature debut Versus (2000), a moviegeek’s wet dream of yakuza gunplay, samurai set-pieces and zombie gore,…
Bronson first published by Little White Lies, 20th Feb 2009 “You’re a very sweet man, Charlie,” says Irene (Kelly Adams), “but you’ve got no ambition.” It is hard to know whether to agree or disagree with Irene’s assertions. Charlie (Tom Hardy) may be blessed with a roguish grin and a charismatic naïveté, but he is…
No Man Of God first published by VODzilla.co No Man Of God begins at its end, in 1989, with a TV news report stating that “after an exhausting series of appeals that lasted ten years, Ted Bundy is dead” – executed in the electric chair at the Florida State Prison. In this way, Amber Sealey’s…
No Looking Back (Otorvi i vybros) had its North America première at SXSW 2022 The intent of Kirill Sokolov‘s arresting feature debut Why Don’t You Just Die! (2018) was carefully laid out in its original Russian title, Papa, sdokhni (literally ‘Daddy, die’). For this was to to be a direct assault on the patriarchy, as…