Monkey’s Magic Merry Go Round screened at Imagine Fantastic Film Festival, 31 Oct 2025 Buried in the title of Aidan Leary’s debut feature Monkey’s Magic Merry Go Round is the nostalgia of children’s television shows from the Sixties and Seventies like The Magic Roundabout and Monkey (whose theme song included the repeated lyric ‘Monkey magic’)….
An Taibhse (The Ghost) had its international première at FrightFest 2024, 24 August; first published by SciFiNow “What if Alexander follows me here?”, says young Máire Finegan (Livvy Hill) to her father Éamon (Tom Kerrisk) as they travel through darkness on a coach, their faces illuminated by the candle lanterns they are holding. This opening…
The Lonely Man with the Ghost Machine had its world première at Make Believe Seattle 2024 The Lonely Man with the Ghost Machine offers a scenario that is post-apocalyptic twice over. For it opens, five years after an alien invasion known only as The Calamity, when one of the only remaining survivors, Wozzek (Graham Skipper,…
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…
Nomi (Angela Way) has some dark feelings, even if she may be concealing them on her holiday in an isolated family property with friends. She still feels devastatingly sad about her mum and dad’s recent divorce, feels guilty that she is spending Christmas away from them, and feels bitter that she has had to pick…
Woodshock first published by VODzilla.co “Remember when we used to play in the woods together. I got lost that one summer. When I turned around, you were gone. When they found me, I almost didn’t want to come back.” These words which introduce Woodshock – accompanied by abstract images of Theresa (Kirsten Dunst) alone among…
Escape From Tomorrow first published by VODzilla.co Randy Moore’s feature debut opens with a textual disclaimer insisting that it is a work of fiction, and denying any involvement in its production from either the Disney Company, the Siemens Corporation, or any of their affiliates. This might seem a strange way to begin a monochrome film…
Like his feature debut The God Inside My Ear (2017), director/producer Joe Badon’s Sister Tempest (which Badon also co-wrote and co-scored with Jason Kruppa) is a delirious psychodrama in which a woman’s trauma-tinged descent into madness and self-knowledge plays out like multiple overlapping movies in different genres. “I, Anne Hutchinson, hereby promise you that I…
Review first published by TwitchFilm In British bingo, if the number 88 comes up, the caller will shout, “Two fat ladies!”, as a conventional code for the two figures’ pictographic appearance. Similarly the title of April Mullen’s 88 represents a conundrum in need of decoding: the numeral itself recurs in different contexts throughout the film (whether as…
Review first published by FilmLand Empire “You keep thinking like that, these streets will eat you up. You’ve got to change your negativity. What I’m saying to you, dude: it’s the way you look at shit. I mean, change your perception, and you change the world.” The speaker is one of several ‘invisible’ homeless characters…
Enemy first published by FilmLand Empire “Chaos is order yet undeciphered” reads text near the beginning of Denis Villeneuve’s Enemy, proclaiming the film’s status as a thorny puzzle in need of careful decoding. Enemy may be adapted from José Saramago’s 2002 novel The Double, but it is equally haunted by the spirits of Hegel, Lynch…