Silent Hill first published by Film4, 23 April, 2006 Against the wishes of her husband Christopher (Sean Bean), Rose DaSilva (Radha Mitchell) takes her disturbed daughter Sharon (Jodelle Ferland) to Silent Hill, an abandoned mining town whose name Sharon keeps reciting in her sleep. After a freak accident on the way, Rose wakes up alone…
The Crazies first published by EyeforFilm, 26 Feb 2010 In George A. Romero’s original The Crazies (1973), the insanity of post-Sixties America – where soldiers were firing live rounds at unarmed students and the spectacle of flaming corpses and chemical warfare in Vietnam was playing out nightly on the TV news – was contained within…
Run Hide Fight first published by VODzilla.co (in a slightly truncated version) Perhaps cinema’s first school shooting depicted was in Lindsay Anderson’s if…. (1968), whose antihero (Malcolm McDowell, in his on-screen debut) opens fire on fellow pupils, teachers, parents and visiting members of the establishment in a recalcitrant assault upon society’s stuffy status quo. On April 20, 1999, the horror of…
Pitch Black first published by Through The Trees “They say most of your brain shuts down in cryo-sleep. All but the primitive side, the animal side. No wonder I’m still awake.” So says Richard B. Riddick (Vin Diesel), a native of the planet Furya, at the beginning of David Twohy’s Pitch Black, even as we…
First published in Sight & Sound, July 2016 Review: “1, 2, 3. 1, 2, 3.” Michael Taylor (David Mazouz) likes to count. Fearless, not always communicative, and blessed (or cursed) with an ill-defined ability to ‘see different’, this autistic boy, with his unusual, often demanding behaviours, dominates and occasionally disrupts the workings of the Taylor…
In the middle of World Cup frenzy, two films will become available for home release that are being cannily marketed as an antidote to football. Both are written and directed by women, and blithely unconcerned with the macho mechanics of the beautiful game. Near the beginning of Jessie McCormack’s Expecting (2013), Lizzie (Radha Mitchell) and…