Night Sky first published by SciFiNow. Near the end of Night Sky, someone will menacingly promise protagonist Oren (AJ Bowen) “a long excruciating couple of agonisingly painful hours while you – you helplessly wait to bleed out,” adding, “a sensation with which I think you’re pretty familiar.” Indeed, when we first meet Oren in the…
Next Exit first published by SciFiNow The road movie is, famously, a metaphor for life. Where the journey starts and ends is arbitrary, but as our travellers have strange encounters with passers-by, take various unexpected detours, and look back over what they are leaving behind even as they move on to territories new, what really…
Hékate UK première at Sohome Horror Pride Virtual Film Festival Hecate is an ancient Greek goddess typically depicted – sometimes in triple form – with dogs, keys and torches, and associated with crossroads, witchcraft, poisons, night and the moon. Although this feminine deity is never mentioned in Nadia Benedicto’s Hékate beyond its title, her presence…
Coming Home In The Dark has its Canadian première on demand at Fantasia 2021 Middle-class, middle-aged couple Alan (Erik Thomson) and Jill (Miriama McDowell) are hiking through a remote coastal area of New Zealand on a family day out. As their constantly bickering twin teenage sons Maika (Billy Paratene) and Jordan (Frankie Paratene) walk some…
Two-Lane Blacktop first published by Little White Lies “Just passin’ through,” is how they describe themselves, their existence, and their general trajectory. In a customised 1955 Chevrolet as stripped-down, well-tooled and finely tuned as Monte Hellman’s film, two taciturn, plain-dressed, anonymous young men – dubbed The Driver and The Mechanic in the closing credits, and…
68 Kill first published by SciFiNow Adapted from Bryan Smith’s 2013 novel of the same name, Trent Haaga’s 68 Kill opens with the image of a fly trapped in honey, followed by the sight of Chip (Matthew Gray Gubler) transfixed with adoration as he watches his girlfriend Liza (AnnaLynne McCord) sleeping by his side. The suggestion…
Every so often a film comes along that knows exactly what it is, but proves adept at throwing viewers off the scent. White Coffin (or Ataúd Blanco: El Juego Diabólico) is just such a film, gleefully steering us down familiar-seeming roads, before taking every twisted dirt path and circuitous detour it can find, so that…
He may sport a quiff that would be the envy of the Leningrad Cowboys, and be drifting through a law degree with all the fey shiftlessness of a slacker hero, but when we first meet him, Takemura (Odagiri Jo) is obviously down on his luck – not least because he is having another man’s sock…
Review of Week-end I wrote æons ago for Movie Gazette – in fact so ancient, it’s back when I was still using the unconscionable p-word… After his extraordinary directorial debut in 1960 with Breathless (À Bout de Souffle), film critic Jean-Luc Godard became one of the leading figures of the French New Wave movement, reinventing the rules of…
Repo Man first published by Little White Lies Alex Cox is famous, amongst other things, for his love of westerns – and so it seems apt that his debut feature should open with a lone traveler heading west, humming “Oh My Darling Clementine” to himself. Yet J Frank Parnell (Fox Harris) is a mad nuclear scientist driving…
Review first published by EyeforFilm “It’s just somewhere where the three of us have been going for years,” explains cocksure Craig (Bob Morley) to his new girlfriend Nina (Sophie Lowe). He is out camping with his best friend Marcus (Xavier Samuel) and Marcus’ long-time girlfriend Liz (Georgina Haig) in the South Australian outback “in the…