Don’t Look Up first published by Sight and Sound When Michigan family man and astronomy professor Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio) first realises what is coming, he spends the night checking and rechecking the calculations, and is quick, the following day, to call the White House with the bad news. Mindy’s urgency matches the speed of…
Everybody Dies By The End had its world première at FrightFest 2022 Anyone who has seen Don Coscarelli’s John Dies At The End (2012) or Ryuhei Kitamura’s No One Lives (2012) will know that this kind of title can often come with irony and antiphrasis. So the title of Everybody Dies By The End, though of course containing a truism about human mortality,…
Although already well-established as the director and star of many two-reelers, it was not until 1923 that vaudeville comedian Buster Keaton got to write, direct, produce and star in his first feature film, Three Ages – which, to placate a studio nervous about entrusting a long-form project to a man whose directorial track record did…
In Radu Jude‘s Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (Babardeala cu bucluc sau porno balamuc), the titular ‘banging’ and ‘porn’ come front-loaded, if heavily qualified. For the film opens cold in the middle of an amateurish if energetic POV sex tape in the making, as a woman in a pink wig engages in a range…
She Dies Tomorrow first published by Sight & Sound, October 2020 Review: Amy has a death fixation. Not just the character Amy (Kate Lyn Sheil) who has suddenly been filled with the absolute, unwavering certainty that she is going to meet her end the following day, and who is as close to a heroine as…
There is a temptation, when it comes to Richard Bates Jr, to subscribe to the otherwise flawed notion of nominative determinism. After all, much as his full title literally signifies his juniority and his status as the latest in line to have inherited the family name, so too all his features – Excision (2012), Suburban…
I Blame Society enjoyed its World Première Tues 28 January 2020 at the Rotterdam Film Festival Meet Gillian – an unfulfilled amateur filmmaker in LA. She has an MA but is unemployed, and the slew of ‘disturbing’ short films to her name have so far not helped her move on to anything bigger. When her…
Heathers first published by Movie Gazette Smart teenager Veronica Sawyer (Winona Ryder) has problems, which she obsessively chronicles in her diary. At high school she has become an honorary member of a bitchy clique whose three other members are all called Heather (Shannen Doherty, Lisanne Falk, Kim Walker), and she is attracted to their popularity…
The Caiman first published by Film4 Summary: In his first film since 2001’s The Son’s Room, Nanni Moretti snaps his satirical teeth at film, politics, family – and Silvio Berlusconi. Review: Bruno Bonomo (Silvio Orlando), a neurotic producer with a string of schlocky ‘fascist’ films from the Seventies to his name, is now struggling to stay afloat….
Frankenstein’s Army first published by Grolsch FilmWorks “Everybody’s sick. The Nazis! The Communists! Capitalists! Everyone. The sickness cannot be cured, so it must be cut out.” The speaker is Dr Viktor Frankenstein (Karel Roden), explaining his solo surgical strike against all sides in the Second World War. A German who was interned in the concentration…
Gemini published exclusively for Projected Figures Originally associated with the Noughties mumblecore movement, writer/director Aaron Katz makes films – Dance Party, USA (2006), Quiet City (2007), Cold Weather (2010), Land Ho! (2014) – that, in both their setting and sensibility, could not be further from Hollywood. His latest, however, unfolds in the dark heart of…