Film
Film Review: Max Winslow and the House of Secrets
When it comes to making movies aimed at teenagers, Hollywood doesn’t have the greatest track record. The huge surge in popularity of young adult fiction this century has spawned numerous franchises and successes. However, for every Hunger Games or Love, Simon there are countless Maze Runners or Divergents. Book adaptations are an increasingly dangerous game …
Film Review: Vicious Fun
There is, undoubtedly, a disgraceful lack of diversity within genre cinema. Despite the range of characters who contribute to horror films, the only voices we generally get to hear of those of the victims. What of the perpetrators? Who will stand up for them? The mass murderers and chainsaw wielding lunatics. Who will tell their …
Grimmfest Review: Ten Minutes to Midnight
There’s something about late night radio talk shows which seems to attract the wild animals out there. The lonely, the troubled and those who live around the fringes of life. The creatures of the night seem drawn in like moths to a flame. Both at the end of a radio and behind a microphone. This …
Film Review: I Am Greta
Our climate stands at a tipping point, perched in the most precarious position it has been in since the last ice age. We now live in a truly global world where everything is connected. The decimation of the rain forests and the melting of the ice caps has dire consequences for everyone, wherever you may …
LFF Review: Supernova
Anyone who has experience of a friend or relative suffering from dementia will know what an absolutely horrendous condition it is. It’s an illness which comes in all shapes and sizes but its impact is never less than devastating. Seeing someone you love gradually (or rapidly) fade away is traumatic. As scientific breakthroughs allow us …
LFF Review: Eyimofe (This is My Desire)
To even use the term ‘African cinema’ when describing the diversity and richness of myriad national film industries scattered across a huge continent, is to say the least slightly patronising. However, given the relative lack of exposure we have to it in Europe, it’s easy to slip into lazy generalisations. Whilst it’s a struggle for …
Grimmfest Review: Urubú
If there’s one thing that the political turmoil and polarisation of the last few years have demonstrated it’s that we’re increasingly living in socio-economic bubbles. Surrounding ourselves with likeminded people. Living, working and socialising is these rather homogeneous communities. We might hear news stories or tales of how other people live, but rarely engage, empathise …
LFF Review: Wildfire
Whilst ‘the troubles’ in Northern Ireland might be over (although there are worrying signs that this isn’t the case) it doesn’t mean that those who lived through them can just move on. That’s the natural reaction. Ignore the past and look to the future. It’s something many countries have tried, but refusing to confront our …
Grimmfest Review: Triggered
One of the great joys of watching genre cinema is the amount of films where a bunch of suspiciously model-like and relentlessly annoying ‘teenagers’ come to a succession of bloody and brutal ends. There seems to be an almost infinite number of scenarios you can put a group of friends through before gleefully starting to …
LFF Review: Wolfwalkers
Whilst animation has always been popular with cinema audiences, until recently it was only really Disney films which attracted mainstream attention. With the rise in popularity of Pixar, Studio Ghibli and Dreamworks, it’s a genre which has become commonplace on the big screen. However, it’s often the smaller studios which produce the most innovative and …