Review

By Sebastian Clare. Frank has had enough. Divorced and living alone, he fantasises about killing his incessantly loud and obnoxious next-door neighbours and observes, through his television set, the increasing decadence of American culture. In the space of no time, he is fired from his job on a trumped-up harassment […]

By Celluloid Liberation Front. As part of its ‘Out of the Past’ sidebar section, the 47th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival has presented a digitally restored copy of Nová Vlna milestone The Firemen’s Ball by Milos Forman. Restored classics often come with an intimidating dose of self-importance and grandeur; Milos […]

By Jacob Mertens. Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) sparked a series of inferior sequels, in no small part because the films failed to grasp what made Alien great: elegant simplicity. Alien crafted a lean build up of tension and fear, and while the narrative allowed a few twists and turns the […]

Book Review by Yvette Lim. We have all heard scathing and cruel remarks about transgendered bodies; they are often cast in tragicomic roles in films that end with these queer bodies marginalized or destroyed, restoring power and order to the heteronormative and the patriarchal. The well-known Thai movies Iron Ladies […]

By Christopher Sharrett. I have just re-screened on disc Nima Nourizadeh’s Project X (2012), which I saw in a nearby multiplex this past season. I wanted to see it again not because I feared I missed something in the plot (there is hardly any of this, nor characterization, nor any […]

By Sebastian Clare. Better known as the musician responsible for the critically-acclaimed UK Chart-topping album The Defamation of Strickland Banks, Ben Drew a.k.a. Plan B attempts to bring his creative talent to another medium with an ambitious cinematic debut, Ill Manors. A gritty, unrelenting look at the social underbelly of […]

By Carolyn Lake. While comedy is an inevitable feature of a film loosely based on the invention of the electronic vibrator, Tanya Wexler’s Hysteria comes off as surprisingly light despite its fascinating historical subject matter. Hugh Dancy stars as Mortimer Granville, a progressive doctor living in Victorian London during the […]

By Sebastian Clare. Thirty-three years after his tense, atmospheric sci-fi horror kick-started one of film’s most successful franchises, Ridley Scott returns to the Alien saga with Prometheus, a prequel that seeks to provide some answers, not only to the origins of the series antagonists, the Xenomorphs, but to the ultimate […]

By Matthew Sorrento. Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder (1959), in its title alone, makes quite a promise. The most effective of its kind (taken from the best selling source novel by Robert Traver – a.k.a. Judge John D. Voelker – loosely based on a case of his), the title […]

By Janine Gericke. During this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival, I had the opportunity to see Hysteria, Tanya Wexler’s Victorian era comedy about the birth of the vibrator. The film was co-sponsored by the home of San Francisco’s finest vibrators, Good Vibrations. Hysteria gives us a glimpse into the accidental invention of a […]