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 […]

By Leo Collis. Directed by Academy Award-winning filmmaker Vanessa Roth, American Teacher is a documentary that focuses on the lives of four teachers, as they approach different points in their careers. Going beyond their role as educators, the film looks at how the profession has shaped their personal lives, and […]

By Cleaver Patterson. There were three subjects British cinema excelled at during the heady days of 60’s liberalism – kitchen-sink-drama, Gothic horror and old-fashioned, feel-good humour. If director Tony Richardson’s gritty social treatise A Taste of Honey (1961) and anything produced by Hammer during their mid-decade heyday epitomised the first […]

By Gary M. Kramer. Intensely erotic, and featuring beaucoup nudity, Jean-Marc Barr and Pascal Arnold’s Sexual Chronicles of a French Family wants to talk about–and show–people having sex. The filmmakers delight in presenting the subject both visually and verbally as the characters discuss sex as much as they are seen […]

By Leo Collis. After working in film and television for nearly a decade, Russell Owen steps up to present his debut full-length production, Welcome to the Majority. The film is centred on a post-apocalyptic purgatory, where nine people are forced to face their demons to find a way out. Split […]