The Tales from the Crypt brand had built up considerable goodwill by the time Demon Knight arrived in cinemas in January 1995. The HBO anthology series, which ran from 1989 to 1996, had made the latex-faced Cryptkeeper a recognisable figure in popular culture, and the blend of ghoulish humour
Rocks arrived in 2019 as one of the more quietly assured British films of that year, opening at the Toronto International Film Festival before a theatrical release that earned it six BAFTA nominations, including Outstanding British Film. It is the kind of film that slips out without fanfare and then
Short films occupy a strange position in the wider film conversation. They rarely get the critical attention they deserve, tend to live and die on the festival circuit, and most audiences only stumble across them by accident or word of mouth. When one lands, though, and lands with a clear
Bram Stoker's Dracula arrived in cinemas in November 1992 carrying the full weight of its source material and its director's reputation simultaneously. Bram Stoker's 1897 novel had already generated dozens of screen adaptations by that point, from F.W. Murnau's unofficial and
Ryan Fleck's Half Nelson arrived in 2006 as one of those small, scrappy American independent films that somehow punches well above its weight in the conversation it provokes. Shot on a modest budget by a collection of production companies including Hunting Lane Films and Original Media, it was
Set in the fractured political landscape of ninth-century Tang dynasty China, The Assassin arrives from Taiwanese auteur Hou Hsiao-hsien as something of a career left turn: a wuxia film from a director whose reputation rests almost entirely on quiet, rigorously observed dramas of everyday Taiwanese life. The film
There is a telling moment in the production history of Porco Rosso that says a great deal about the film's particular flavour: Hayao Miyazaki has described it as a film for tired, middle-aged men. Not a ringing commercial pitch, perhaps, but an honest one. Released in Japan
I am a sucker for a good road trip movie, I really am, so I went into Ramzi Bashour's Hot Water at the BFI London Film Festival hoping to be swept along. It has a lovely premise and a genuinely winning supporting turn, but in the end it
No Good Men, Shahrbanoo Sadat's Kabul-set romance, is the kind of film I can see clearly for what it is, nod along to, and still walk away from feeling a little underwhelmed. I caught it at the BFI London Film Festival, and while there is plenty to
Elvis Presley needs no introduction, and yet somehow every generation finds its own way back to him. He arrived in the mid-1950s as something genuinely unprecedented: a white Southern boy absorbing Black American musical traditions and transmitting them back through a physicality and charisma that television barely knew how
How on earth do you tackle a film like Dao. Alain Gomis's sprawling, searching family epic is the sort of thing that resists a tidy write-up, and I caught it at the BFI London Film Festival knowing roughly nothing about where it was going to take me.
There is a particular strain of British crime film that emerged at the turn of the 1970s, one that wanted nothing to do with the Swinging Sixties gloss that had preceded it. Where films like Goldfinger had offered a fantasy Britain of tailored suits and supervillain lairs, the mood had
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