Rating: 3.0★
There are films that tell you a story, and there are films that hit you somewhere you didn't know you were vulnerable. Arthur Jafa's Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death is firmly in the second camp. Seven minutes long and composed entirely of found
Rating: 3.0★
Most time-travel films are essentially flashy, convoluted messes that rely on a massive CGI budget to paper over their narrative plot holes. So when I sat down to watch Shane Carruth's 2004 indie mind-bender, I was bracing myself for something in the vein of The Butterfly
Rating: 3.0★
Grief is one of the hardest things to put on film. Not because emotion resists the camera, but because the temptation to sentimentalise, to over-explain, to reach for easy catharsis, is almost irresistible. Jean-Marie Straub resists all of that in Artemide's Knee, a short film made
Rating: 3.0★
There's something almost perverse about how appealing Pawo Choyning Dorji makes exile look. The premise of Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom sounds, on paper, like a punishment: a young, ambitious teacher yanked away from his city life and dispatched to what is reportedly the most remote school
Rating: 3.0★
There's a distinct, sun-drenched charm to the 16mm aesthetic of 1970s cinema, and Pim de la Parra's 1976 drama One People captures that era's visual texture about as well as anything I've seen from the period. I have a real soft
Rating: 3.0★
There's a particular pleasure in tracking a cultural phenomenon back to its source, and Moonrunners is exactly that kind of discovery. Gy Waldron's 1975 film is the undisputed progenitor of The Dukes of Hazzard, and the DNA is all over it: moonshine runs, dusty Southern backroads,
Rating: 3.0★
There's a very specific, undeniable magic to the moment the needle drops on a classic Trojan Records compilation. That warm crackle, the skank of the rhythm guitar, the brass punching through. Nicolas Jack Davies's 2018 documentary Rudeboy: The Story of Trojan Records captures that exact frequency,
Rating: 3.0★
When a filmmaker grabs you by the collar with one short film, you go looking for more. That's exactly what happened after I saw Garrett Bradley's America, which left such a mark on me that I went straight to Alone, her 2017 short. What I found
Rating: 3.0★
There's something genuinely rare about a horror film that gets under your skin on a rewatch just as much as it did the first time. I came back to Gore Verbinski's 2002 remake of The Ring recently, and I came away reminded of exactly why this
Rating: 3.0★
Here's a confession that probably undermines any claim I have to serious horror credibility: I watched Gore Verbinski's American remake of The Ring years before I ever sat down with Hideo Nakata's original. The remake absolutely terrified me at the time, burrowed deep into
Northern Horror Fest
Tobee Collins made Verena with no filmmaking experience at all. None. He taught himself to write, to shoot, to light, to edit and to score, and then went and did every one of those jobs himself: writer, director, producer, cinematographer, editor and composer. It was his first film, and it
Rating: 3.0★
There are films you admire enormously and films you love, and sometimes those two things refuse to overlap. Phil Tippett's Mad God sits squarely in the first category for me, and I've been wrestling with that ever since the credits rolled. It is, without any doubt
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