Rating: 3.5★
Young-adult dystopian fiction had, by 2014, become something of a reliable industrial pipeline in Hollywood. Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games series had demonstrated the commercial logic clearly enough, and studios were busy optioning every last vaguely post-apocalyptic teen novel on the shelves. James Dashner's 2009 novel
Rating: 3.5★
By 1945, Ealing Studios had built its reputation on wartime dramas and the kind of sturdy, socially minded pictures that felt entirely in keeping with the national mood. Horror was not really in the playbook. What makes Dead of Night so historically curious is that it arrived as an anomaly,
Rating: 3.5★
Wes Anderson's seventh feature, The Darjeeling Limited, arrived in 2007 off the back of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, a film that had divided audiences and critics alike, and it carried with it a sense of the director needing to reassert himself without quite reinventing the wheel.
Rating: 3.5★
They Cloned Tyrone arrived on Netflix in the summer of 2023 trailing the kind of word-of-mouth that tends to build quietly before suddenly becoming unavoidable. Produced by MACRO and Made With Love Media, it is a genre-blending science fiction comedy mystery that plants itself firmly in a
Rating: 3.5★
The zombie comedy, or zom-com if you prefer the shorthand, has been a recognisable genre hybrid since at least the early 2000s, and by 2015 the form had settled into something approaching a comfortable formula: self-aware humour, a group of unlikely survivors, and a careful calibration of laughs
Rating: 3.5★
Lynne Ramsay has never been a director interested in comfort. From the suffocating council-estate grief of Ratcatcher (1999) to the cold, forensic dread of We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011), she has spent her career making films that sit in the chest like a stone. You Were Never
Rating: 3.5★
There is a particular kind of Greek cinema that exists almost entirely outside the mainstream, and Dogtooth (or Kynodontas, in its original Greek) sits right at the centre of that tradition. Released in 2009 and co-produced by the Greek Film Centre alongside Boo Productions and Horsefly Productions, the film
Rating: 3.5★
Few films in the history of British cinema arrived with quite as much expectation and logistical weight as Doctor Zhivago. Based on Boris Pasternak's Nobel Prize-winning novel, published in the West in 1957 after the Soviet authorities suppressed it at home, the source material already carried enormous
Rating: 3.5★
By the turn of the millennium, Wes Anderson had already established himself as one of American independent cinema's more distinctive voices, first with Bottle Rocket (1996) and then with the cult-beloved Rushmore (1998). With The Royal Tenenbaums, he stepped up in scale and ambition, moving from the
Rating: 3.5★
By 1990, Philip K. Dick had already become one of Hollywood's more reliably plundered source authors, with Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982) having set a high bar for adapting his paranoid, reality-questioning fiction. Total Recall draws from Dick's 1966 short story "We
Rating: 3.5★
There are films that arrive as entertainment and quietly become documents. Quadrophenia, released in 1979 and directed by Franc Roddam, is one of those. Set against the mods-and-rockers clashes of Brighton in 1964, it follows Jimmy, a young London working-class teenager who spends his weekdays enduring a
Rating: 3.5★
Nineteen seventy-two was a remarkable year for independent American cinema, and nowhere was that more visible than in the cycle of Black-led films that had begun to find distribution outside the traditional studio system. Blaxploitation was at its commercial peak, with studios eager to profit from a new
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