Gary Collinson examines the silent film career of Alfred Hitchcock… “In many of the films now being made, there is very little cinema: they are mostly what I call ‘photographs of people talking’. When we tell a story in the cinema, we should resort to dialogue only when it’s impossible to do otherwise.” – Alfred […]
2019 in Review: Revisiting cinema’s biggest releases, news and talking points
Tom Jolliffe looks back at 2019 in film… Whilst we all come to terms with deleting and retyping 19 as 20 on documents, letters, invoices etc, lets make time to look back at 2019 and further confuse matters. As a year of cinema, 2019 has been interesting and with a usual mix of pop culture […]
Countdown to No Time To Die: The Daniel Craig Bond Era
Chris Gelderd counts down to No Time To Die by revisiting the Daniel Craig Bond era… A Royal Naval Reserve Commander, operating as an officer within the Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6 as it’s commonly known. Named after an American ornithologist with an apparently “boring name” fit for a person who was created as a […]
Star Trek – The Essential Picard: Encounter at Farpoint
Ricky Church revisits the essential Jean-Luc Picard episodes as we count down to the premiere of Star Trek: Picard… As we ready ourselves for Patrick Stewart’s return as Jean-Luc Picard in the upcoming Star Trek: Picard, the latest television series in the Star Trek franchise, we’ll be discussing the most essential episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation that focuses […]
It’s Chinatown Jake: The Joys of the Unhappy Ending
Tom Jolliffe looks at the unhappy ending, and why they often have a more lasting impact (spoilers abound!)… Cinema has the power to move us. It can be an escape. The overriding formula has historically involved a happy resolution, because lets face it, after journeying through the crisis that the protagonist finds himself in, it […]
Extreme Cinema – Salò
Salò, 1975. Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. Starring Paolo Bonacelli, Giorgio Cataldi, Umberto P. Quintavalle and Aldo Valletti. Pier Paolo Pasolini’s final film Salò (Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma, 1975) is based on the Marquis de Sade’s novel 120 Days of Sodom. Instead of France, the story is set in the republic of […]
Revisiting 80’s Fantasy Films: The sublime, the ridiculous and the underrated
Tom Jolliffe takes a jaunt back to the 80’s to see how some of the decade’s biggest fantasy films have aged… Growing up as a young sprog in the 80’s I was treated to all manner of eye-catching fantasy films. A lot of these ‘kids’ films were completely savaged by critics at the time. I […]
Extreme Cinema – Irreversible
Irreversible, 2002. Directed by Gaspar Noé. Starring Monica Bellucci, Vincent Cassel, and Albert Dupontel. Irreversible (2002) features strong language, sex, violence and sexual violence in its tale of a woman raped in a subway and whose boyfriend and ex-lover seek a bloody revenge on her attacker. When shown at the Cannes Film Festival, the graphic […]
The True Story Behind The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It
Jo Craig on the true story behind The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It… Adrenaline is currently racing for The Conjuring franchise, following the reveal of the official title and plot synopsis for The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It, which confirmed initial whispers of the new film depicting the first demonic possession […]
There’s just one blockbuster to get excited for in 2020: The year of Tenet
Tom Jolliffe looks ahead to Tenet, and why it stands head and shoulders over every other tentpole release in 2020… With the Disney machine making record money this year even before they’d fired out Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker to a public who seemed to go with a half-hearted, sleepwalking obligation over a fiery […]