Steadily emerging as one of the most interesting contemporary filmmakers, Alex Garland, who intrigued and unnerved us with his AI thriller Ex Machina, brings us his creepiest film yet, the oddball horror misogyny parable, Men. As anyone who has seen the evil, shiny, puppet-like face in the promo will realise, there’s something decidedly sinister at work in this film. Here,
Read moreIranian director Asghar Farhadi is one of the great auteurs of contemporary cinema. His distinctly low-key humanist dramas immerse us in the minutiae of Iranian people’s lives and through their stories he subtly but powerfully explores aspects of Iranian society, culture and politics. His latest film, the Cannes Film Festival Grand Prix winner, A Hero, is no different and has
Read moreJurassic Park was one of the event films of the 1990s and a movie many would recall as fondly as ET or Star Wars. Based on the excellent Michael Crichton novel, the film combined revelatory photorealistic dinosaur special effects with a mostly exciting, if at times, cheesy adventure story built around revolutionary science and technology concepts. Although not as rigorously
Read moreArriving on our cinema screens a mere 36 years after the original film, Top Gun: Maverick is part action movie, part military propaganda and part romance but more than anything it’s a wilful exercise in Gen X nostalgia mining. With flashbacks to the original film, scenes almost reproduced from that film, a soundtrack with some of the same songs and
Read moreThe new Australian film The Drover’s Wife: The Legend of Molly Johnson is very loosely based on a Henry Lawson short story from 1892. Those seeing this film with a vague recollection of the original story, who may be expecting a quaint Australian folktale, are in for a shock… but a necessary one. This revisionist Australian western, which explores issues
Read moreThere’s something about the perceived pristine idyll of Scandinavian society that makes horror films from that part of the world all the more creepy; just have a look at Ari Aster’s Midsomer. Another addition to that subgenre is Finnish body horror film Hatching. This menacing slow burn film plays on childhood concerns about pleasing demanding parents and young female anxieties
Read more