By 1989, the Halloween franchise was already showing the strain of diminishing returns. John Carpenter's 1978 original had essentially invented the template for the American slasher film, and I wrote about it at length in my review of Halloween. The sequels that followed were always going to be
By 1988, the Halloween franchise was at something of a crossroads. John Carpenter's original 1978 film had more or less invented the grammar of the American slasher (I covered it in my review of Halloween), and Halloween II had followed its template closely enough to satisfy audiences without
Of all the films I saw around this year's festival season, few moved me as deeply as Apart, Stelana Kliris's beautiful, tragic drama of a young Cypriot woman married off to a stranger in apartheid South Africa in 1974, leaving one divided country for another. I
Every so often a film arrives that reminds me why I do this, and Apart is one of them. Stelana Kliris's drama, which I caught ahead of its world premiere at Tallinn Black Nights, is a beautiful, touching and ultimately tragic piece of work, and I was completely
Manchester in the mid-to-late 1970s was, by almost any conventional measure, a city on the slide: industrial decline, high unemployment, and a civic mood that had soured well before punk gave young people a reason to make noise about it. What grew out of that particular soil, however,
Based on the manga series by Hiromi Takashima, which began serialisation in 2013, Kase-san and Morning Glories is a short-form anime OVA (original video animation) released in 2018 by studio ZEXCS. At just 58 minutes, it sits somewhere between a feature film and an extended episode, a format
There is a particular tradition in British genre filmmaking, modest in budget, unpretentious in ambition, built on a solid premise and a willingness to commit to the bit. Outpost (2008) sits squarely in that tradition. Directed by Steve Barker from a screenplay by Rae Brunton, the film plants a squad
By 1998, the Lethal Weapon franchise had become one of the defining pillars of Hollywood blockbuster action, a series that had, over the course of a decade, moved from a surprisingly raw buddy-cop thriller into something closer to a crowd-pleasing institution. The original 1987 film, Lethal Weapon, established
Vital, Amir Zargara's sombre and unflinching short, is the kind of film I can call excellent and genuinely mean I never want to watch again. It is a hard, heartbreaking and important piece of work that takes on one of the grimmest realities of global inequality, and while
Let me be clear from the outset about what this half-star is for, and what it is not. Safe Zone, Ahmad Alameldeen's nine-minute animated short, tells the story of a desperate girl in a besieged city who slips free of her mother to reach a stray
Magan's Fare, the short from Christopher Knoblock and Dana White, is exactly the kind of film that lives or dies by its two central performances, and happily, it soars. It is a warm, humane and quietly affecting piece of work with real heart and a point worth making,
Getar Hero, Teddy Stern's lyrical urban Western, is a short with a terrific hook and a real sense of style, even if the story it hangs on them never quite tightens into something gripping. I admired its craft more than I was gripped by its tale, but there
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