Short Reviews

Demons 2

I recently picked up Arrow Video’s double pack of Lamberto Bava’s Demons, which also included the sequel. I had not seen either film before, but this second entry seemed to… Read More
Chinatown

One of my all-time favourite films, this was my first chance to see Roman Polanski’s gorgeously realized retro noir on the big screen. Jack Nicholson was right at the height… Read More
Deadly Blessing

Early horror offering from Wes Craven, that arrives after his grungy and controversial thrillers, like The Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes but before he found… Read More
Antiviral

Brandon Cronenberg follows his father’s path into the gruey world of body horror with this assured satire on celebrity culture. Read More
Rashomon

My favourite Kurosawa film, and quite possibly my favourite Asian film of all-time, this masterful morality play changed the language of cinema forever. Its revelation that narrators, performances, even the… Read More
The Great Gatsby

Baz Luhrmann takes an enthusiastic swing at F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic of American literature, and while he never holds back on his trademark aesthetic of excess – even going so… Read More
Upstream Color

Shane Carruth follows up Primer with this confounding, beautiful and endlessly intriguing examination of memory, identity and relationships. Read More
Therese Desqueyroux

Incredibly tedious and frustrating period drama from the late Claude Miller, in which Audrey Tautou plays the titular heroine, who is married off to a local landowner only to find… Read More
King of New York

Just revisited Abel Ferrara’s crime epic for the first time in over a decade – and it’s still brilliant. Read More
Demons

Lamberto Bava directs this ridiculous 80s giallo splatterfest, from a script co-written with Dario Argento. Two college girls in Berlin accept an invitation to a mysterious film screening, only for… Read More
Ivan’s Childhood

Andrei Tarkovsky’s debut feature is on the one hand a fantastical escape from the horrors of war, but on the other a bleak, nightmarish vision of a young orphan faced… Read More
KanZeOn

Strange yet intoxicating musical documentary that explores a variety of traditional and alternative forms of Japanese music. A turntable-spinning priest and eccentric lady who attempts to harness all the sounds… Read More
L’Avventura

I jumped at the chance to finally strike what is arguably Antonioni’s most famous film off my List of Shame, only to find the 2.5hr experience incredibly tedious. Sure, the… Read More
Star Trek Into Darkness

Having never been much of a Star Trek fan, and emotionally underwhelmed by the 2009 re-boot, I had zero expectations from J.J. Abrams’ second outing with the crew of the… Read More
The Game

David Fincher’s attack on the 1% proves just as poignant, prescient and thrilling today as it was when it was first released, to much disappointment, back in 1997. Michael Douglas… Read More
White Zombie

Bela Lugosi stars as a mysterious slave master in Haiti, whose penetrating gaze seems enough to bring the dead back to life to serve his bidding as shuffling zombies. Many… Read More
The Berlin File

I had heard decidedly mixed things about Ryu Seung-wan’s latest Korean action thriller, so was pleasantly surprised by this neo-Cold War tale of duplicitous North and South Korean agents working… Read More
Iron Man 3

Venturing across the border I sought out the China version of Marvel’s Iron Man 3, complete with added Wang Quexi and Fan Bingbing. Was it worth it? Not at all. Read More