Over the past couple of years there has been a growing conversation about representation in film. The Miseducation of Cameron Post isn’t the first coming of age film about an LGBT teen (indeed, it’s enough of a subgenre to have its own established cliches), nor is it the first of...
To kick off this year's London Film Festival coverage, we're trying something new for TLE. In this audio preview, I sat down with lapsed critic, fellow film fanatic and my friend Timothy E Raw. We went through the programme and picked one film each from every section to discuss (and...
For my money, one of the major new cinematic talents discovered in recent years was not an actor, a director or a screenwriter but 37-year-old cinematographer Lukasz Zal, who was camera operator on Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida. Zal stepped in as DP just after just a few days when Ryszard Lenczewski...
Okay, what do I write here? So far, Flashbacks To 93 has consisted of a mix of movies I’ve seen and love, ones I’m revisiting after a long time away from them and a few that I’d never seen before. I think it’s been going well. Even when I’ve not...
So far this series has been about horror films, a theme that will continue through most of the entries, but there are other kinds of films that the BBFC, historically, has had issues with. Martial arts and other action films sometimes struggled with the board under James Ferman, not least...
Hollywood has, from its very beginnings, been importing talent to serve both in front of and behind the cameras. John Woo had made his directorial debut in 1974 with the martial arts movie The Young Dragons (featuring action choreography by one Yuan Lung Chen, you may know him as Jackie...
I wonder whether, without the striking poster image, its lurid tagline “This woman has just cut, chopped, broken and burned five men beyond recognition… But no jury in America would convict her!” and with writer/director Meir Zarchi’s preferred title, Day Of The Woman enough people would have taken note of...
When I first saw Heathers I was in hospital. It was, perhaps, an unusual choice; a blackly comic satire about a popular girl (Winona Ryder’s Veronica) who has come to hate the clique she’s a part of (the titular Heathers, played by Kim Walker, Shannen Doherty and Lisanne Falk). Veronica...
In my article for the BANNED! Series on The Toolbox Murders, I talked about how, when I was a kid, I wasn’t able to watch many films that I wasn’t supposed to be seeing. That was why I considered the 12 certificate - which came in in 1989, the first...