Film

Only just over three-in-10 characters in the top 50 most successful films of 2016 were played by females - with even fewer cast in lead roles

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 this film for us still to be talking about it forty years on. Titles matter, and the phrase I Spit On Your Grave has such a visceral charge that it...

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced its first new Oscars category since 2001: Best Popular Film. The award will honour those films which have had huge mass appeal, yet typically not the artistic reverence necessary to take the standard Best Picture gong. The runaway favourite for the first Best Popular Film statuette is the critical and commercial smash hit Black Panther. There are even rumours that a behind the scenes Disney campaign led to Best Popular Film...

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 gets roped into murder when her new boyfriend JD (Christian Slater) serves one of the Heathers a ‘hangover cure’ that is actually drain cleaner. The two of them make this,...

A tree sparks a spat between neighbours in Haffstein Gunnar Sigurðsson black comedy Under the Tree. When Atli (Steinþór Hróar Steinþórsson), husband to Agnes (Lára Jóhanna Jónsdóttir) and father of young daughter Asa (Sigrídur Sigurpálsdóttir Scheving), is caught by his wife having a crafty wank early one morning to a video of him and an ex-girlfriend having sex, he is thrown out on the street.  With nowhere to go, but home, Atli heads for his parent’s place where an altogether...

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 release being Tim Burton’s Batman - a great innovation. There had always been such a wide gulf between PG and 15, and it was ridiculously easy to fall into the...

Filmmakers have a strange habit of allowing the most horrific events to take place in the most beautiful of surroundings. This is most certainly the case with Sicilian Ghost Story, which is set in the woodlands and lakes that border one of the titular island’s small towns. The film centres around Giuseppe (Gaetano Fernandez), a 13 year old boy, and Luna (Julia Jedlikowska), a spirited girl in his class who has taken a liking to him. Giuseppe is sensitive and...

Dominic Savage delivers a noble if somewhat tepid character study of a desperate housewife in The Escape. Tara (Gemma Arterton) is a married mother of two.  She lives in the quiet, dull rabbit hutches of suburban London.  It is a lonely existence, and despite her family, she is isolated.  Her husband, Mark (Dominic Cooper), is the self-absorbed breadwinner, a man blind to his partner’s immeasurable unhappiness.  For Tara, life is a cycle of monotonous routine, the school run, the weekly...

I have no rhythm and I can’t carry a note, let alone a tune, but still, I love music. As much as I love music in and of itself, as something to listen to while I’m writing a review for instance, it’s at gigs that I find myself most transported and engaged by an artist. A great gig is unifying; for the three minutes of THAT song that you and the rest of the crowd have waited for, everyone is...