Film

There’s nothing better than a trip to the cinema - the smell of freshly popped popcorn and the excitement of going to watch a film you’ve waited months to see. You sit through each gripping trailer in anticipation, munching your way through your cinema snackbox. But while you were sipping on that jumbo-sized soft drink, did you pay attention to the forthcoming film releases? Cineworld has created a brainteaser of a puzzle to test your film buff knowledge. Set in...

By Sam Inglis Films menace us in many different ways. We’ve been scared by ghosts, by aliens, by monsters, vampires, zombies, demons and supernatural murderers. I like films with all of these threats in them, but the ones that scare me, that truly get under my skin, are serial killer films. Dracula, Pennywise, The Wolfman, Damien, Sadako and Freddy Kruger are all very different threats, but they all have one thing in common: you know they’re not real. When you see...

The Silence of the Lambs is a piece of classic horror cinema, and in the great canon of Hollywood horror it sits happily alongside The Exorcist and Nosferatu. The film is being re-released as part of the “BFI Thriller: Who Can You Trust” season and has been artfully up-scaled and rendered in 4K. The visuals are enhanced and do not look that out of place with modern Hollywood productions, aside from the obvious slight dull look to the colours. It...

By Michael McNulty If you’re looking for a poorly sketched portrait of Paul Gauguin, then Edouard Deluc’s film, Gauguin, might be just the thing for you.  This quasi-biography is a tepid attempt at painting the artists life in the romantic brush strokes that he surely would have liked to have been remember by. A bedraggled Gauguin (Vincent Cassel) is desperate to leave Paris, “there’s not a face or a landscape worth painting,” he passionately explains to his paintbrush wielding brethren. ...

Taking seven days to shoot and incorporating 78 camera setups and 52 cuts, the shower scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho is one of the most memorable and iconic sequences in cinematic history. In 78/52 director Alexandre O. Philippe looks behind the curtain of Hitchcock’s most famous murder. Joining him is an impressive ensemble of directors, editors, actors, and film historians that includes Bret Easton Ellis, Peter Bogdanovich, Jamie Lee Curtis, Elijah Wood, and Guillermo de Toro. Each has their own different experience encountering Psycho and each...

With contributions from: James McAllister, Stephen Mayne, Jim Mackney, Michael McNulty, and Sam Inglis The night is dark and full of terrors… but enough about the trick-or-treaters. For us film fans, Halloween is generally a time to indulge in some creepy thrills from the comfort of our sofas, all the while exerting a tremendous amount of willpower by ensuring we don’t eat all the sweets brought for those hooded figures who come knocking on our doors in search of candy…...

By Jim Mackney Nearly forty years have passed since The Shining was first released in 1980. It was Stanley Kubrick’s only proper foray into horror but it can be said that many of his films, A Clockwork Orange for example, have heavily flirted with the genre. This Halloween the film is being rereleased in glorious 4K! Is it worth the admission price, after nearly forty years? The honest answer to this lies somewhere in the unhelpful, no mans land of...

By Michael McNulty Joachim Trier’s latest cinematic instalment, Thelma, is a veritable melting pot of genres.  Part coming of age romance, supernatural mystery-thriller and straight family drama.  This is a dizzyingly tense, low-key film and a subtlety poignant observation on sexuality and repressed desire that wraps itself around you and squeezes. The young, attractive Thelma (Eili Harboe) has moved to Oslo for university.  Away from home for the first time, she is tentatively taking her first steps into a world...

 By Michael McNulty It’s Halloween week.  So, it goes without saying that we’re all looking for films to get the scares in.  For those of you looking for a break from the Slasher films of yesteryear and their countless reboots, prequels, sequels and mash ups here’s a chilling alternative, John McNaughton’s 1986 film, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. Although Henry was released in 1986 it didn’t really see much screen time until 1990.  This was largely due to the...