It’s very easy to slip into cliché and hyperbole when describing an extraordinary live music performance, tossing around “transcendental” and “a religious experience” like you’re the first idiot with a word processor to connect a crowd of people singing in unison to a church gathering belting out a hymn or two. But, dammit, clichés are…
I guess I’m just going to have to get used to being an Arcade Fire contrarian. Don’t get me wrong, I like the guys. I have a beard and wide-rimmed glasses and I wear skinny jeans, what did you expect? But I always found the smoky neo-Springsteen stylings of Neon Bible just that little bit…
The opening shots of Y Tu Mamá También stem from the mindsets of its two male teenage protagonists. They’re sex scenes, of course, rushed and frantic; defined by jealousy and uncertainty. But the film – part sex-comedy, part coming-of-age story, part road-movie, part reflection on the class inequities of modern Mexico – has broader ambitions…
Days of Heaven is an immense, impressive picture. Only Terrence Malick’s second full-length, the plot would seem to lend itself to the easy naturalism of his debut, Badlands. A young woman named Abby (Brooke Adams), her boyfriend Bill (Richard Gere) and his sister Linda (Linda Manz) travel to a Texan farm to work on the…
On paper, Prisoners seems like its destined to be forgotten as yet another unremarkable thriller. The film concerns the abduction of two young girls and focuses its attention on two men searching for them; Hugh Jackman as Keller Dover – zealous carpenter and father of one of the girls – and Jake Gyllenhaal as Detective…
Early in Stephen King’s time travel story, 11.22.63, protagonist Jake Epping has settled in to the town of Derry in the late 1950s (those familiar with King’s oeuvre will recognise Derry as the setting of one of the author’s best novels, It). Jake is an English teacher under the assumed name of George Amberson. He’s…
I’ll give Texas Chainsaw this – it’s a very different take on remaking a classic horror film. The 2003 remake of Tobe Hooper’s classic was essentially a repackage of the main plot points (basically: Leatherface kills people), modernized with a higher budget and more attractive cast but none of the twisted charm of the original…
The opening titles of John Frankenheimer’s Seconds, created by the inimitable Saul Bass, turn normality into grotesquery. Extreme close-ups of the human face warp and distort, taking the ordinary – a human mouth, a human eye – and rendering it horrifyingly unfamiliar. The mutability of human appearance is at the core of the science-fiction conceit…
Last night I went to a preview screening of Tim Winton’s The Turning, presented by director and producer Robert Connolly. The book it’s based on is a collection of seventeen short stories from one of the Australia’s greatest authors, stories set on or around the Western coast of Australia; stories about childhood and parents and…
This final half-season of Breaking Bad has been like a game of ten-pin bowling at times. That may seem like an odd metaphor, but bear with me: there’s so many pins to knock over in this final stretch that we need to have a break every couple of episodes to line them up again –…
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