Dear White People (2014)

As its title suggests, Dear White People is a statement as much as a film, tackling modern-day race relations. Justin Simien’s debut feature stages its satirical drama in Winchester University, a fictional American college where residential colleges are divided – and, ultimately, fractured – along race lines. Early on I fretted that its insistence on…

The Friday the 13th Series

Yesterday was Friday the 13th, and I took the opportunity to maximise my school holidays by sitting down with a few beers to watch the entirety of the Friday the 13th slasher series. Well, the first eight films at least: I left out Jason Goes to Hell, Jason X, Freddy vs Jason and the execrable…

eXistenZ (1999)

eXistenZ is destined to always be second choice. Looking for a David Cronenberg film that eroticises the unerotic? Your first choice is Crash; eXistenZ comes a distant second. Looking for a film that cursorily engages with videogaming culture before becoming a philosophical treatise on the nature of reality? The Matrix does that better than eXistenZ,…

Short Cuts (1993)

It’s no accident that the soundtrack of many scenes throughout the 3 hour running time of Short Cuts is jazz. Jazz is improvisational music, familiar elements constructed over a backbone that shifts and changes, reflecting life’s messiness. Short Cuts is the same, weaving plot elements and character archetypes you might recognise into an immense, organic…