The Omen is silly when it should be scary, despite the stately sets and sombre acting surrounding it. David Warner (not the cricketer) does an admirable job of delivering a huge chunk of ominous exposition without it sounding too absurd (until he loses his head) and Gregory Peck is always reliable. The soundtrack and special…
I had expected something revolutionary from The 400 Blows: imaginative, exciting filmmaking from the film that began the New Wave movement. The cinematography itself didn’t wow me as I’d hoped, aside from a spectacular and extended series of tracking shots that conclude the film. But the story of young Antoine Doinel is certainly touching, particularly…
Yes, another horror movie… Sinister is, for its first half, a genuinely scary film populated by reasonably well-developed characters. Ethan Hawke, writing a true crime novel, finds a handful of creepy snuff films in the attic of his latest house (the site of a recent murder, naturally) and watches them, one by one, late at…
David Lynch is one of my favourite filmmakers, so I thought Wild at Heart, which left me cold on first viewing, warranted a second chance. I’ve heard many others unimpressed by Lynch’s work, even masterpieces like Mulholland Drive, describing them as simply random events strung together. Sadly, Wild at Heart puts me in their shoes.…
A horror “classic,” starting Wes Craven’s career, The Last House on the Left is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a good film. The cinematography and editing can be generously described as amateurish, the screenplay (a loose reinterpretation of The Virgin Spring) decides that the best thing to play against a harrowing rape/murder sequence…
Another horror movie remake! This one tries is particularly faithful to the Wes Craven original, even recreating a number of scares shot-for-shot. Not necessarily a bad thing, I suppose, but the new interpretations are pedestrian interpretations, without flair or creativity. There’s no emotional throughline in the first half; the film focuses on one character for…
The Mist is a good movie that could have been great. The first element that lets it down was inescapable with its low budget: the special effects. The film is intended to be serious, meaningful and to capture real fear, and the acting and composition support this, but the creature special effects appear goofy and…
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…
Shame appears to establish Brandon (Michael Fassbender) as the suave gentleman that doesn’t exist outside of fiction, unflappable and exuding preternatural confidence. We soon find that this persona is a thin shell around a damaged core, and the film the same: beginning with confident, gliding cinematography that becomes gradually more erratic, disjointed. Shame isn’t a…
The appeal of the Scream films (well, the first two – Scream 3 was an abject failure) is their diversity. Each is a slasher, a whodunit and a satirical take on the horror genre; even if they fail in one, they normally manage to be entertaining in another. Scre4m fails as a slasher film –…
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