I’m a total sucker for films exploiting the amnesia trope, as hackneyed as it is (if it’s good enough for The Bold and the Beautiful, it’s good enough for me!). There’s something immediately engaging in the character and audience sharing the same predicament: not knowing the specifics of the events that preceded the film’s beginning,…
It’s easy to forgive horror films their sins if they’re actually scary. If Annabelle had been a genuinely frightening film, I could’ve happily forgiven its hollow Polanski references – ranging from a host of Rosemary’s Baby quotations to a Charles Manson’s appearance on television. I wouldn’t have had a problem with how it mishandles/abandons its…
Samurai Bride follows the format established by its first season (titled Samurai Girls because apparently they don’t like “season two” in Japan), relying on its animation’s stylistic diversity to excuse its otherwise entirely conventional blend of harem tropes, fan-service and oversized showdowns. Interestingly, I’d argue the two approaches work at cross-purposes; viewers looking for a…
Is it an inevitability that horror franchises trend towards soft-core porn the longer they run? Probably not – Nightmare on Elm Street found its way to bad puns while Friday the 13th travelled to New York, Hell and, eventually, outer space. It’s certainly the case with the Wrong Turn series, which began as gory-hillbilly-survival-horror, took…
A Long Way Down begins with a potentially promising premise before it falls, well, you know, <gestures vaguely towards title>. For a film that opens with a suicidal quartet meeting atop a London skyscraper on New Year’s Eve, it demonstrates little actual interest in examining suicide, despites its half-hearted feints at undergraduate psychology. Instead A…
Canadian director and co-writer of Siddharth, Richie Mehta, was inspired by his own encounter with a man on the streets of India looking for his lost son. His film poses the same questions Mehta must have had after this encounter. “What happened to the boy?” And, perhaps as importantly, “How could a father know so…
Read a description of Hany Abu-Assad’s Omar – the tale of a Palestinian freedom fighter forced into collaboration by the Israeli secret forces – and you’ll probably imagine a slice of social realism. You know, natural lighting, no non-diegetic music, liberal use of handheld camera and a nuanced take on Israel-Palestine aggression. The actual picture…
A decade on, Alpha Dog is most notable for establishing both Justin Timberlake and Anton Yelchin as respectable actors. This plucked-from-the-headlines crime picture put Timberlake in the role of a charismatic kidnapper and Yelchin as his fifteen-year-old abductee, and they both do great work. It’s worth remembering, though, that Alpha Dog also stands as a…
Proxy is two hours of emotional and narrative withholding which combines preposterous thriller and horror movie tropes together into a flat, underwhelming experience. That flatness is almost certainly intentional (it’s hard to imagine any director getting such unemotive performances unintentionally), but it only served to disengage me from the proceedings, blunting the impact of a…
Tusk represents a kind of critical milestone for me, as the first film I found so unpleasant that I walked out of it. Admittedly, it wasn’t entirely Tusk’s foulness (punctuated by a particularly terrible cameo) that sent me from the cinema twenty minutes before its conclusion: the exodus of the group I was sitting with…
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