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SHOW ME A HERO – Part Five & Six
It may have taken its title from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s quote “Show me a hero and I’ll show you a tragedy” but as David Simon and William F. Zorzi’s six-part series moved towards it’s brutal, brilliant endgame, it became increasingly clear that another Fitzgerald quote was equally, if not more, apposite: “There are no second…
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THIS IS ENGLAND ’90 – ‘Spring’
Early on in the first episode of This is England ’90, Gadget (Andrew Ellis)—who might as well have been looking straight down the lens at the home viewers—commented to friends Shaun (Thomas Turgoose) and Milky (Andrew Shim) that the reason they all wanted to still eat school dinners still was “… about the nostalgia, innit.…
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Interview: French filmmaker Rémy Gente, creator of THE STRAIN’s special opening titles
If you’re watching FX’s vampire drama The Strain this season, you can’t have missed the show’s special opening titles, which appeared during episode 9’s “The Battle for Red Hook”. The normal ones are just dimly-lit shots of dirty bathroom tiles smeared with the show’s title in blood, but episode 9’s were a sumptuous feast of graphic novel inspired…
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MONSTERS: DARK CONTINENT (2014)
“Gotta give the crowd what they want, baby,” a character says early on in Monsters: Dark Continent, as a group of gamblers crowd around an underground dog fight. What is it they want? “Blood.” Though the character’s referring to that disturbing fight that plays out in the first act of Tom Green’s follow-up to Monsters,…
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DOCTOR WHO – Series Eight, Part Three
In preparation for next weekend’s arrival of Series Nine on the BBC (19 September), the concluding part of my review of Peter Capaldi’s debut year, Series Eight, covers the last four episodes, plus the 2014 Christmas special. (For previous catchups, read Part One and Part Two.) Writer Jamie Mathieson follows his marauding mummy tale with the…
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AMERICAN ULTRA (2015)
Weird movies deserve to be celebrated, and American Ultra is just about the weirdest movie to arrive in cinemas in recent times. It’s not its plot that is especially unusual, it’s largely different in how in handles its story and what it’s really about under the surface. This is a film about what it’s like…
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5 New U.S TV Shows to Watch this Autumn
The idea of television having seasons is largely an American term, but the term increasingly means less and less now the U.S have realised the value of filling the summer with good, original programming. There’s a captive audience all year around you can entertain and advertise to. However, it remains true that most of the year’s…
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SHOW ME A HERO – Part Four
The wheels finally came off Nick Wasicsko’s (Oscar Isaac) mayorship this week, as the oleaginous Henry Spallone (Alfred Molina) promised the white residents of Yonkers just enough to squeak into office. Of course, once there Spallone discovered, like the two mayors before him, that there’s no reversing Judge Sand’s decision: that public housing will be…
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HOW TO CHANGE THE WORLD (2015)
When you think of environmental activism, Greenpeace is likely the first name that pops into your head. Today the organisation is synonymous with campaigns like Save the Whales, and known for its high-profile protests against oil drilling in the Arctic Circle. But how did the organisation, start? And who started it? That’s the story that…
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NO ESCAPE (2015)
Try not to take the title of No Escape too seriously. If you’ve seen any of the trailers you’ll know that there are, of course, numerous escapes. Indeed, the very act of escaping from ludicrous scenarios is the fuel for the plot of this film, which is all about instinct taking over as a family…
