Author Phil W. Bayles

The idea of visitors from other worlds is one of the oldest in all of science fiction, but Denis Villeneuve's new film Arrival is one of the very few that poses a genuinely thorny problem: how would we...

Don't let the provocative title fool you - Russian animator Leonid Shmelkov's Very Lonely Cock is a charming animated short which, while utterly bizarre, is also completely safe for work. We think....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VDvgL58h_Y A truly great parody is the one that doesn't require the audience to be familiar with any particular thing that it's mocking. It's why Airplane! remains one...

https://vimeo.com/177713990 In just a few short weeks, America could elect its first ever female president. This should be a cause for celebration; a golden time in politics and a long-overdue victory...

https://vimeo.com/jacobfrey/thepresent Based on a short comic strip by Fabio Coala called Perfection, Jacob Frey's animated short The Present plucks at the heartstrings in almost Pixar-esque fashion....

The problems of adapting The Little Prince for the screen are twofold. Not only is it one of the most beloved stories in all of literature, it’s not even really a story - it’s more a series of vignettes...

It’s more than a century since Edgar Rice Burroughs first created Tarzan, and in that time he’s been the subject of more than 200 films. It’s not hard to see the romantic appeal the character has held...

Even in a world where a reality TV star has a shot at entering the White House, the photograph of Elvis Presley shaking hands with Richard Nixon stands out as one of the weirder moments in American politics....

Oliver Stone reckoned that the first casualty of war is innocence, and if George Gittoes’ documentary Snow Monkey is anything to go by, he was right. Gittoes, a war photographer who has spent decades in war...

Someone once said that putting videos on YouTube is like throwing messages in bottles out into a churning sea made up entirely of messages in bottles. Israeli YouTuber Kutiman (real name Ophir Kutiel) plucks...

In the eyes of the British government, Moazzam Begg is a dangerous man - a radical extremist with connections to extremist Islamist groups from Bosnia to Afghanistan. Begg, who was born in Birmingham to...

The mass wave of refugees fleeing the Middle East for countries like Germany is unlike any diaspora in living memory; not just in its scale but in the way it is being documented. We’re all used to seeing...

In 2014, war broke out between Israel and Palestine and the city of Gaza suffered 51 consecutive days of bombing. While most people tried to get as far away as possible, young filmmaker Mohamed Jabaly grabbed...

There’s something more than a little off-putting about the start of Rwanda & Juliet. The idea mounting a production of Shakespeare’s immortal love story in a country still scarred by genocide is...

Motorsport pundits like Eddie Jordan will tell you that Tommy Byrne was one of the greatest drivers to ever compete in Formula One. Byrne himself, now working as an instructor in the US, would tell you that...