Me and the Cult Leader – An Interview with Director Atsushi Sakahara Sophie Maxwell August 13, 2020 Behind The Curtain, Features, Interview In 1995 members of the doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo (now named Aleph) deposited bags of sarin gas along Tokyo’s subway line during rush hour. It was an act of domestic terrorism that killed 13 people and has...
Everyday Greyness – Sheffield Doc/Fest 2020 Review Sophie Maxwell July 11, 2020 Reviews Everyday Greyness is the story of Magda, a young Polish woman in recovery from drug addiction. Magda has been living at a treatment centre where, along with a small group of others, she has given up her life...
Me and the Cult Leader – Sheffield Doc/Fest 2020 Review Sophie Maxwell June 27, 2020 Reviews In 1995, commuters in Tokyo were deliberately exposed to a deadly gas called sarin in an act of domestic terrorism. Twelve people were killed and over a thousand injured. Me and the Cult Leader: A Modern...
Keith Haring: Street Art Boy – Sheffield Doc/Fest 2020 Review Sophie Maxwell June 19, 2020 Reviews Keith Haring: Street Art Boy is a biography not only of Haring and his art, but also of politics and culture in New York City in the late 70s and 80s. The film is imbued with the same joyful skittishness and...
Still Living Deliciously: A Love Letter to The Witch Sophie Maxwell January 27, 2020 Features, Love Letter, Nostalgia This article contains spoilers... What does the word ‘witch’ mean to you? I think of cauldrons, Terry Pratchett’s novels, Sabrina and her cat Salem. Of course, there’s also the real-life Salem, the...
ORWAV’s Top 20 Films of 2019: #6 – If Beale Street Could Talk Sophie Maxwell December 30, 2019 Analysis, Features, Top 10 ‘Every black person born in America was born on Beale Street, born in the black neighbourhood of some American city, whether in Jackson, Mississippi, or in Harlem, New York. Beale Street is our legacy. This...
Rojo – Review Sophie Maxwell August 31, 2019 Reviews Benjamín Naishtat’s Argentinian mystery Rojo follows Claudio (Darío Grandinetti), a prominent lawyer whose life begins to unravel after an odd encounter with a stranger. Set in 1975, Rojo’s Argentina is...
The Brink – Sheffield Doc/Fest 2019 Review Sophie Maxwell June 13, 2019 Reviews For what seems like the hundredth time, Steve Bannon positions himself next to a young woman for a photograph. With a flourish, he says "you go in the middle – a rose between two thorns." By the end of The...
Border South – Sheffield Doc/Fest 2019 Review Sophie Maxwell June 13, 2019 Reviews Border South is the story of the migrant trail that leads from southern Mexico to the United States. The documentary explores life on the trail, alongside the lives of a Nicaraguan migrant and an American...
XY Chelsea – Sheffield Doc/Fest 2019 Review Sophie Maxwell June 13, 2019 Reviews Tim Travers Hawkins’ documentary film XY Chelsea follows two years in the life of whistleblower and activist Chelsea Manning. In 2010, Manning leaked thousands of classified US government documents to...
Tolkien – Review Sophie Maxwell May 4, 2019 Reviews Dome Karukoski’s biopic of J.R.R. Tolkien brings to life the origins of the author’s career, charting the course of a life taken over by imaginary worlds. Shivering in the trenches, a young Tolkien...
Writing on Screen: How Biopics Portray Authors Sophie Maxwell May 2, 2019 Analysis, Close-Up, Features In his essay on Richard Eyre’s Iris Murdoch biopic Iris for the Guardian, Martin Amis claims that ‘very broadly, literature concerns itself with the internal, cinema with the external.’ These supposed...
Escape Room – Review Sophie Maxwell February 2, 2019 Reviews In recent years, horror and thriller fans have seen a wave of unusual and original films, confronting vital political themes (Get Out, 2017) and kicking back against tired generic tropes (Hereditary, 2018)....
The Most Dangerous Games: Cinema’s Best Puzzles Sophie Maxwell January 29, 2019 Analysis, Features, Top 10 For some, the thought of being trapped in a small room with a limited time to solve puzzles and escape is sheer nightmare fuel. Maybe your boss thinks such activities are the perfect team-building exercises....
The Heiresses – Review Sophie Maxwell August 12, 2018 Reviews In Asunción, Paraguay, a wealthy older couple are faced with financial crisis after Chiquita (Margarita Irun) is served with a prison sentence. Her partner, Chela (a riveting Ana Brun), is a nervous introvert...