Features

There is a common misconception in filmmaking which presumes the director to have total and divine confidence in both their subject matter, and the various processes by which they tell the story. Ben Reed’s...

Douglas Sirk is a tough sell in a cynical age. Perhaps he would be in any. His plots are often shallow and seeped in wish-fulfilment; the performances are overwrought and slightly archaic; his sets, despite...

In Isla Badenoch’s The Elvermen, fish are the size of men and men are of mythical proportions. The film (which premiered on June 5, 2021 at Sheffield DocFest), was shot in a narrow window of time, between...

Moulin Rouge! is based on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, kind of. It’s also based on the opera La Bohème, but again, only kind of. It’s been compared to the opera La Traviata, the novel Nana, and the...

Horror sequels so often fall prey to the law of diminishing returns. The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It has its work cut out for it, because not only is it the third instalment in the mainline series,...

“I always played older,” Olympia Dukakis once told the New York Times. “I think it was the voice.” From 40 years old, Dukakis was playing mothers of grown children and elder stateswomen - and...

In the realm of great storylines, “A formerly flamboyant hairdresser takes a long walk across a small town to style a dead woman's hair” certainly hits the jackpot. Throw in two contrasting legends in the...

With an outpouring of festival and critics awards over the last 12 months, it seemed almost certain that Kelly Reichardt’s stunning First Cow would garner a handful of Academy Awards nominations. But in a...

Screening at this year's Glasgow Film Festival, Heather Young's first feature Murmur is a bleak portrait of loneliness. The director sat down with us to discuss her creative process, touring digital festivals...

Looking back at Trainspotting, which was released 25 years ago this week, one of its most striking qualities is the sheer amount of its young talent. While they probably would all have found success had...

Feminist author Betty Friedan dismissed the critical and popular success of Silence of the Lambs by calling it a film about “the evisceration, the skinning alive of women.” On the surface, her disgust is...

One successful franchise. Three iconic films. A straight-to-DVD spin-off, a reality TV show, and a series of books. A concert tour, a stage musical, and a production on ice. It has been adapted into foreign...

The ending of another year is a time that lends itself to reflection. So let’s look back on the good old days, when going to the supermarket didn’t feel like a health hazard, when cinemas were open and...

Released less than a month before the UK entered lockdown, Portrait of a Lady on Fire is a memory from the Before Times. Not only is it about so much of what has been taken from us this year, but the film...

Editor note - While Little Women was released on the 26th December 2019 in the UK, due to time constraints our group of writers did not get the chance to vote for it in last year's Top 20. For that reason, we...