Analysis

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...

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...

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...

One of the things that separates my very favourite films from those that are merely excellent is that they seem to fold in other mediums as they go. With its dense plotting and lovingly textured surroundings,...

Mermaids, one-eyed seagulls, and glimpses of sea monsters; Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse is anything but a mainstream horror. This undeniably weird film landed in the UK in the “normal” part of 2020,...

In a year so dominated by collective illness, loss, and pain, focusing on the tragedy of a single family for two hours can feel remarkably refreshing. Shannon Murphy’s debut feature Babyteeth is an intimate...

Throughout the delirious beats of its climax, Bacurau demands the viewer to both abandon and embrace their humanity. As the underdog marches to victory, the joy of cruel, uncensored death blends into...

Everyone should see 1917. Whatever your film taste, whatever your interest in World War One films in particular, 1917 bridges the divide. Winner of Best Film and Best Director at the 2020 Baftas (among many,...

Watch the opening sequence of Suspiria here: part 1 & part 2 A masterpiece of the genre, and certainly the most famous Italian example, Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977) remains a uniquely haunting...

Rocks was a shot of life and energy in an otherwise listless year. The film takes us into the world of a group of young girls in Hackney – their loyalties and their rivalries, their music and their jokes. It...

We’ve had a lot of time to reflect in 2020, whether we wanted it or not. That means time to look into ourselves, our culture, our society – our history. It’s not a passive process, though that’s an...

What a year 2020 has been. Thankfully ours is not to reason why, so for now let us look for a silver lining somewhere else entirely. 2o20 was an outstanding year for movies. While our industry suffered from...