The Thing – Horror Cinema’s Greatest Remake Katy Moon November 13, 2018 Analysis, Features, Love Letter, Nostalgia, One Off Creating horror remakes is often a thankless job. Taking familiar intellectual properties with built-in audience recognition and repackaging them with a little more sex or violence than the originals were...
Halloween: The Perfect Slasher Turns 40 Katy Moon October 17, 2018 Features, Love Letter, Nostalgia Like the great Michael Myers himself, you can never really kill a horror franchise. This month, 40 years after the original slashed its way onto movie screens and into our hearts, Halloween returns. Pointedly...
What’s the Meta? How The Cabin in the Woods Subverted Horror James Andrews October 11, 2018 Features, Love Letter, Nostalgia Screenwriter extraordinaire Drew Goddard (Cloverfield, World War Z, The Martian) is back with his second feature as a director, Bad Times at the El Royale. His latest finds a group of strangers unravelling a...
Rushmore and How the Teen Movie Grew Up Rhys Handley October 8, 2018 Features, Love Letter, Nostalgia Rushmore is 20 years old. Even with a two-decade legacy that reaches into cinema’s hallowed history to map out its future, Wes Anderson’s singular screwball tale of love, betrayal and extracurricular...
Still Creating Musical Fusion: School of Rock Turns 15 Ellena Zellhuber-McMillan October 3, 2018 Features, Love Letter, Nostalgia When it came out in 2003, School of Rock was deemed a "sleeper hit". Though it was obviously intriguing enough to investors, it does sound pretty unremarkable: washed-up musician tries to teach preppy kids how...
Second Chance: Johnny English James Andrews October 2, 2018 Features, Nostalgia, Second Chance As Rowan Atkinson returns this week for a third Johnny English film that no-one really asked for, it seems inevitable that this unlikely franchise (based around a character created for a '90s Barclaycard ad...
High School: Dazed and Confused at 25 Thom Denson September 24, 2018 Features, Nostalgia It’s what we love about these films, man. We get older and they just stay the same age. With 1993’s Dazed and Confused, Richard Linklater delivered a shot of pure nostalgia in the arm of cinema goers,...
At The Movies With Clarence And Alabama: True Romance Turns 25 Rory Steabler September 10, 2018 Close-Up, Features, Nostalgia True Romance turns 25 today. A quarter-century after that love letter to sex, violence, and Elvis Presley hit screens (and bombed), we have to ask ourselves: we’re all pretty much over Quentin Tarantino,...
My Summer of Love: Pawel Pawlikowski’s Finest Hour Patrick Nabarro August 30, 2018 Features, Love Letter Pawel Pawlikowski, winner of the Best Director award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival for Cold War, has become one of the world’s top contemporary auteurs almost by stealth. He’s not a filmmaker who...
A Love Letter To… The Muppets (2011) Sian Brett August 24, 2018 Features, Love Letter, Nostalgia For many a comedy fan, The Muppets was the start of a lifelong love of entertainment. Playing the music, lighting the lights, celebrity guest stars aplenty, and a gang of Muppets to offer guaranteed laughs...
Where Are They Now? The Inbetweeners Tom Bond August 14, 2018 Features, Nostalgia, Where Are They Now? Ask any Britcom star and they'll tell you just how hard it is to make the transition from domestic TV to the silver screen. At its simplest level there's just something about the structure of a great sitcom...
Oh Brother: Reappraising Step Brothers 10 Years On James Andrews July 25, 2018 Analysis, Features, Nostalgia 2008's Will Ferrell-John C. Reilly team-up Step Brothers is almost irredeemably stupid and low-brow when viewed again with a decade's more maturity, and through the more enlightened filter of 2018. Almost...
Mamma Mia! at 10: A Fun, Feminist Legacy Ellena Zellhuber-McMillan July 17, 2018 Features, Love Letter, Nostalgia The faults of Mamma Mia! are well known; the singing is bad, the choreography is simple, and the plot is weak. Its strengths, on the other hand, are barely mentioned – strange for a film that made...
My First Uprising: WALL-E’s Family-Friendly Revolution Joni Blyth June 28, 2018 Features, Love Letter Thracian gladiators. Highland knights. Petulant teenagers. These are the kinds of people who are born to lead revolutions. Courageous defiance comes with the territory of being a sword bearing, bow-wielding...
Captain Fantastic vs. Death Rhys Handley June 27, 2018 Features, Love Letter, Nostalgia Behind its fanciful premise; its lush, heightened production design; and a thick, swirling cloud of ambient Sigur Rós atmospherics, Matt Ross’ Captain Fantastic is an incredibly frank film. Its musings...