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Cat People (1982)
The upsurge of interest in popularity for science fiction, horror, and fantasy cinema in the late 1970s and 1980s provoked a cycle of remakes based on an earlier generation of such films. This cycle...
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Backrooms (2026)
Here there be spoilers...Kane Parsons’ Backrooms has proven a big, left-field hit of 2026 cinema. A lot of what has made its success remarkable has little to do with the actual movie, but it’s hard...
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The Mandalorian And Grogu (2026)
Since the contentious response that met Star Wars - Episode VIII: The Last Jedi (2017), the failure of Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018), and the curdled reception of Star Wars - Episode IX: The Rise of...
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Chandu The Magician (1932)
A gem of the early sound era, Chandu The Magician is also one of the purest attempts to conjure on the cinema screen the flavour of a certain kind of pulp storytelling, and one that would echo...
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Torpedo Run (1958)
Submarine movies are an unusual subgenre, reliable and just about always enjoyable, defined as they are by certain near-compulsory elements providing automatic high drama. The sweat-browed captain...
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Voodoo Man (1944)
Although he was still famous enough to feature in some glossy, big studio-produced horror movies of the 1940s, Béla Lugosi’s fortunes had waned hard since his glory days after Dracula (1931)....
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The English Patient (1996)
Late in 1996, Anthony Minghella’s The English Patient seemed to sweep out of nowhere to become the instant Academy Award frontrunner. The film duly won nine awards including Best Picture, providing...
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The Gorge (2025)
Here there be spoilers … Scott Derrickson’s The Gorge has an immediately intriguing and arresting storytelling hook, and for a surprisingly long time seems to know what to do with it. Former US...
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Nosferatu (2024)
F.W. Murnau might have been a little boastful and pretentious when he subtitled his legendary 1922 film Nosferatu“A Symphony of Horror,” but he was also definitely onto something. A great horror...
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Blitz (2024)
Artist-turned-filmmaker Steve McQueen’s first standalone feature as director since the sharp disappointment that was Widows (2018), Blitz could be described as an act of revisionist history. Or,...
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Red Rooms (Les chambres rouges, 2023)
Pascal Plante’s Red Rooms opens with Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy), a good-looking, well-dressed young woman who has nonetheless spent the night like a hobo, camped out in a back alley of downtown...
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Gladiator II (2024)
Here there be spoilers…Any commentary I make on Ridley Scott’s Gladiator II must be prefaced by an initial confession. As great a fan and admirer of Scott’s that I am, that love does not extend to the...
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Alien: Romulus (2024)
Fede Alvarez’s Alien: Romulus is a movie that seems, at first glance, to have many things going for it. Taking on a franchise that’s now getting on for close to half a century old,...
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The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake (1959)
One of B-movie wizard Edward L. Cahn’s very cheap yet enormously entertaining forays into horror cinema, The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake comes close to embodying a specific ideal of a bygone...
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Assault (1971)
aka In The Devil’s Garden At Heatherdene School, a very posh all-girls seat of learning outside an exemplary regional English town, pretty student Tessa Hurst (Lesley-Ann Down) leaves for the day and...
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Battle Of Britain (1969)
Despite being very much an episode of grim and unromantic history, the Battle of Britain has long since achieved quasi-mythic grandeur. The battle saw the outnumbered pilots of the Royal Air Force...
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Journey To The Center Of The Earth (1959)
Henry Levin’s Journey to the Center of the Earth was the product of a string of retro-flavoured, deliberately old-fashioned films made in the 1950s and ‘60s that harkened back to the best-known...
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Twisters (2024)
Here there be spoilers...I suppose. I mean there are tornadoes and the heroes don’t die. Aren’t you surprised?I admit it: when I heard a sequel was being made to Jan De Bont’s Twister (1996), I...
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Villa Rides (1968)
A splashy but generally ignored by-product of late 1960s screen culture, Villa Rides is part big-budget, bouncy Hollywood action-adventure movie, part epic historical biopic, trying hard to appeal to...
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China (1943)
John Farrow’s China has one of the most arresting openings of any Hollywood film of its era, offering remarkable long tracking shot that anticipates a more recent obsession of filmmakers with...
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