In 1993 12-year-old Giuseppe Di Matteo was kidnapped by the mafia, held captive for 779 days and murdered. Co-directors and writers Fabio Grassadonia and Antonio Piazza pay tribute to the young boy with a gorgeous supernatural fantasy film that recalls the work of Guillermo del Toro in its poetic visuals and the dread and surreal
Reviews
A strict catholic upbringing leaves shy Thelma (Eli Harboe) feeling like an outsider as she embarks on her University education in Joachim Trier’s sensitively handled supernatural Nordic chiller. Trier stamps his own nuanced spin on female coming-of-age horror by introducing a refreshing and richly drawn gay character struggling with her sexuality that strikes a similar
Rafe Spall turns in an emotionally engaging performance in this loose adaptation of Adam Nevill’s horror novel directed by David Bruckner and written by Joe Barton. Spall really makes you feel his character, Luke’s pain, fear and grief during and after he witnesses the brutal murder of a close friend at an off-licence. The swift
We didn’t expect a chilly thriller from the director of Let The Right One In and Tinker Tailor, Soldier Spy and producer Martin Scorsese with a cast this strong to be quite so bad, but there can be no question that something has gone terribly wrong with Tomas Alfredson’s adaptation of Jo Nesbø’s bestseller The Snowman. With the exception
At the beginning of Ghost Stories, Phillip Goodman (Andy Nyman) is monitoring a live video feed of a celebrity psychic performing onstage. This illustrates how watching and listening closely can reveal the explicable reality behind the apparently supernatural – but it also slyly reveals the transition of Ghost Stories itself from 2010 play to film.
Sci-fi’s sacred texts don’t come much more revered than Blade Runner and you have to admire Denis Villeneuve’s nerve in taking this on. What becomes abundantly clear very early on is that he and his team are more than capable. This is a film that understands its predecessor, it has the style and craftsmanship to
If you sculpt the mashed potatoes, they will come. In 1977, New Hollywood’s two nerdiest directors changed sci-fi cinema forever. If Star Wars gave us a junkyard-style vision of outer space and galaxies far, far away, his pal Steven Spielberg removed inherent terrors and fears in alien visitation yarns, replacing dread and horror with hope
Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan saw Natalie Portman’s character struggle to maintain her identity and sanity in her own manic pursuit of perfection. Similar concepts rear their head in mother! too; only it examines control being taken rather than being lost, creating something much more harrowing. Charismatic duo Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem offer up powerhouse
While there was a conspicuous dearth of female filmmakers represented in FrightFest’s feature programme (of the 65 films that screened, only Natasha Kermani’s Imitation Girl, Tini Tüllmann’s Freddy/Eddy and Caroline Labrèche and Steeve Léonard’s Radius could boast female directors), the short films showcase went a considerable way to redressing this imbalance. Programmed by Shelagh Rowan-Legg, it
Still/Born begins with both a birth and a still birth, as young mother Mary (Christie Burke) delivers Adam, only to realise in horror that his identical twin Thomas is dead on arrival. Yet the mannered forward-slash punctuation that splits the film’s title (like in Marat/Sade, Face/Off and Frost/Nixon) also betokens other doubles and divisions within
“Alright, whoa baby! She’s gorgeous! Alright, that looks good, how much is it?” The speaker, in the opening scene of Imitation Girl, is a boy in his young teens (William Wakeland), diminished in static wideshot as he negotiates with two older men who have purchased a girlie magazine on his behalf. The boy’s words refer
The first time we see Samantha (Anja Savcic) in writer/director Kurtis David Harder’s InControl, she is facing a mirror. This follows a prologue in which pretty cheerleader Marissa (Sarah Troyer) tries desperately – and vainly – to phone Mark and Jenny, before, in her distraction, flipping her car spectacularly. The connection between these two sequences
“We meet only once every fifty years,” says the Duke (Vincent Regan) to Peter (Tony Curran) as a small group of people of different ages, genders and ethnicities (played by Charlie Cox, Freema Agyeman, Annette Crosby, Lukas Leong and Jordan Long) gathers around the table in a farmhouse at night to discuss boundaries, quotas and
Time travel purists should probably steer clear of Rowan Coleman’s latest. Though its heroine, Luna Sinclair, is a quantum physicist, it’s not science that helps her step through the fourth dimension. Nope, it’s the power of love. After a lifetime of struggling with depression, Luna’s mother recently killed herself. But she left a video for
Leading the pack of Universal’s new Dark Universe (complete with Marvel-style logo) is Alex Kurtzman’s modern-day reboot of The Mummy, which finds itself caught between tones and failing to juggle the responsibilities of being a shared universe starter, a new take on a classic property, and a big Tom Cruise action movie. Soldiers Nick Morton (Cruise)
Tightrope walker Hoshiko is a star. Graceful and beautiful, she’s the main attraction of the glittering Cirque, her daring antics captivating audiences everywhere. She’s also a prisoner, forced to perform to a crowd that wants nothing more than to see her fall to her death. In Hayley Barker’s dystopian YA novel, Britain has torn itself
Robert Jackson Bennett’s brilliant Divine Cities trilogy comes to an end, and the author of Mr Shivers and The Troupe has made sure to send his characters off with a bang. The incredibly rich world that he has created, with warring states, undercover operatives, miraculous tricks and dead gods who aren’t as dead as they
A marriage quite literally goes to the dogs in Bitch, in which a put-upon woman snaps under crushing pressures and adopts the psyche of a ferocious canine. Marianna Palka (Good Dick) writes, directs and stars as Jill. Bitch opens with her attempted suicide by hanging, disrupted by the chandelier her noose was fastened to collapsing
“I can help you if you let me. I’d like to help you. But first you have to tell me about myself.” Memory is the central theme of Marjorie Prime, a claustrophobic chamber drama with a neat sci-fi hook. In its sleek near-future world, a service creating fully sentient holographic projections of late family members
Basket Case and Frankenhooker filmmaker and schlock cinema legend Frank Henenlotter’s controversial, deeply icky Brain Damage is presented in beautiful 1080p so we can all enjoy this giddy VHS cult favourite in striking high definition. For the uninitiated, Brain Damage fits very neatly into the Henenlotter back catalogue with a sweaty young man trying desperately
Phenomena gets a raw deal. It’s often held up as the first sign of Dario Argento losing his masterly touch, an overblown blend of greatest hits and daftness. However, while it shares several key plot elements with Suspiria and arguably never really squares its blend of creature feature, serial killer horror and fairytale, it’s a
The level of competition for the Best Animated Film at the Oscars this year was absolutely ferocious: Kubo And The Two Strings, Moana, and Zootopia each felt like they were more than deserving of the grand prize…which is why it’s just about forgivable that Michael Dudok De Wit’s beautiful fable The Red Turtle walked away
Some 75 years after her creation, after god knows how many Batman and Superman big screen adventures, Wonder Woman finally gets her solo silver screen debut. To say that the film has to carry the weight of expectation is somewhat of an understatement. This film is all expectation. We’re expecting to be stunned into silence
When Warner Bros announced that it was making The Lego Movie, the whole thing sounded a bit like a ploy to get people to pay to see a 100-minute-long advert for Lego. Upon the film’s release it was immediately clear that that wasn’t the case at all. The more cynical among us probably presumed The
Unless you have been living in Outer Mongolia, no doubt you will have heard talk of a popular little animated movie called Frozen. Cleverly jumping on the bandwagon, Elly Blake has a ready-made audience for her new, YA series, Frostblood. Ramping up the raunch factor and adding some gladiator action, it is time for Frozen
If horror movies are anything to go by, you had to be really careful about booking a place to stay back in 1960. This proto-Amicus spookfest, released in the same year as Psycho, features a hotel no less deadly than Bates Motel: the Raven’s Inn, in Whitewood, Massachusetts. Built on the very spot where, some
A house swap goes horribly wrong in this latest chiller from SL Grey (aka excellent South African authors Sarah Lotz and Louis Greenberg). Having explored shopping malls and underground bunkers, the duo are back with a tale of grief, insanity and the dangers of taking a chance on unrated Air BNB users. Literature professor Mark