A documentary movie about Palestine’s first judge in Sharia law, Kholoud Al-Faqih. So inspiring. She is a stalwart of bravery and defiance in the face of both patronising sexism and more concerted misogynistic disregard for women’s lives. She defies tradition, endures discrimination and champions other women in the field. To watch her sew seeds of…
The new movie by the guy that did Garth Merenghi. It’s an almost entirely dialogueless psychological horror. The main character is a haunted house of a man, who himself haunts the decaying urban landscape of this nothing English town, surrounded by ever-encroaching scrub brush, marshland and woodland, pushing to reclaim it to purposelessness. He carries…
A gap year, Humanitarians of Instagram, selfie-stick of a film. It’s a movie that, without irony or self-awareness, would tell you that the Third World people it’s visited were sooo poor but they were sooo happy. It’s a barely disguised piece of advertising for an ‘adventure’ firm that caters to the super-wealthy, and does not…
What absolute gash. Join the most achingly heteronormative family imaginable, with the mother barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen, and the dad whose entire character can be summed up as “No let family die”. Spent 2 hours hoping they’ll all get eaten as they plan the most infuriatingly stupid home birth since that dumb-arse bird…
Mark Anthony really is a cunt, isn’t he? No matter how much of a dick you paint Octavius to be, Mark Anthony is the architect of his own demise, a spoiled child who turns on anyone and blames them for his own bad decisions, including Cleopatra. As for her, it feels like the play should…
A black comedy about a pregnant woman who believes she is being driven to kill by her unborn foetus in vengeance for the death of her partner. Alice Lowe is great in this, giving it a Inside Number 9, British comic/horror/tragedy vibe. Loved her Halloween costume at the end, like Kate Bush from Wuthering Heights…
Fucking loved seeing Koyaanisqatsi at Film City Glasgow. Beautiful film in a beautiful venue. I loved it. Despite the implicit criticism in the title, meaning a life out of balance which must change, I found Koyaanisqatsi to be a celebration of life. Bookended by shots of cave paintings, the film shows the ecstatic movement of…
An hour and a half, single-location, edge-of-the-seat thriller, that combines the tension and claustrophobia of something like Assault on Precinct 13, and the architectural cat-and-mouse of something like Die Hard. Three burglars break into the home of a blind man and, boy, did they ever fuck with the wrong guy. The Detroit urban prairie makes…
The Neon Demon is incredibly beautiful and disappears spectacularly up its own arse. It has a solid first hour, which should be the entirety of the film with the climax scene tacked on. It builds up so much capital in its first half, I was like, this can be as slow as it wants, it’s…
Houses of Halloween is not bad for a DVD given away free at FrightFest.