Category: Film
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When we think of old Hollywood the silent film era of Charlie Chaplin and the birth of American cinema, we picture a glamorous world preserved in black and white celluloid. But beneath the surface of that glittering industry lay a seedy underbelly of greed, addiction, and violence. The 1922 murder of William Desmond Taylor stands…
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It was difficult to know what to expect from Game: the opening film of the festival (I’ve seen a couple of very strong openers, and a couple less so); and audiences had been told there are “local connections” to Nottingham, which might have meant the city’s genre film festival was promoting well known talent, rather…
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There’s something about the red velvet and candlelight of Hammer’s Dracula that feels almost sinful. Not just because it redefined horror, but because it seduced it. Before 1958, cinematic vampires were ghostly aristocrats, whispering through cobwebbed castles in black-and-white shadows. But Hammer Films — in their usual, gloriously excessive way — didn’t just want to…
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Intelligent satire, humour, a demon and a cult actor or two: count me in. Portal to Hell was surprisingly deep and actually raised lots of questions, too, so I hardly knew which one to start with when I sat down at my laptop to talk to Woody Bess, its writer and director. The film’s tone…
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The day’s feature film, Baby Fever (dir Nupur Chitalia, Pascale Potvin) encompass all the themes of the day, at least tangentially. After moving to a new community with her husband, James, and finding herself pregnant, Lila interviews with the local mothers’ group, a prestigious club led by mommy influencer Trish (in a tooth-for-tooth performance by…
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Strong themes (from grief to motherhood, self-doubt to self-preservation) wrapped in elegant storytelling ruled the day at the tenth Sick Chicks Film Festival. Grief is such a ubiquitous topic in so many films that it seems impossible that there can be anything else to say, but there is. In Aunque no esté contigo (Even If…
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Kombucha is a satirical horror film about the dilemma many creative people face between work that satisfies their souls versus more commercial jobs that pay well. Oh and it’s about health fads and other issues too; a wild and potent mix, which made for a fascinating conversation with its director, Jake Myers. I asked him…
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I’ve admired found footage films for some time, always keen to discover different approaches to it, so pleased to see a film Grimmfest describes as “a twisty, disorientating and brilliant spin on the ‘found footage’ subgenre” in their 2025 programme. Once I watched Tribe, I was even more pleased to sit down and talk with the…
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I love a good revenge thriller: revenge often seems to give a rich tension to a film, and a motivation viewers can get behind. So I relished the chance to talk to Tom Botchii, whose film Syphon wasn’t quite so straightforward. Described as a “cat-and-mouse vigilante action”, I asked Tom how it came about that the…
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I’ve become very fond of Mayhem Film Festival, and it’s lovely to meet a filmmaker who feels the same. Recently, I had the pleasure of spending half an hour in the company of Marc Price, writer and director of The Arbiter, soon due to screen at this year’s Mayhem. “We’ve had two films there,” Marc…