Abigail (2024) Directors: Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Tyler Gillett Screenwriters: Stephen Shields, Guy Busick Starring: Melissa Barrera, Dan Stevens, Alisha Weir, Kathryn Newton, Angus Cloud, Giancarlo Esposito Universal Monster movies are a thing of the past. Even new movies that are inspired by them are hard to come by, with mainstream horror trends moving towards the exploitation of everyday life instead of using a physical being as the source of our terror. With Abigail, we’ve got a bit of a throwback – it’s a retelling of Dracula’s Daughter (1936). As much as it’s new, much vaguer title sugg ..read more

Challengers (2024) Director: Luca Guadagnino Screenwriter: Justin Kuritzkes Starring: Zendaya, Mike Faist, Josh O’Connor When 18-year-old rising tennis star Tashi Duncan (Zendaya) first meets best friends and fellow tennis players Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor) and Art Donaldson (Mike Faist), she tells them that tennis is more than just hitting a ball with a racket – it’s a relationship. Sitting on the beach, while waves crash in the background, Tashi explains that playing a really good game of tennis is like being in love or not existing at all, leaving everything you have out on the court an ..read more

Star Wars is arguably the most beloved film franchise in history. For almost half a century, the galaxy far, far away has ignited the imagination of the public, finding audiences at the box office, at home, at viewing parties, and across all media; engaging with people young, old, and in between, whether they’re from here, there, or anywhere. It has become a staple of Western culture; a monument of our underlying beliefs, our period’s moral conundrums, our collective morality. It is mythological in nature, taking ideas from the Bible and Shakespeare, and brought to life with incredible filmmak ..read more

Seven Samurai (1954) Director: Akira Kurosawa Screenwriters: Akira Kurosawa, Shinobu Hashimoto, Hideo Oguni Starring: Toshiro Mifune, Seiji Miyaguchi, Isao Kimura, Daisuke Katō, Yoshio Inaba, Takashi Shimura, Keiko Tsushima, Kamatari Fujiwara It is true that sometimes there are more things to a film than meets the eye. We try to loop our fingers through it, we swallow its visuals whole. We label it by genre, critique it by checkboxes. But sometimes, when we least search for it, a film can sneak up on you. A sliver of something escapes from an unnoticed crack and it becomes more than a categor ..read more

The year is 1956. The radio crackles as Jean Shepherd, the host of Night People, introduces his next guest, a 26 year old actor promoting his latest film Edge of the City. Little did Shepherd know that crowdfunding as we know it was about to be invented. In what has now gone down as the stuff of legend, John Cassavetes managed to finance his first feature film, Shadows, off the back of a radio show. What began as a tirade about the superficiality of Hollywood ended with the young actor asking listeners to send him money to prove that he could make a better picture if only he had the means to d ..read more

New York born actor Al Pacino has given so much to cinema. Over more than fifty years, he has delivered some of the greatest performances of all time. He is so gripping, and at times so menacing, that sometimes a single stare from him can be worth as much to a film as a lengthy monologue. After a brief appearance on screen in Me, Natalie (1969), Al Pacino caught attention for his starring role in Jerry Schatzberg’s The Panic in Needle Park (1971). The two would reteam two years later for Scarecrow (1973), where Pacino starred opposite Gene Hackman. These were two fantastic films with bleak und ..read more

Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver (2024) Director: Zack Snyder Screenwriters: Zack Snyder, Kurt Johnstad, Shay Hatten Starring: Sofia Boutella, Djimon Hounsou, Ed Skrein, Michiel Huisman, Doona Bae, Ray Fisher, Anthony Hopkins, Staz Nair, Fra Fee, Cleopatra Coleman, Stuart Martin, Ingvar Sigurdsson, Alfonso Herrera, Cary Elwes, Rhian Rees, Elise Duffy, Sky Yang, Charlotte Magi, Stella Grace Fitzgerald  Is Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon – Part Two better than the opening instalment? Marginally, but only because all the boring setup is now out of the way and we can more-or-less get straight t ..read more

Making his start as a novelist and writing scripts for directors like Danny Boyle (28 Days Later and Sunshine), thought-provoking ideas man Alex Garland learned from the talented filmmakers he so closely collaborated with, did some uncredited work to finish the troubled comics adaptation Dredd, and then eventually made his full directorial debut in 2014. Garland’s films tend to be cerebral sci-fi or psychological horrors, often tackling the biggest ideas about what makes us human while also being extremely visually striking and technically accomplished, though their ambiguity and challenging t ..read more

Sherlock Jr. (1924) Director: Buster Keaton Screenwriters: Clyde Bruckman, Jean Havez, Joseph A. Mitchell Starring: Buster Keaton, Kathryn McGuire, Ward Crane Somehow a century has passed since the inimitable Buster Keaton unleashed one of his best films upon the world. One of the three greats of silent slapstick (along with Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd), Keaton was responsible for some of the best films of the silent era, along with a great many of the best stunts ever put to film. Only partially is this due to most of them being done for real, something which would never get past health ..read more

Civil War (2024)  Director: Alex Garland Screenwriter: Alex Garland Starring: Kirsten Dunst, Wagner Moura, Cailee Spaeny, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Sonoya Mizuno, Nick Offerman, Jesse Plemons, Nelson Lee, Evan Lai, Jefferson White There aren’t many film scripts written as cutting satires four years earlier that could still be considered “hot button” by the time they are released. But that’s the current state the world, where it’s more than a little frightening how Alex Garland’s fourth directorial feature Civil War has only become more relevant over time. In a very near future, after t ..read more