America has always feared its cities, and no city has inspired more fear than New York in the 1980s. From the 1960s onward crime rates gradually increased in the Big Apple, driven by ideologically motivated underinvestment in social…

One of the most influential moments in the history of film took place in March of 1933, when a young Ray Harryhausen first saw the film King Kong. The primitive stop motion effects in the film fascinated the 13-year-old Harryhausen, and it…

The opening of The Abominable Dr Phibes feels like an unnerving dream. A mysterious figure robed and hooded in black plays the pipe organ for a mysterious beautiful woman, accompanied by an eerie orchestra of animatronic robots, before the…

I don’t think anyone working on Death Stranding would have guessed that their game would be the perfect encapsulation of 2020. In fact, the game didn’t even initially release last year; the PS4 version came out in 2019. But it was the PC…

Realistic science fiction films, as a general rule, don’t age as well as fantastical space operas. When you set your film “fifteen minutes into the future” it’s hard for that to stay relevant when that becomes the past. Those that manage it…

Nowadays, with Marvel’s cinematic juggernauts regularly blowing up the box office several times a year, it’s easy to forget that there was a time when “superhero movie” meant either kiddie fare or B-movie schlock. One series that elevated…

There’s a joke I made about writing this article: “how do I make a film about people isolated together and one of them going mad topical today?” I thought about that joke while I was watching The Shining’s opening, with its amazing…

I still remember when I saw the trailer for Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. I couldn’t tell you what film I was in the cinema to see, but I vividly recall watching a sepia-tinged airship crawl across the sky before New York City was…

When you look at the witch-trial fever that swept over Europe in the 17th century, it’s noticeable how it largely left Ireland untouched. This wasn’t really because of greater tolerance on the part of the Irish people, but rather reflects…

War creates monsters, and not all monsters go away when the war does. Some still fight for their lost cause, some fight for their own survival, and some fight because they’ve discovered they love nothing more than killing. This was the case…