Film Features

A sprawling city, a host of tropical islands dotted around a vast blue archipelago, a high school full of clubs and constant development - this is world building at its most basic. Every work of fiction has world building to some extent. It…

About two years ago the critic and writer Sean T. Collins wrote an article called ‘The Monumental Horror Image’. The nature of these images and how they scare viewers does not come down to gore or a jump scare but rather to framing and…

A Writer, a Professor and a Stalker walk into a bar, what happens over the next three hours is either the longest punchline in history or one of the greatest films ever made. Since premiering in 1979, Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker has gone on…

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…

“No one stays good in this world.” At long last, after years of tortuous whingeing on Twitter and a courageous protest in real life the self-described crusaders of artistic freedom have managed to unleash whatever hideous, inhuman, Zack…

When your first introduction to a titular character is a nostalgia-soaked montage detailing one man's insatiable lust to create 'life saving inventions out of household materials' while he stands triumphantly atop the world blowing a golden…

It's hard to see what the cultural impact of the third film in the Die Hard series really is. 25 years later and it's likely the majority of people think its a perfectly fine action film, many think its reasonable way to pass 2 hours, many…

Who Can Kill a Child? is one of the coolest discoveries I've ever made. It's a cult classic, but not so much of a cult classic that it's really a cult classic in name only. At the book shop I work we used to have a 'cult classics' display.…

Last month culture magazine Vanity Fair gave the world a first look at the upcoming Dune movie - directed by Denis Villeneuve (Blade Runner 2049) and starring Oscar nominee Timothée Chalamet (Call Me by Your Name, Little Women) as the…

Ancient Egypt is a setting that for many animators has fueled their imagination for years. After all, it’s a culture with a vast history featuring everything from pharaohs to mummies, a pantheon of gods to the pyramids, hieroglyphics to…