Senior Film Writer Mark Farnsworth teaches Film in East London and is currently working on two screenplays, The Mysteries and Fair Access. He also writes the Oh/Cult section for Brokenshark.co.uk.
The Secret Agent is an elegiac, surreal, brutal yet hopeful, study of Brazil’s collective memory of life under the military dictatorship in the 1970s. The dreamlike fluidity of writer/director...
Who exactly are they? Are they your parents coming home from holiday early before you’ve had a chance to clean up that party? Are they that mythical collective used for rumours, misinformation, the...
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley is bound like a demon behind the screen, expressionistic but held hostage to misfortune just the same. She could be possessed by Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of...
The British prison movie genre, like its wayward cousin on the outside, the British gangster genre, is more sparsely populated than you’d think. The (un) holy trinity of McVicar, A Sense of...
Motormouth Marty Mauser is a grade-A shit heel. A 1950s hustler with a tommy gun delivery who won’t take no for an answer. He’s a lithe, wiry, fuck stick, spidering his way through New York city...
Bushman, David Schickele’s long-neglected 1971 film that has been newly restored and re-released for contemporary audiences, plays like a radical act of cinematic excavation, unearthing not just a...
There are crime dramas that want to comfort you with the idea that justice, eventually, wins. And then there’s Santosh, which calmly takes that idea, walks it out back, and buries it in a shallow...
What better horror film for the Halloween season than a movie about nuclear Armageddon? Kathryn Bigelow’s apocalyptic political thriller, A House of Dynamite is a weighty procedural about...
Like the devastating impact of climate change, the cold civil war being fought in America heats up incrementally degree by degree. The constant pressure applied to the body politic by the flickering...
Even in sepia Robert Redford’s eyes are Pacific blue. Californian azure. The truth and the lie. He’s the Santa Monica pretty boy no one wanted for Sundance; that’s no cinematic legend playing...
