10 of 2016’s best films
2016 has been the year that saw Neo-Liberalism finally implode like a dying star. Its death throes vomited forth a Donald Trump presidency and the bitter divisions of Brexit, post truth politics and...
Author: Mark Farnsworth
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.
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
The Star Destroyer is poised over the holy city of Jedha like a dagger through the heart of the Force. The Empire needs Kyber crystals to power the newly constructed Death Star to, “Commence...
Train to Busan is a zombie action film with a social bite
Zombies are the allegorical gift to global cinema that keeps on giving. They are in perpetual motion, always shambling or racing forward, the unread children of progress heralding the new world order...
Imperium explores racial politics in a new America
Imperium not only sideswipes you with its opening liberal quotation, but then sits you in the back of a car with Harry Potter dressed as an FBI agent. He waits nervously for a white van to deliver a...
Do we really need to analyze Stranger Things to death?
Stranger Things is back in the zeitgeist again. Here's one from the archives... All aboard the nostalgia train, next stop Netflix and the '80s themed series Stranger Things. We disembark in Hawkins,...
Alan Clarke Retrospective: The Firm (director’s cut)
Let’s begin, at the end of the 1980s and the world of The Firm. The beautiful game is being defiled by the English disease, pumped around the body politic by Football Specials and Intercity trains,...
Taking a closer look at Hitchcock and Truffaut
What better movie is there than Kent Jones’s Hitchcock/Truffaut documentary to prematurely break my sabbatical from film criticism? Truffaut’s 1962 in depth interviews with Hitchcock took over...
London Film Festival 2015 Dispatch 1: Der Nactmahr, Live From New York & Sunrise
“Der Nactmahr’s” early swimming pool set piece exerts an audacious ear drubbing of sub-bass pressure, a sonic bombardment of ultra-sleek techno that threatens to strobe the viewer out of their...
Review: Straight Outta Compton
“Straight Outta Compton” explodes with a blank screen, helicopter blades and media chatter. We could be starting another zombie apocalypse or alternatively listening to a multi-layered, cinematic...
Review: Attack On Titan
In the live action adaptation of the popular manga series “Attack On Titan” the scraps of flesh that make up the last surviving members of humanity have been cowering in fear behind three...