Review: Promising Young Woman
The male gaze reversed. Our faces screwed up close in crotch shots of men gyrating, dressed in a smart casual nightmare, you know the kind of shit clothes bought for men by their wives or girlfriends...
Category: Watch
Film review: The Kid Detective
What is it that makes a slight, inconsequential movie like “The Kid Detective” tap on your bedroom windows to keep you awake at night thinking about it? It’s a shaggy dog story of sorts about...
Review: Rebecca
Director Ben Wheatley doth protest too much. He may want to play down any comparison to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 version of, “Rebecca”, but the parallels are too great to ignore. Both rotund,...
Gender-neutral performance awards at the Berlin International Film Festival
Cinema is an industry that investors think is about returning money. It does not matter to them whether the protagonist is female or male, what matters to them is the audience that pays to watch the...
Antebellum review: it isn’t enough
In a parallel universe, ”Antebellum” could feature as a perverse reboot of “Charlie’s Angels.” Picture Janelle Monáe’s ultra-confident, Afrofuturist, 21st century sociologist / yoga...
Three true crime docuseries for end-of-summer streaming
With the summer theatrical blockbuster now a remnant of the pre-pandemic past, streaming services of every corporate stripe have rushed in to fill the void. And since the true crime genre has long...
Clockers 25 years on
When Spike Lee took over directorial duties from his friend and mentor Martin Scorsese, his intention for “Clockers” was to put the, “final nail in the coffin” of the Hood genre, the cycle of...
Review: Clemency
Before watching Clemency, director Chinonye Chukwu’s meticulous dismantling of the death penalty in America, it is worth reading President Trump’s infamous 1990s full-page ad in The New York...
How cop shows serve to reinforce the racism at the heart of our culture
Mareike Jenner, Anglia Ruskin University TV police shows are a complicated strand of entertainment. Unsurprisingly, they have come under the cultural microscope in response to police brutality and...
The impact of coronavirus on the artistic scene
The world of entertainment looks dark this year. A great number of events have been cancelled and large concentrations of people banned. Tours, competitions, performances and seasons ended suddenly,...