Movie Musings

Girl Power? The strange suppression of female superheroes

by Matthew Hammond 26 April 2012

Supergirl. Barb Wire. Elektra. Catwoman. These four distinct super heroines are all strong-willed, powerful and determined role models from the world of comics. They all, however, share a specific critical legacy: each have been the stars of eponymous films that have crashed commercially, critically and financially. Without exception.

Read the full article →

The Road Less Travelled: Possessed Vehicle Movies

by Graham Gough 16 February 2012

By Graham Gough The possessed vehicle sub-genre is a strange beast, a disgruntled and mostly aggressive child of the road movie and horror fest. These films are less about characters trying to escape their mundane or horrible lives and more about characters seeking escape from driverless, demon-fuelled automobiles which will stop at nothing to consume [...]

Read the full article →

Best of British: Kes (DVD)

by Maryann O'Connor 6 February 2012

By Maryann O’Connor On the surface, Kes is a touching portrayal of the life of a working class lad in the 1960s but it could just as easily be the story of any working class child, in any decade.

Read the full article →

2012: Film Futures That Might Have Been

by Helen Cox 1 January 2012

By Helen Cox Hungover today? Still got Auld Lang Syne, officially the most depressing song ever written, ringing in your ears? No matter how bleak things seem this morning you have one thing to be grateful for: there is a distinct line between film and reality. At least that’s what I’m told. If this were [...]

Read the full article →

Why I Hate Film #4: Other People

by Adam Glasspool 17 October 2011

By Adam Glasspool It may surprise some of you to read that I’ve never murdered anybody. I may come across in these articles as frustrated and angry, and I am, but I’ve never actually pulled a Charles Bronson on the people who have wronged me.

Read the full article →

Jurassic Park (1993): Then and Now

by Maryann O'Connor 29 September 2011

By Maryann O’Connor When I sank back into my plush red cinema seat last weekend, I felt just as excited about the film I was about to see as I had been when I first saw it, eighteen years previously.

Read the full article →

Slow-Cooked Sequels: Does money never sleep?

by Nicky Branagh 14 September 2011

By Nicky Branagh Have you noticed that delayed sequels have been particularly prevalent at the local multiplexes over the last few years? Long-awaited film follow-ups are nothing particularly new; the 8os saw just such a trend: consider the likes of Psycho II (1983), appearing 23 years after Hitchcock’s classic and Scorcese’s The Color of Money (1986), [...]

Read the full article →

Hollywood and its world influence: How long will it last?

by Tim Oliver 10 August 2011

By Tim Oliver The turn of the 20th century saw the development of cinema as a technology. It was a technology that continued to develop and, along with it, a desire surfaced to sell and consume it as a means of entertainment. Enter stage left Hollywood with its classical studio system, its stars and its [...]

Read the full article →

2011: The Year of the Documentary

by Lucia Hodgson 26 July 2011

By Lucia Hodgson Reportedly, whilst speaking at the increasingly extolled Sheffield International Documentary Film Festival this year, filmmaker Steve James hailed a ‘golden age of documentary film-making. 2011 has already witnessed an epoch-inducing influx of documentaries with the subjects just as diverse as their creators.

Read the full article →

The Last Action Hero?

by Kezia Tooby 19 July 2011

By Kezia Tooby Do you remember a time when Hollywood action heroes were excessively muscular, swore a lot and could fight off swarms of enemies with their physicality alone? A time when heroes were never once affected by their injuries? If you cast your mind back to the Eighties and Nineties you will recall the [...]

Read the full article →

Why I hate film #2: Vom-com

by Adam Glasspool 18 July 2011

By Adam Glasspool I once genuinely chased a girl to the airport. Not in a rapey way, you understand, but because she was leaving the country, I was in love with her and I needed to tell her how I felt. Deep down I hoped that she’d change her mind and stay. A quagmire of [...]

Read the full article →