Punk Music has always had an uneasy relationship with violence, but for all the bravado, safety pins and rioting it’s never been explicitly tied to outright murder. That was until ultra-violent thriller Green Room hit theaters. Following on from his widely praised debut, Blue Ruin, Jeremy Saulnier cranks the drama up to eleven and produces an exhilarating, albeit […]
London Film Festival 2015: The Lobster
“If you were an animal, what animal would you be?” Whether it’s the whirling infantile mind or the daydreams of a bored office worker, this thought holds a primitive interest. Clearly it’s been on Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos’ mind. The Lobster places us in a world where relationships are so important that those who haven’t found […]
London Film Festival 2015: Observance
Alfred Hitchcock, the master of the thriller film, once commented on the idea of voyeurism in a conversation with Francois Truffaut. He said, “I’ll bet you that nine out of ten people, if they see a woman across the courtyard undressing for bed, or even a man puttering around in his room… They could pull down […]
London Film Festival 2015: Anomalisa
Standing in the queue for the London Film Festival’s mysterious secret screening, all the talk was unsurprisingly concerned with what lay ahead on the mammoth screen at the Odeon in Leicester Square. Packed together like cattle, there were murmurs of The Hateful Eight or, perhaps most widely suspected, The Danish Girl. But of course you can’t second guess the […]
London Film Festival 2015: The Ones Below
Sometimes a film is intrinsically indebted to another. The Ones Below owes such gratitude to Roman Polanski’s pregnancy horror classic, Rosemary’s Baby. Building directly from another film, especially one as renowned and distinctive as Polanksi’s, adds a certain amount of pressure and expectation to a film; unfair or not, audiences expect you to either trump your predecessor or add to its legacy. […]
