Paul Schrader’s Dog Eat Dog might have one of the best openings in recent memory. Without tediously itemising the whole sequence, let’s just say it involves a totally wired Willem Dafoe armed with a large knife in a lurid suburban setting where bold neon glows battle for supremacy. It’s like Schrader ingested David Lynch, Douglas Sirk, Michael Moore […]
London Film Festival 2016: The Ghoul
You’ve may not have realised it, but you’ve probably seen Gareth Tunley plenty of times on television. He’s appeared in everything from Hustle and The Thick of It to Peep Show (memorably as “more cor anglais” Gog) in the last decade. It turns out Tunley, perpetually stuck in bit parts, has now moved behind the camera and made a curiously intense psychological […]
London Film Festival 2016: The Autopsy of Jane Doe
Like Ronseal, The Autopsy of Jane Doe does exactly what it says on the tin. Writers Ian Goldberg and Richard Naing have done their research and come back with a horror film based on the meticulous process of sleuthing through a cadaver. Of course there’s more to the film than a mere autopsy — just […]
London Film Festival 2016: Brimstone
One of cinema’s greatest characters, let alone villains, is Robert Mitchum’s insidious preacher Harry Powell in Night of the Hunter. With ‘love’ and ‘hate’ emblazoned on his knuckles, Powell stalks the Southern Gothic landscape with sinister desires and an ominous aura of dread. Mitchum’s performance is one not easily forgotten or trumped. That was until […]
