Aldo Iuliano’s Penalty: Short Film Review

In the middle of nowhere, on a grass patch among scattered bushes, a group of younger men is playing a game of football. It looks innocent at first, with basically no audible dialogue. But there is a growing sense of desperation and aggression involved in the game, up until the moment when one of the…

Santiago Paladines’ The Fare: Short Film Review

Somewhere in the USA, the police comes into “a drop house” – a hideaway where illegal immigrants are being kept by traffickers before transporting them deeper into the country – and what they witness is a plastic rubbish bag, filled with human waste. In it, there is a man who is barely alive, and next…

A Taxi Driver Review

“As a journalist, you shouldn’t be in a place that’s too comfortable,” German reporter Jürgen Hinzpeter says to his colleagues as they discuss the civil unrest in Gwangju, South Korea. He craves an interesting story, a chance to uncover a hidden truth to the world so when he hears about what’s happening there, he knows he must go….

The Dark Tower Review

There must be some sort of a curse, cast upon the works of Stephen King; while the novels and the stories that the man has created have thrilled and scared the living wits out of millions of readers across the globe, the majority of attempts to transfer those scaries and monsters and universes onto the…

The 25th Raindance Film Festival Programme Announced

Raindance Film Festival, the largest independent film festival in Europe, is returning for its 25th anniversary edition this year; it is slotted from September 20th to October 1st 2017, with its venue in Central London – and just yesterday, on August 15th 2017, the festival announced its 25th line-up of over 200 feature and short films. For…

Seeing Him: Short Film Review Plus Q&A with Vanessa Bailey

The theme of attraction and fantasy relationships where a woman is older than a man is clearly deficient in the cinema, while the reverse configuration finds plenty attention without anyone complaining. Seeing Him, a short film written by Vanessa Bailey and directed by Chris Jones, has finally brought what the British cinema was slightly lacking: a…

Luc Besson’s Valerian And The City Of A Thousand Planets

The Fifth Element (1997) has been both loved and bashed by critics for the past 20 years; some have even ruled it the best summer blockbuster ever made. However, not many people know that Luc Besson’s creation was partially inspired by a series of French space opera comic books called Valérian and Laureline; the connection…

Dunkirk Review

The topic of the Second World War has been depicted mainly in two ways so far, which can be represented by Steven Spielberg’s exactness and the poetic parlance of Terrence Malick; other films flicker in between these two directors’ styles. Christopher Nolan, meanwhile, with his new production – Dunkirk – took a different approach to the…

Project Itoh’s Genocidal Organ

A word, a whisper in a general’s ear, and just like that a nation will descend into chaos. Neighbour against neighbour, brother against brother, indiscriminate violence to the point where even the leaders forget exactly how it all began. How can something like this happen? And can it really be the work of one man?…

Pablo Larraín’s Neruda

The 2016 feature Neruda brings together two creators of the same (first) name – the character of the legendary Nobel prize winner and celebrated poet and political activist Pablo Neruda, whose original name was Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto, serves as the center, the source material and the inspiration to Pablo Larraín, the barely 40-year-old…