I Am Not A Serial Killer is a gripping low-budget psychological thriller that mixes the familiar coming of age themes with outright horror tropes and a touch of the supernatural. Sixteen-year-old John Wayne Cleaver (played by Max Records, the misunderstood young hero from Spike Jonze’s Where The Wild Things Are) is a troubled adolescent, a…
Oh no, again another zombie movie? Or is it the umpteenth film about the end of the world thanks to a fast spreading epidemic? “You know what?” they thought at Blumhouse Production. “Lets just mix together those two worn-out horror genres”. The result is Viral. And I have to admit, the result isn’t so bad….
Remembering Pirates is a new work by Christopher Harley, who gave us Blood Bank at the Ensemble Theatre late last year. The ‘core’ of the drama in this new play is similar to the last one by Mr Harley. Two brothers: one of them lost (Michael), the other (John) subsequently traumatised. (In Blood Bank, it…
Occasionally you encounter a low-budget film with overwhelming visual looks – like Kill Command – and that despite the limited budget. Besides that, you can also enjoy some successful performances and a narrative which is entertaining enough. It’s not very original however – we’ve seen enough films with sophisticated technologies doing crazy things because of…
A mighty confusing psychological thriller, The Girl on the Train partly suffers by overdoing the signaling of time frames on the screen. It takes ages to figure out just what is going on and by then you can’t help thinking it is all too hard. Devastated by her recent divorce, Rachel (Emily Blunt) spends her…
We don’t see many horror films from Iran, as their cinema is mainly centred around domestic dramas and social realist pieces that subtly critique the repressive regime and its patriarchal nature and religious zealotry. Last year we had the low budget A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, a low key and understated horror film…
Bold (to a point) and imaginative, writer and director Thomas Ian Doyle’s latest work Between the Sheets straddles the line between film and theatre. The contention is you don’t really need to “act” to appear on film, but theatre takes a lot more time and effort. Tristan Beckett (Jayden Popik) has signed a $32 million contract…
J G Ballard’s prescient dystopian 1975 novel High-Rise was a bleak allegory for the class warfare and decline of civilization and the breakdown of society. Ballard wrote the novel in the 70s during a period of tumultuous upheaval in the social fabric of Britain before the economic downturn and rampant unionism drove Thatcher’s conservatives into…
In 2008, Philip Roth published his 29th novel, Indignation, a story that returned him to his own youth, growing up in Newark, New Jersey before attending a small liberal arts college. One of America’s most honored and accomplished writers – having received a Pulitzer Prize – Roth was 75 years old when he turned back…
Based upon writer/director Gary Ross’ original screenplay, Free State of Jones tells the extraordinary story of a little known episode in American history. It concerns Newt Knight, a fearless Mississippi farmer, who led an unlikely band of poor white farmers and runaway slaves in an historic armed rebellion against the Confederacy at the height of…
