Reflection In A Dead Diamond (2025)

What I appreciate about Helene Cattet and Bruno Forzani (Let The Corpses Tan, The Strange Colour Of Your Body’s Tears) as filmmakers is that they are fetishists. Drawing upon memories of genre cinema – a gesture, a moment, a flourish – and not simply re-creating them, but deconstructing and exploding them. With Reflection in a […]

The Grapes Of Death (1978)

When choosing something to watch, there’s often a scene early on that clinches for me whether I’ve made the right choice or not. For The Grapes Of Death (1978), directed by French exploitation filmmaker Jean Rollin, when the protagonist Elizabeth (Marie-Georges Pascal) is running for her life through the French countryside, completely alone within the […]

Eileen (2023)

Eileen (2023) is a character study. It’s also about stretching out the tension. The question keeps occurring: where is all this going? It’s the mid-1960s, it’s wintery and grey Massachusetts. Eileen works as a secretary in a prison. She looks after an alcoholic ex-cop father. She has daydreams about sex, or about killing her father. As […]

Here (2023)

Two characters walk through a Belgian forest on the outskirts of the city. A shot follows one of the characters as they move, and the sound design emphasises the ambience of nature. The leaves rustling, the wind, and cracking trees. We don’t hear the human footsteps as they trudge, and as we see between bushes, […]

New Jerusalem (2011)

New Jerusalem (2011) takes the trope of the talkative co-worker to an intimate, thoughtful level. In a Virginian garage, two men are first seen moving tires around the driveway. Sean (Colm O’Leary) is brooding and quiet, opening up a little to the inquisitive Ike (Will Oldham). Originally from Ireland, but having served in the US […]