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 Oracle (1985)

After seeing the repulsive yet effective thriller, Tenement, I was interested to see more of director Roberta Findlay’s mainstream 1980s genre work, after a previous decade of working in exploitation and pornography. The Oracle (1985) is a low-budget supernatural horror movie that uses the planchette as its hook – a silver artificial hand in a […]

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 […]

Doppelganger (2003)

Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s The Nutty Professor (Jerry Lewis version). Collaborating with his favourite leading man, Koji Yakusho, writer-director Kurosawa opens Doppelganger (2003) in the existential dread familiar from something like Cure. A scientist, who is working on robotic wheelchair that would help disabled people through concentration and muscular impulses, sees himself in public, a person who […]