Knife + Heart (2018)

I was so keen to see Knife + Heart (2018; Un couteau dans le coeur), a queer take on the giallo genre, when it showed at the French Film Festival a few years back. I missed it at cinemas and was meaning to catch up with it – thank the neon-lit heavens for Mubi keeping […]

Farewell, My Lovely (1975)

I love neo-noir as a genre, so there’s only a few I haven’t seen in the recent Criterion Channel ‘Neo-Noir’ collection. So that’s why I watched Farewell, My Lovely (1975), which is a more traditional take on the film noir style with Robert Mitchum playing Raymond Chandler’s character of private detective Phillip Marlowe. I think […]

Redbelt (2008)

I love Redbelt (2008) in spite of myself. Writer-director David Mamet has a way with words, but despite all his pretensions, he’s in love with macho bullshit as any other blockbuster action type. The movie is set in the world of Mixed Martial Arts competitions and has an eclectic cast that mixes Mamet regulars like […]

The Last Boy Scout (1991)

I used to watch the Bruce Willis-Damon Wayans action flick, The Last Boy Scout (1991) repeatedly as a 15 year old, positioning it as a ‘gritty’ R 18+ rated alternative to Die Hard even though I was often rewatching a TV edit that whittled away all the F-words and excessive blood-letting. Over the successive decades, […]

Buzzard (2014)

Heavy metal music blaring and a freak out over a busted Nintendo power glove, this is the first scene of dark indie comedy, Buzzard (2014), one of the several collaborations between Michigan based director Joel Potrykus and star Joshua Burge. I loved their last film together from 2018, the surreal Relaxer, and I was keen […]