Emma Seligman’s female-run comedy Bottoms is a camp reimagining of Fincher’s Fight Club: but with minimal dick swinging. Toying with the harmful stereotypes surrounding gender that have orbited conversations surrounding the original, Seligman weaves the narrative of two lesbians hellbent on setting up a self defence class in the hopes of losing their virginities to their cheerleader crushes.
Continue readingAuthor: Madison Fearn (Page 1 of 2)
The prophetic jumble of voyeuristic images that greet us in the opening moments of Emerald Fennell’s second directorial debut Saltburn construct a mesmerising festival of sharp compositions and saturated colours: quickly morphing from mere indulgence to expressions of rich symbolism under the eyes of its audience.
Linus Sandgren’s cinematography reveals a world which criticises and glorifies the spectacle of upperclassmanship in ravenous detail. As the title card bolts out over Cambridge’s stony walls, vines sprawling in school-boy graffiti from the lettering, Saltburn’s introduction acts as a neatly packaged prognosis on what is to come, briefly revealed to us and concluded like the practiced lick and seal of an envelope.
Continue reading
It was 1987 when our pizza-devouring, ass-kicking teenaged mutant ninja turtles and rat-surrogate-father splinter first kowabunga’d their way onto our screens. Since then we’ve witnessed many iterations of our beloved scaly heroes, but the odour of 80s cinematic lawlessness thrums through our amphibians cold-blooded veins irrelevant of the decade. But rehashing material dog-eared with melancholy is never an easy task. As with any other remake, directing a good new Turtles film boiled down to retaining the magic of the original, whilst simultaneously making it modern enough to resonate with a contemporary audience.
Continue reading
Burrowed within the leather-bound embrace of the humble cinema seat, there are few positions any human being seems capable of comfortably enacting; mostly consisting of fairly intuitive postures, bipedal bottom against furniture bottom and bipedal back against furniture back. You can only imagine my surprise then, when A24’s recently released horror flick Talk to Me expanded my apparently limited knowledge of the spectacular diversity of seating positions.
Halfway through my spine was flush across the bottom seat, legs jettisoned out and fingers steepled over my eyes. At particularly gruesome moments I pretzeled myself over the empty arm to my left, somehow still stretching for my friend’s hand despite my awkward angle. To be a horror fan brings with it the flirtations of mild masochism both inherent in being spectator, and in surfing through hours and hours of mediocre content. Discovering a film that elicits horror so tangible it has you physically squirming in your seat is then, for lack of a better terms, a rarity and a pleasure.
Continue reading
Upon first hearing about the Barbie movie, anybody above the age of thirteen likely met the news with an eye roll, a sigh or perhaps even an exasperated comment about the decline in original content being produced by the film industry (the latter, possibly, having escaped my own mouth).
But then, you find out it’s going to be directed by Greta Gerwig. Best known for being the writer and director of the 2019 remake of Louisa May Alcott’s classic novel Little Women and her Golden Globe winning coming-of-age comedy Ladybird, Gerwig is renowned for making films which, at the very least, are classed as being feministic. To hear she was directing the Barbie movie felt almost as shocking as discovering Vladimir Putin was starring in the next season of RuPaul’s Drag Race.
Continue reading
The year is 2023. You can place an order online and get your product delivered to your doorstep on the same day. There is a chatbot that can write your entire University essay for you in 5 minutes, with minimal need for alteration. You can put any, literally any question, into an online search engine and likely have an answer back within 2 seconds that is, at the very very least, relatively helpful.
You can do all of these things, and yet, I still had to wait 5 years for the sequel to Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Consumer culture really has done nothing to teach us the value of patience. But hey, clearly that’s what the film industry is for.
Continue reading
I’d like to air my dirty laundry straight away with the admission that my Marvel days ended, like many others’, in April 2019. Besides two of the saga’s most believed heroes still lays the fresh carcass of my longstanding interest in the MCU. Endgame, as was fairly indicated by the title, was the natural conclusion for many abiding fans of the superhero cinematic universe. It forecasted total and unavoidable change, and brought with it the unnerving realisation that a) there was about to be a big and steady cast change for our beloved hero roster and b) it was almost certainly all downhill from here.
Sure I saw No Way Home like everybody else in the whole wide world- and I enjoyed it. I even dabbled in Shang-Chi and I scrolled through some Easter egg clips from The Multiverse of Madness, but I did all this with the surprisingly liberating ignorance of somebody who only understands the mere basics of the plot and not the intricacies of the grand battles each film is slowly gearing towards. But since the original Guardians of the Galaxy got everyone’s mums, grandma’s and dogs interested in the MCU, why couldn’t it drag me back in?
Continue reading
Horror films rarely call for a sequel. Inevitably, the obligation for at least a relatively firm conclusion is embedded in the genre’s DNA. Of course there are many famous horror franchises, and as Ti West himself declared you simply “can’t make a slasher movie without a bunch of sequels”.
But despite this, I cannot think of a single time that a second instalment was actually necessary for the sake of the plot. How can there be loose ends to tie up when the haunted family, the vacationing school-friends, or the blushing newly weds have already met a grim fate? Likewise Pearl, the follow-up prequel to last years 70s inspired witty gore flick X, is a film that is, at its core, entirely unneeded. But this certainly doesn’t mean it isn’t worth a watch.
Continue reading
There is simply no world more spectacular to dip back into than that of the Wick-verse. War-dogs, bulletproof suit jackets, blood-binding markers, neutral-zone hotels and- my personal favourite addition to the roster- a blind man’s tactical doorbell motion sensors. Oh my.
It’s a miracle that Chad Stahelski manages so expertly to keep the momentum rolling from John Wick: Chapter 3 straight from the get-go of the franchise’s fourth instalment: but manage it he does. The latest film opens on our titular hero hammering his bloody fist against a makiwara before briskly cutting to a desert chase sequence on horseback, with Wick at the rear. Warning: slight spoilers incoming.
Continue reading
On a rare occasion, a film will be mentioned that I’m certain I’ve watched but can remember nearly nothing about. It will never be a terrible film so to speak. Usually in fact, it is entirely average. A film built on such weak foundations that it is totally unable to take up any permanent space in my brain.
Luther: The Fallen Sun is a prime example of a film that will surely slip into a region of total narrative amnesia for me in the coming months. Again, it’s not that this Luther adaptation is unwatchable- far from it. But it’s almost more insulting that the film is merely mediocre.
Following up the acutely popular BBC series of the same name, the announcement of a Netflix film coming in 2023 oozed with tentative potential. Despite being a detective in the Metropolitan Police Service, DCI John Luther is not exactly renowned for catching criminals by the book, which often lands him in trouble with his superiors.
Continue reading
