Film

Adolescence: Can TV spark radical change in young men?

Adolescence is just another example of art acting as a conversation piece. The recent series has inspired much conversation after it has highlighted how harmful online misogynistic and ‘incel...

Please, no more biopics!

A few weeks ago, Sam Mendes announced his casting for the Beatles biopics he...

Going Dreamy: The Singular Will of David Lynch

In a behind-the-scenes clip from David Lynch’s final project, Twin Peaks: The Return, a...

Missing the plot of ‘Wuthering Heights’: Is the book always better?

Sophie Price discusses Emerald Fennell's upcoming film adaptation of Withering Heights, examining how much film adaptations can get away with changing.

Review: West Side Story (2021)

CW: sexual assault. For musical theatre purists and sceptics alike, Steven Spielberg’s reboot of West Side Story remains a hard sell. According to the naysayers,...

Barbie reborn

CW: Body image When I learnt that a new Barbie film is coming out in 2023, my first reaction was excitement. The batch of...

Queer As Folk: Pride is where community is

"Yet the message carried in this little soap opera bubble is nonetheless heartening: that the queer community is supportive and inclusive, and that for the very vulnerable, it’s often more loving and nourishing than the institutions and relatives that have failed to accept them."

Review – No Time to Die

No Time to Die has emerged from all of its production chaos triumphant, dusting itself off and adjusting its shirt cuffs with all the effortless sophistication of its protagonist.

The future of film in a post-pandemic world

Is the cinematic experience in danger of decline?

Athletics and aesthetics – how the media is sexualising athletes

The device of the camera itself is one which creates an uneven power dynamic between the viewer and the camera’s subject.

Review: How The Suicide Squad brings the Director’s Cut back to life

“I’m a superhero,” cries Polka-Dot Man in the third act of the film. “I’m not just a superhero movie,” screams The Suicide Squad for the entire 2h12m runtime. James Gunn’s movie perfectly captures the essence of his source material, while also challenging  the conventions of Marvel/DC films. Gunn  has done this in a year that has seen Zack Snyder’s Justice League released while demands continue for #ReleaseTheAyerCut, but he has risen above these controversies and put his stamp on the project. And so, The Suicide Squad comes as an entertaining breath of fresh air.  

Feminist or Anti-feminist: Responses to Promising Young Woman

CW: sexual assault and rape, suicide “Every week, I go to a club, and every week, I act like I’m too drunk to stand. And...

Review – Zola

Melding literary mystique with a sugary, hyper-digital aesthetic, Bravo plays within a territory of cinema yet to be charted.

Review – Summer of Soul

Summer of Soul, which seamlessly interweaves original festival footage with contemporary interviews and news footage from the time, is truly brilliant. To say that the film merely shows the absolute talent of many of these performers would be an incredible understatement – the film positively resurrects them.

Too Horny to Handle? Demonising sex on reality TV

Watching Too Hot to Handle, you would think that we were living in the Victorian era rather than the sexually liberated society that many of us recognise.

Review- In the Heights

“No pare, sigue, sigue” (a Spanish aphorism which translates as “don’t stop, keep going, keep going”) is a particularly catchy recurring motif from the...

The Time-Travelling of Television

'The truth is that travelling to different time periods might even give us a better awareness of the idiosyncrasies of our own era – an era which, for all its shortcomings, could well be the golden age of the television series as we know it.'

UFOs, Space Baboons, and Masculinity

Somehow, “Pentagon confirms UFOs may exist” barely registers as news. It’s a shame, since our cultural obsession with the great unknown of outer space...

Accidentally in Love: Shrek Twenty Years Later

I watched Shrek for the first time when I was two years old. It quickly became a daily habit: my parents would plonk me...

Review – Spiral: From the Book of Saw

My friend and I arrived about thirty minutes late to see Spiral: From the Book of Saw in the cinema. It didn’t particularly matter....

Submarine: A Study in Soundtrack Writing

'Nothing is done by halves in this film, including the emotional intensity; when you’re watching, you feel at all times like you’re stuck in Oliver’s head, forced to hear all of his fifteen-year-old-boy thoughts and schemes. The soundtrack follows all of this perfectly, letting Oliver’s state of mind bleed through into the lyrics, which is the key to what makes Turner’s music so powerful and so fitting to the film.'

Tragic Female Friendship in The Pursuit of Love

'In everything from Little Women to My Brilliant Friend, Lady Bird to The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants, women are offered a pretty clear choice: do you want to be sexy, or clever? Do you want to be stimulated, or happy? According to Mortimer, you can’t have both.'

Cannibal coming-of-age: Julia Ducournau’s Raw

'Raw is gross and disgusting, but it is also an important story about acceptance, about what makes us normal, and about our relationship with what we eat. Though the very idea of the film is sickening, disgust is central to the point it wants to make.'

The Epic Highs and Lows of Riverdale

'Riverdale is the teen drama to end all teen dramas. What started off as a fairly standard show about a teen murder mystery has evolved into essentially a parody of itself. '