horror
Kieron Tyler
Although FW Murnau’s pre-America years will always be defined by 1922’s Nosferatu, he’d already racked up nine films in the preceding three years. He made his mark on Hollywood with the 1927 landmark Sunrise but, although being overshadowed by Nosferatu, his earlier German films reveal how he reached these points. Schloss Vogelöd (also known as The Haunted Castle) is a Murnau obscurity, a stately, atmospheric meditation from 1921 that’s capable of giving the willies.But they take a while manifesting themselves. The straightforward plot is drawn out. Every scene is a carefully staged set piece Read more ...
Matt Wolf
As further proof that Shakespeare plays come these days not as single spies but in battalions, the London leg of the all-male Propeller ensemble's lengthy tour has pitched up in the capital in time to deliver their Richard III within days of Kevin Spacey's debut in that very role at the Old Vic. Think of it as the battle for supremacy over the Bard's second-longest play or not, one thing seems clear: you're unlikely to find as abundantly bloody and brutal an account of this particular Shakespearean horror show for some while to come. Is director Edward Hall bidding to become the British Read more ...
fisun.guner
Is Don’t Look Now really the best British film of all time? That’s how a panel of 150 industry experts voted earlier this year in a poll compiled by Time Out. But then, out of a list of 100 top British movies, Distant Voices, Still Lives came third, ahead of Brief Encounter (12) or anything by Hitchcock.Nicolas Roeg’s 1973 supernatural chiller no longer shocks with its infamous scene of explicit sex; and the scenes featuring the two spooky sisters remind us that Roeg’s interest in cinematography and clever editing seems often to outweigh his interest in getting the best out of his actors. But Read more ...
hilary.whitney
There is something rather bloody-minded and heroic about Nicolas Roeg’s films with their fractured narratives, macabre imagery and extremes of sex and violence which place him, along with film-makers such as Ken Russell and Roger Corman, within a very particular but thrilling seam of dark English Romanticism.Now aged 82, Roeg, who was born in London, is responsible for some of the most provocative images in cinema – alien sex in The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), a teenage Jenny Agutter getting her kit off in the Australian outback in Walkabout (1970) and - possibly the most famous of Read more ...
josh.spero
Psychoville, whose first series was made on such a low budget that one episode was filmed in one room in one take (having the additional benefit of being an homage to Rope), used all the extra cash thrown at it to horrifying effect in its second series finale. A Jacobean plot, with a revivified cryogenically stored Nazi's head and a cremation while alive, was animated with the best technology licence fee payers' cash can give, and instead of being chucked up the wall, it gave TV's creepiest series a fine send-off.If you haven't been following the series, try this for a precis: the Read more ...
emma.simmonds
With more claret than a blood bank and more skin than a nudist colony, True Blood is HBO at its most gleefully provocative. Unencumbered by the cerebral depth of The Sopranos, the social conscience of The Wire, or the historical obligations of Deadwood, it’s a two-backed beast of a TV show. That’s not to say it’s not smart or satirical, but from its opening credits it announces its dishonourable intentions as a gravelly voiced stranger croons, “I wanna do bad things with you.”Based on the novels by Charlaine Harris, True Blood is the televisual brainchild of Six Feet Under’s Alan Ball. It Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Feminism it certainly isn’t, though it is bizarrely refreshing to observe that the heroine fleeing a maniac in a state of comely undress is in her mid-forties. It might be baby steps rather than huge strides of progress but nevertheless, The Orphanage’s Belén Rueda once again makes a cheeringly mature and cerebral, yet still hauntingly beautiful scream siren. It’s a shame that Julia’s Eyes as a whole lacks her class and consistency.The Spanish director Guillem Morales’s second feature (after 2004’s The Uncertain Guest) is an entertaining shambles which begins with the death of Sara ( Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Several years ago the film career of Simon Pegg was launched by Shaun of the Dead, a comic tribute to the low-budget killer-zombie flick. Pegg has long since moved on to bigger, if not always better, things. Without him the film’s producers have returned to the same thematic patch, but with one crucial difference. This time the invading force is stalking not white middle-class slackers in their thirties but a tooled-up posse of teenage boys from the ‘hood. It feels like a much fairer fight.Earlier on this week on Front Row there was much talk of so-called negative stereotyping in Attack the Read more ...
anne.billson
In Wake Wood, Aidan Gillen and Eva Birthistle play a married couple who lose their nine-year-old daughter in horrific circumstances. In mainstream cinema, this would lead to the earnest soul-searching and Oscar-bait performances of films like In the Bedroom, The Door in the Floor or Rabbit Hole. But Wake Wood is the latest film from the new-model Hammer Film Productions. Which of course means the soul-searching is followed by lots of running, and screaming, and blood.In Wake Wood, Aidan Gillen and Eva Birthistle play a married couple who lose their nine-year-old daughter in horrific Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
Dark this new one-act drama by American playwright Neil LaBute may be; deep, not so much. It has all the author’s usual hallmarks: an accumulation of sinister tension, disturbing sexual politics, the threat of violence. And in a taut, pacey production heralded by an opening soundtrack of punishingly loud grunge-rock music and directed by LaBute himself, it’s acted with conviction by Olivia Williams and Matthew Fox, best known for TV’s Lost. The writing also makes murkily playful use of fairytale imagery and undercurrents of classical tragedy. But for all its slick style, its narrative is a Read more ...
Nick Hasted
If you’ve seen Tomas Alfredson’s remarkable Swedish adaptation of John Alfrede Lindqvist’s vampire novel Let the Right One In, then this US remake by Matt Reeves is far from required viewing. He shadows the original so closely, you’ll never be surprised or scared. But like a loving cover version of a favourite hit, there are pleasures in the riffs he plays.The idea of a lonely, bullied 12-year-old boy bonding with a similarly isolated girl who tells him she’s been 12 “for a very long time”, due to being a vampire, works as well in Los Alamos, New Mexico as on Alfredson’s bleak Swedish housing Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
Like the misbegotten monster at its heart, this stage version of Mary Shelley’s seminal novel is stitched together from a number of discrete parts; and though some of the pieces are in themselves extremely handsome, you can all too clearly see the joins. Here’s a bit of half-baked dance theatre, there a scene of simple, touching humanity. And for each dollop of broad ensemble posturing, there’s a visually stunning scenic effect. In the midst of it all are two excellent performances by Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller, who alternate in the roles of vauntingly ambitious Read more ...