Category: Essays and Articles
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by Daniel Owens The routine was firmly established by now. I’d arrive home on a night after an hour’s journey from Oxford Community College where I “studied” music (“got high, failed to learn anything and screamed into a microphone in an attempt at being a metal vocalist” would be a more accurate description). I wouldn’t…
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By Samuel Leary THE EVENT On January 27th, I was lucky enough to attend Dead Duck Film Club’s screening of Park Chan-Wook’s beloved modern classic, The Handmaiden (2016), at Savoy Cinema in Nottingham. Following their Dead Duck Cult Film Festival in November (for which I previously wrote an article ) and a screening of Let…
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by Daniel E. Smith Released in 1975 through BBC2’s Playhouse teleplay anthology, Diane remains a relatively underseen work in Alan Clarke’s filmography. This may in some part be due to the undeniable bleakness of the teleplay’s subject matter, focusing on incest and rape and how one (namely, the titular Diane) learns to deal with them…
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by Ceridwen Millington Affliction (1997), starring Nick Nolte, James Coburn, Sissy Spacek and Willem Dafoe is a film that is easy to watch subjectively, feeling pity and anger as Wade Whitehouse suffers the sins of the father. The story follows the aforementioned character, a man is ostensibly a sardonic, alcoholic cop and general town dogsbody.…
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by ‘K’ In 1955, a queer-coded thriller pierced the French cinema landscape, appearing in the horizon as a tower of layered anxieties and deceit. Tensions of different kinds vertically stack up like bricks: conspiratorial, romantic, psychosexual. Some anxieties boil over a dead body that can’t be found, and others burn between living bodies that never…
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by Ros Tibbs New French Extremity: French New Wave’s Edgier and Violent Cousin One period of filmmaking that unlocked a whole new level of the medium’s artistic properties and cultural significance is the French New Wave, an art movement that rejected the traditional modes of cinema in favour of something experimental and thematic, with notable…
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This year, one of cinema’s greatest cult classics turned 30. Brighton based pop-up White Wall Cinema projects the new 4K release, prompting fascinating reflections on the film’s legacy, and enduring appeal.
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by Mary Muñoz Released in 1935, The Bride of Frankenstein, directed by James Whale, is widely regarded as one of the greatest sequels in cinematic history. Building on the foundation of Frankenstein (1931), the film expands the narrative and emotional depth of Mary Shelley’s original story, while introducing new characters and themes that resonate with…
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by Emma Arneil Being a teenager is hellish. Your body is changing at a terrifying rate. Your friendships, once solid, can now feel fraught with tension, and your parents seem to clamp down harder on you just as you’re trying to pull away. The desire for freedom, while still being stuck under someone else’s roof and rules.…
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by Billy Butler “The cowboy is the archetypal American hero: in real life he conquered the West; in his celluloid form he conquered the world.” (Sandford, 1980, P.103) The American western genre perhaps encapsulates all that Hollywood has become synonymous for; epic stories where men are ultra-masculine and women ultra-feminine and where good and evil…
