The 2018 Halloween reboot tapped into horror fans’ ravenous nostalgia for the original 1978 film while delivering a strong storyline that gave the franchise a credible place in today’s world. That film’s unadorned visual style made the scares more convincing and effective while interestingly exploring the traumatic impact of knife-wielding murderer Michael Myers on heroine Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis).
Read moreWriter/director Jordan Peele’s intriguingly off-kilter, socially conscious, genre-splicing horror films, Get Out and Us have been some of Hollywood’s more interesting offerings of recent years. They weren’t for everyone, though, as the plots of those films, especially Us, were a little murky and at times made us feel we were watching a jumble of ideas rather than a coherent story.
Read moreSteadily emerging as one of the most interesting contemporary filmmakers, Alex Garland, who intrigued and unnerved us with his AI thriller Ex Machina, brings us his creepiest film yet, the oddball horror misogyny parable, Men. As anyone who has seen the evil, shiny, puppet-like face in the promo will realise, there’s something decidedly sinister at work in this film. Here,
Read moreFresh Don’t be put off by the schlocky marketing picture for the film Fresh which features a severed hand in supermarket meat packaging. While relevant to the story, it doesn’t quite do justice to what is a mostly stylish and subversive thriller. Here, single woman Noa (Daisy Edgar-Jones) having endured a string of bad dates including one with an irritating
Read moreThe fiction film featuring the real-life rock band is a dicey venture. On one hand there’s Richard Lester’s 1964 classic A Hard Day’s Night which captured the fun, wit and energy of The Beatles. On the other hand, there’s the 1978 monstrosity KISS and the Attack of the Phantoms, a film so awful the band apparently forbade anyone from mentioning
Read moreGiven director Guillermo del Toro’s catalogue of ornate gothic horror movies, it seems a film about a carnival freak show would be a career imperative. His latest movie, the confrontingly dark and creepy noir crime thriller, Nightmare Alley – which is a remake of the Edmund Goulding 1947 film – explores this unsettling and often sad world. Bradley Cooper stars
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