Film posts
Join me for my 2025 #ArthouseSummer as I watch “arthouse” films until the end of August.
I've posted reviews of films off and on for years, but it only became regular when I attempted the 2020 #31DaysofHorror film challenge. I discovered I loved having a structure around watching films, and making myself write a few paragraphs embedded the film a little more in my brain. That led to watching the films of David Lynch in chronological order in 2021, and then Dario Argento in 2024.
I find it hard to choose what to watch these days because almost everything is available at any point in time. A film challenge is a form of curation. It helps me start and provides guide ropes as I go. I still like to post a review when I fancy though.
May 18 2021, 17:41
Wild at Heart (1990)
Wild at Heart is a series of deliberately melodramatic, hyper-violent and sexual scenes stitched together into a road movie, with a tenuously-made connection to the Wizard of Oz.
May 12 2021, 15:02
Blue Velvet (1986)
Blue Velvet has a fearsome reputation but is also culturally beloved. Dennis Hopper’s over-the-top performance has become iconic, and its themes foreshadow those in the massively popular Twin Peaks.
May 09 2021, 20:10
Dune (1984)
I went into Dune thinking I would see something the critics were missing – I mean, how could the director of Eraserhead and The Elephant Man direct a complete dud? – and... it’s so over-the-top, it manages to not be awful.
May 06 2021, 18:40
The Elephant Man (1980)
The Elephant Man is as traditional and straightforward as Eraserhead is surreal and obtuse. Both are black and white, and Lynch does use some dream imagery in The Elephant Man, but they’re at opposite end of the narrative spectrum.
May 02 2021, 13:35
Eraserhead (1977)
So imaginative and pure and watchable and laugh-out-loud funny, which I didn’t expect at all. A psychosexual puzzle about the horrors of unplanned parenthood, marriage, intimacy, capitalism, poverty, dreams – you can take it any direction you like.
December 15 2020, 20:55
She Dies Tomorrow (2020)
This isn’t a horror film, though it is marketed as one. The camera is often still as figures move towards us, faces blurred by lights or shadows, which creates a sense of dread.
December 03 2020, 21:42
A Short Film About Love (1988)
Tomek is nineteen, lonely and living with his possessive godmother in a Polish apartment block. Every evening he spies on Magda through his telescope when she comes home from work.
November 27 2020, 13:50
Creepy (2017)
The films of Kiyoshi Kurosawa were a revelation to me in October’s #31DaysOfHorror — I started with Pulse (2001), then went back to Cure (1997), and both were masterpieces.
October 31 2020, 08:00
Doctor Sleep (2019)
Danny Torrance is an alcoholic, but finds a place of peace and sobriety in New Hampshire, where he uses his shine to ease the deaths of the elderly people in a local hospice.
October 30 2020, 08:00
The Bride of Frankenstein (1935)
The Bride of Frankenstein contains some of the most iconic images in cinema, but it opens with a scene I really didn’t expect — Lord Byron and Percy Shelley praising Mary Shelley for her book, Frankenstein.
October 29 2020, 08:00
The Exorcist (1973)
A cultural behemoth. It’s an astonishing film and deserves the plaudits. As I watched it, the question that kept coming up in my mind was, why Regan?
October 28 2020, 08:00
Tenebre (1982)
Tenebre is set in Rome, but we could be anywhere, because the story stays in hotel rooms, suburban streets and modernist buildings made of concrete and glass.
October 27 2020, 08:00
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)
People in the background of shots look directly at the camera. A windscreen is a web of cracks that we struggle to see through. The score is spidery and jarring, and the camera is often off-kilter.
October 26 2020, 08:00
Land of the Dead (2005)
I’d been so careful in choosing the films up to this point, but for one night I thought I’d just go with something random, and here we are. Land of the fucking Dead.
October 25 2020, 08:00
Christine (1983)
Stephen King is brilliant at weaving vivid teenage experiences into his novels. Christine was one of the formative books of my childhood. But this is a horror film first and foremost.
October 24 2020, 08:00
Prom Night (1980)
Like Scream’s Ghostface, the killer in Prom Night can be dodged and knocked over. This is not Michael Myers. There is a lot of disco.
October 23 2020, 08:00
A Cure for Wellness (2017)
The vampiric financial services industry meets the parasitic wellness industry in a fairy tale where an ambitious young man is sent to a Swiss sanitorium to bring back his company’s rogue CEO.
October 22 2020, 08:00
The Dead Center (2019)
In a Nashville morgue, an unnamed man comes back to life and walks out. A short, sharp film, less than ninety minutes, and it zips along.
October 21 2020, 08:00
It Follows (2015)
The film opens with a wide shot of a leafy suburban street, and we look closely for whatever we think the director wants us to see. Like Jay, we are trained from the start to scan the horizon for trouble.
October 20 2020, 08:00
The Beyond (1980)
There is a portal to hell in the basement, and people get mysteriously hurt while working in the house. Like Hellraiser a few years later, the dead return to claim the ones that escape from hell.
October 19 2020, 08:00
#Alive (2020)
After Fulci’s barely moving dead, these running zombies are a bit of a shock. Technology is an ally, but the adult Joon-woo seems to be in a semi-infantile state.<< < Previous | Next > >>