Screen Rats

I love supermarkets. Whenever I’m in a new place, I like to scope out the terrain by visiting the nearest grocery shop. Target, Monoprix, Edeka, Coop – I treat these …

A logical point of comparison for John Michael McDonagh’s The Forgiven is Babel, Alejandro González Iñárritu ’s sweeping 2006 narrative of interwoven stories. While t…

A 24’s latest bloodfest Bodies Bodies Bodies is a sardonic riff on The House Party – the only trope in Hollywood that has its own smell. Following the tang of teen spi…

A pologies for kicking things off on a morbid note, but the South Korean director Park Chan-wook will likely go to his grave being remembered for the image of a man sc…

F ew movies arrive with a wind beneath their wings quite like Michael Flatley’s Blackbird, which was produced in 2018 but will finally hit UK and Irish cinema screens …

Before a showing of Beast, you might be treated to a trailer for an upcoming re-release of Jaws , drawing a rather unfortunate comparison. While Spielberg’s film was a…

A t the end of John Carpenter’s 1982 sci-fi horror The Thing, two men sit across from each other, waiting. R.J. MacReady (Kurt Russell), and Childs (Keith David) are t…

C elebrated screen hardman Ray Chinda (OC Ukeje) is having a really bad time of it: the spice has been drained from his relationship; he’s addicted to internet porn; h…

A s the superhero movie has become the dominant face of both genre and blockbuster cinema, the definition of what a “strong female character” has changed alongside it.…

I s there anything that Penélope Cruz can’t do? She has, perhaps by stealth, revealed herself as one of the most exciting and versatile actors on the planet. With a re…

E ven cursory followers of the Premier League would likely have been aware of Arsenal’s disastrous start to the 21/22 campaign – winless and goalless after three games…

N ow only a month and change out, the London Film Festival has kicked its buzz-stoking into high gear with the announcement of yet another programming section, this ti…

O n our screens, the image of young adulthood is so hyper-aestheticised that seeing a film about the Latvian rave scene titled Neon Spring might tempt us to locate it …

C ollectively we’ve never been more disillusioned with marriage: an awareness of the social contract’s gendered distribution of labour, in tandem with women’s increasi…

R egency is back in style with a slew of Jane Austen adaptations jostling for attention alongside authors riffing on the classics. Mr. Malcolm’s List falls into the la…

U nfolding over the course of one evening, Lee Haven Jones’ directorial debut sees an affluent Welsh MP and his family hosting a dinner party at their garishly moderni…

W e may decry the idea of pandemic movies, but it’s perhaps unavoidable that cinema is being used to attempt some kind of ‘great processing’ of the last few years – an…