Screen Rats

“I n Korean cinema, there is Before Oldboy and After Oldboy,” US distributor Neon proclaimed when promoting the 20th anniversary theatrical re-release of Park Chan-woo…

A s a film critic gets older, perhaps it’s inevitable that you begin to look at the film releases of your youth with rose-tinted glasses on, lamenting that the general…

T here’s a bit at the end of 1997’s The Matrix where Neo attains God Genius status and is able to see the binary code inside the malevolent machine that he and his hel…

S ome directors make films to be artists. Others, to be entertainers. Ousmane Sembène saw film as the most effective tool for political activism. “Of all the arts”, he…

T here’s a little aside at about the midpoint of Joe Lawlor and Christine Molloy’s essay/diary/dream film, The Future Tense, where we see some comically strobed footag…

F rom Greyfriars Bobby to Isle of Dogs via Lassie Come Home, the relationship between man and canine has delighted cinemagoers since the very birth of the medium, and…

T he enemy of romance is heartbreak, but both are reliably sharp tools for a writer as they craft a work of fiction from imaginative scenarios that may contain just in…

A fter his dystopian sci-fi THX 1138 failed at the box office, George Lucas was challenged by his friend Francis Ford Coppola to write a film that would appeal to main…

I n the Internet age there has always been one universal truth: boys kissing will always be cute. Be it gifs, porn, or the chaste hand-holding of the Heartstopper boys…

F reaky Friday means something. It has done since 1972, when Mary Rogers first published a children’s novel bearing the alliterative title, and the phrase was further …

E xcuse the cliché, but for most romantics, the notion of ‘home’ tends to be tied to a person – be it a lover, friend, family member – rather than a place. This statem…