Philmology

It’s not uncommon in cinematic parlances to talk of a director as being at the peak of their career: Ford, Hitchcock, Scorsese, and Spielberg etc., have all been spoken of as having a golden period at some point or another. Were it equally fashionable however, to speak of directors as being at their lowest ebb, […]

A young, socially dysfunctional man purchases a life-size doll over the internet, then introduces her to his family and townsfolk, who eventually play along as if the doll is ‘real’. When I first heard about the plot for Lars and the Real Girl my response oscillated between enthusiasm and trepidation. While the description of the […]

“From the Visionary Director of The Bourne Identity”, so reads the promotional tagline on one of the pre-release posters for Doug Liman’s Jumper. Call it my unremitting critical cynicism but when it comes to ‘visionary directors’, the name Liman, seems strangely out of place with the likes of Welles, Hitchcock, Bergman, Kurosawa, Marker, or Fellini. […]

This year, as part of its 60th anniversary, the Cannes Film Festival sought out over thirty directors from around the globe to produce a short film of three minutes in length on the theme of ‘the cinema’. The resultant product, To Each His Own Cinema, is both a showcase of the film industry’s talents (both […]

On the 18th May 1980, Ian Curtis, the lead singer of UK band ‘Joy Division’, committed suicide. For many people, the revelation of Curtis’ death will come as no surprise. In Control, his demise is foreshadowed from early on in the film, expressed in Curtis’ existential ponderings through a softly spoken voice-over. “Existence?” he muses, […]

In an era where sex has infiltrated almost every level of culture, through advertising, Internet pornography, chat rooms, txt flirt, single bars, soap operas, gossip rags, religion, and even politics, it seems difficult to fathom how D.H. Lawrence’s “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” was at one time the source of great controversy. For director Pascale Ferran, the […]

A woman dressed in a fur coat is walking through a shopping mall. Suddenly, a man carrying a baseball bat approaches and beats her to the ground. Stripping the coat from her lifeless body he wanders casually away. A title card fades up on screen; “What if you were killed for you coat?” It’s a […]

There’s a term that film critics often use to describe a work that captures and magnifies some enduring characteristic of our population: the ‘human condition’. It’s an overarching term with various existential connotations, one that’s too often applied as a kind of linguistic ‘get out of jail free’ card when confronted with imagery at once […]

It may seem slightly unusual to be reviewing two films together that, at first glance, share little in common. Interview, a satirical drama, was directed by, co-written and stars Steve Buscemi, a performer better known for his awkward screen persona than his work behind the camera (Trees Lounge). Bug, a paranoiac thriller, is the latest […]

Like the second coming of Christ it would be something of an understatement to say that The Simpsons Movie has been eagerly awaited. After years of rumours, innuendo, and a script-in-progress that’s been shrouded in more secrecy than the Ark of the Covenant, America’s longest running animated series has finally made it to the big […]