Features 596
Calamity of a Zombie Girl
By Andrew Osmond. Calamity of a Zombie Girl is a horror film. If we’re being more precise, it’s a schlocky horror picture show, and it doesn’t pretend otherwise. It’s a film in which college-age students investigate an occult mystery, uncover something they shouldn’t, and then start dying messily. There will be blood. Heads will be […]
First Love
by Jeremy Clarke. A boxer with no fear of death. Japanese yakuza, Chinese triads. A bag of drugs. A girl sold into prostitution. Director Takeshi Miike’s latest is a potent cocktail of these ingredients, a mass of mayhem orchestrated with his trademark pace, panache and energy. And yet, as its 14th February UK release date […]
Millennium Actress
By Jasper Sharp. Satoshi Kon’s Millennium Actress (screening next month at the Glasgow Film Festival), uses its heroine to explore themes of subjectivity and spectatorship, with a topic that might at first seem better suited to live action. In all those elements, it bears some similarities with his debut feature Perfect Blue (1997), which pitched […]
King’s Game
By Andrew Osmond. King’s Game is a horror anime. More specifically, it’s a teen-horror anime, in which school-age characters are terrorised by a mysterious killer, called “King.” This self-styled royal murderer doesn’t need a mask or a knife. He (or she or it) speaks through a medium hardwired into the minds of millennials, the mobile […]
The End of Weathering with You
By Andrew Osmond. Two years ago, this blog ran a spoiler-filled article discussing the end of Makoto Shinkai’s blockbuster Your Name. Now, after the cinema run of Shinkai’s follow-up Weathering with You, we give it the same treatment. The discussion will involve huge SPOILERS for both Weathering and Your Name, so consider yourself warned.