Since we’ve been able to invent stories, we’ve had fantasies about creating artificial versions of ourselves, but in “playing god” we often end up faced with unruly creatures or machines which rebel against us or even worse become our masters.
With Scanners, his occasionally gory telepath thriller, David Cronenberg made a significant move from low-budget horror towards the mainstream.
The latest Flipside release from the BFI, Bill Forsyth’s That Sinking Feeling, is like a cross between a gritty Ken Loach working class story and a Children’s Film Foundation fantasy of kid empowerment.
The consequences of one man’s decision in Steven Knight’s Locke outweigh the fate of the world in Doug Liman’s Edge of Tomorrow.
Frank Pavich’s remarkable documentary allows the audience to see Alejandro Jodorowsky’s unfilmed Dune as one of the greatest movies never made.
Once again, I’ve fallen way behind in commenting on the movies I’ve been watching: ’60s political agitprop, mind-bending time travel, demonic possession, cheesy B monster movies, Cold War submarines and futuristic trains …
Two disks illustrate the spectrum of British genre production in the ’70s and ’80s: Pete Walker’s cinematic horror Frightmare and David Rudkin’s epic BBC fantasy Artemis 81.
Continuing a brief survey of the past month’s disk viewing; sci-fi, horror and Archer, an animation discovery which is one of the best current series.
A survey of recent viewing covers approaches to realism, metaphor, horror and war in a range of films from the 1920s to the 2010s.
The concept of genre is endlessly malleable, permitting filmmakers to borrow, invent, mix and match narrative elements to create a seemingly inexhaustible array of stories which combine familiar elements in new, or not so new, ways.