BY ROGER WATSON Of all the films I have watched, Straw is one of the most painful—but it is meant to be. The title presumably refers to the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. Straw (2025) tells the story of a woman living in dire circumstances, whose situation escalates from terrible to tragic, ultimately breaking her. Janiyah Wiltkinson, portrayed powerfully by Taraji P. Henson, is a single mother … Continue reading Straw
BY ROGER WATSON I only recently came across The Zone of Interest, released in 2023 to critical acclaim and solid box office returns. With its limited UK cinema release, I might have missed it entirely if not for Cathay Pacific’s in-flight entertainment system. Filmed in German with English subtitles, the movie explores the domestic life of Rudolf Höss, the longest-serving commandant of Auschwitz. Although it … Continue reading The Zone of Interest
BY ROGER WATSON The film Sisu, made in 2022, had passed me by. A box office success on its release in the United States, I don’t recall it being shown in the United Kingdom. But it is available now on Netflix and if you like a good revenge movie with Nazis dying in ways you never imagined possible, then Sisu is the film for you. … Continue reading Sisu
BY ROGER WATSON The persistent and gripping trailers for The Gorge (2025) on Apple TV+ put it high on my list of films to watch. While I am not sure the film lived up to the trailers, literally cliffhangers as the film is about a gorge, this was quite an enjoyable diversion. The film has a limited cast, most of whom play a minor role … Continue reading The Gorge
BY ROGER WATSON The Monk and the Gun (2023) emerges from the relatively new but thriving Bhutanese film industry, centring on events from 2008 when Bhutan held its first general election. The King had shocked the nation by abdicating ahead of the elections, leading to unease among the population, particularly as the internet had only just arrived in the country. This film prompted me to … Continue reading The Monk and the Gun
BY ROGER WATSON If you were intending to watch Frank Caruso’s Mary over the festive season, prepare yourself for a Christmas turkey like no other. This film is essentially ‘Mary: the Prequel’, as Caruso attempts to narrate the story of Mary leading up to and immediately following the birth of Jesus. We know very little about Mary prior to her betrothal to Joseph and The … Continue reading Mary
BY ROGER WATSON Scrolling through the menu of films on the BA flight from London to Hong Kong recently, I came across Freud’s Last Session. I would not have been interested had it not been for the face of Britain’s national treasure and veteran actor Anthony Hopkins below the title. The premise of the film is that, in his final days while dying of cigar-induced … Continue reading A Fraud’s Last Session
BY MAX WALLER My immediate first impression after watching Yorgos Lanthimos’ ‘Poor Things’ (2024) was that it is essentially an expensive, surreal and hyper-expressionist Hammer horror-style movie for the 21st century with a considerable number of Tinto Brass-like sex scenes thrown in for good measure. Whatever aspirations it has to say something meaningful I’m not so sure it succeeds but it certainly attempts to have … Continue reading The Emancipation Of Bella Baxter
BY MILDA URBONAITE If you’re in your 30s and older calling the 80s retro can sound harsh and, let’s face it, a little depressing. Luckily, with the retro title comes sweet nostalgia for all the weird and crazy things the decade has given us. One of those things is incredible Christmas movies, many of which in hindsight make us go “wait, what”? With the season … Continue reading The Ultimate 80’s Christmas Movies
BY ANDREW MOODY When I was a young teenager in the early nineties, I used to tape old movies on VHS and watch them early in the morning before school. I loved most of them, but certain titles, like Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950), have stuck with me for decades. The first real example of a Hollywood movie about Hollywood, Sunset Boulevard still retains its … Continue reading Sunset Boulevard
BY ANDREW MOODY Anybody in their mid thirties to forties will remember the glory that was Danny Boyle’s extraordinary adaptation of the Irvine Welsh novel Trainspotting. The sequel, T2, arrived twenty years later, purely as a money making operation by what’s left of Hollywood in the age of CGI McMovies. One morning on the breakfast show on Absolute Radio all the DJs sighed and said … Continue reading T2
BY ANDREW MOODY Back in the early nineties my family got cable. There were two movie channels back then, and when Coppola’s flawed but in many ways brilliant adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula came on TV, I begged my Dad to let me watch it. I was allowed to watch violent films, just not sexual ones. Dracula is both, so as an eleven year old … Continue reading Dracula
BY ANDREW MOODY Cannibal serial killer and psychiatric genius Hannibal Lecter first emerged in Thomas Harris 1980 novel Red Dragon and probably remains the most iconic literary character of the 20th century. It wasn’t until Jonathan Demme’s 1991 classic The Silence of the Lambs (the novel was released three years earlier) that Lecter gained rockstar status and became the most influential villain in American art … Continue reading Lecter’s Enduring Appeal
BY ANDREW MOODY Born in 1927, occult filmmaker Kenneth Anger (author of the famous Hollywood Babylon, a document of early celebrity scandals that has since been widely discredited) has made 40 films since 1937, including the notorious Lucifer Rising whose music was created by (recently dead) neo-Nazi Charlie Manson family killer Bobby Beausoleil. Anger, (born Kenneth Anglemyer) is an adherent of Aleister Crowley’s Thelema, inspired … Continue reading Anger
BY ANDREW MOODY It’s interesting to note (given the type of man and artist he became) that Bret Easton Ellis, raised in Beverly Hills and internationally famous from the age of 20, has never had a job. He’s made millions from his writing of course, and when I queued up to meet him in London in July 2010 at a book signing the queue stretched … Continue reading Ellis
BY ANDREW MOODY The strangest thing about Nabokov’s classic, notorious novel Lolita is that if you type the title into Google it will be blocked from providing results – press on a few resultant links and you may well enter a criminal database. I read it first when I was about sixteen, now I couldn’t bear it, and, knowing the narrative (if not all of … Continue reading Lolita
BY ANDREW MOODY William Friedkin’s 1973 masterpiece The Exorcist, one of the few horror films to have ever been nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars (to date The Silence of the Lambs is the only horror winner of the award) was re-released in 1999. when I was 16. I was underage, so I had to sneak in. The trailers back in the early digital … Continue reading Exorcist
BY ANDREW MOODY “He was some kind of a man,” an ageing Marlene Dietrich quietly states as the corrupt, overweight cop played by Orson Welles is shot to death at the end of the director’s expressionist inspired film noir Touch of Evil (1958). According the preface of Simon Callow’s epic three volume biography of Welles, in 1962 (and already an overweight, depressive chain-smoker) the director … Continue reading Remembering Welles
BY ANDREW MOODY Recently added to Netflix was Nirvana biopic Montage of Heck, a film that redefines the misery, addiction and depression usually associated with lead singer Kurt Cobain. Written and directed by Brett Morgan, the extraordinary celebration of Cobain’s life is comprised of animated shorts, surreal, grunge era stock footage, talking head narration and glorious footage of both early, formerly unseen and also classic … Continue reading The Last Rock Band
BY ANDREW MOODY When I first saw Scorsese’s drugged up, delirious masterpiece in Bromley cinema, the reaction was interesting to say the least. City boys (who seemed to comprise the majority of the audience) felt like they’d finally found a film that represented their lives. But a man in a McDonald’s uniform looked like he had inadvertently walked into the seventh circle of hell, and … Continue reading On Wolf of Wall Street
