David Robert Mitchell’s third feature is way too high on its own supply to fully realise its own fascinating subtext — Since the first media murmurs, I was eagerly anticipating Under the Silver Lake. A lot of people were. It’s no surprise really: a young, still somewhat unproven director in David Robert Mitchell, coming fresh from an instant cult horror in It Follows, and venturing into the well-trodden realms of neo-noir…

Almost 35 years since it stunned Cannes, Wim Wenders’s slice of Americana remains a beguiling and enduring work, and the perfect antidote to the Trump era… — A ghost comes walking out of the desert. This is Travis Henderson, one of the most enigmatic and mysterious characters in all of Western cinema with his dishevelled, vacant visage. Played perfectly by the legendary character actor Harry Dean Stanton in a soul-searching performance, the image of Travis has become…

“Poor Seth. It’s all so horrible, isn’t it? The nightmare of childhood.” When Seth Dove remembers his childhood he’ll remember the abstract shapes of the dishevelled and collapsing farmhouses that stood like great American Gothic monoliths in endless fields of gold corn. He’ll remember the joy of terrorising his unsuspecting…

Give John Frankenheimer’s chilling masterpiece the second life it deserves — While much of American cinema chose to angle their camera eye positively towards the sixties, depicting the acid-wave utopianism of the cultural decade as the new American frontier — with films such as Easy Rider and Two-Lane Blacktop glamorising the spiritual road-trip that began with Jack Kerouac’s On the Road…

Sleepwalking into the heart of darkness — How do you adapt a bestselling novel? Do you slave away at your desktop, eyes flitting back and forth from screen to source material to screen, faithfully typing out the author’s fluent and idiosyncratic prose into a taut, formalised, and dialogue-heavy screenplay? Or perhaps you are more attuned to the…

Lynne Ramsay returns with another dreamlike and disturbed character study — This review contains spoilers… Joe is more beast than man. Falling into a weight category somewhere between a grizzly bear and a juiced-up Travis Bickle, he dominates the screen, skulking the neon streets of Cincinnati with a heavy, inhuman hunch. One particular scene of shocking and dramatic violence — where…

Spike Jonze’s misunderstood film still remains an ambiguous and elusive wonder — The opening moments of 2009’s Where the Wild Things Are — Spike Jonze’s misunderstood feature-length expansion of Maurice Sendak’s three hundred and thirty-eight-word children’s classic — perfectly encapsulates its spirit. They are at once exhilarating and nostalgic. Jonze’s camera crashes down the stairs with two ferocious beasts locked in a…

Acid tab cinema goes way out West — “The mole digs tunnels under the earth, looking for the sun. Sometimes, he gets to the surface. When he sees the sun, he is blinded.” So intones Alejandro Jodorowsky over the opening credits of his wild acid western, El Topo (1970: the beginning of something new). “El Topo” translates to…

Is the 1946 classic Jean Cocteau’s greatest magic trick? — There is something inherently supernatural about cinema. It is a unique art form, and it has a particular magical and transcendent power that is unmatched by any other forms, be it literature, painting, sculpture, or poetry. In fact, in its embryonic stage, cinema was just that: a magic trick. Cinema…