Diana: The Musical is a tacky and tactless propanada mission that subverts its own fun flashiness with remarkable bad taste. When I was thirteen, I was obsessed with Phantom of the Opera. By fourteen, the musical obsession grew to include Les Miserables, before snowballing from…
Adapted from Stephen King’s slim debut novella, Brian De Palma’s Carrie is perhaps the quintessential modern witch narrative. Carrie White (Sissy Spacek), a bullied teenager raised by a terrifyingly devout mother, gets her first period in her high school locker room. Her classmates torment…
With the release of last year’s conversational documentary Leap of Faith: In Conversation with William Friedkin, one thing has become abundantly clear — people are never going to stop talking about The Exorcist. Looking at the phenomenon through modern eyes, it might be easy…
What We Left Unfinished never moves past the basic work of archivalism. 1921. 1989. 2021. The cycles of imperial superpowers invading, occupying, and summarily abandoning Afghanistan run their course with horrifying regularity to the point of near mundanity. To American and European onlookers, even the…
The Show is an imperfect beast, but it’s beautiful and horrifying in a way only Alan Moore can concoct. Northampton has always been a strange place. Historically, the town has a habit of being on the losing side of every conflict, and between civil wars,…
Lily Topples the World is a visually spectacular documentary, one with the added benefit of ready cleverness in supply. Joining the ranks of Netflix’s We Are The Champions and The Speed Cubers, Lily Topples The World takes a peek behind the curtain of the…
499 boasts legitimate emotional weight, but undercuts its power with too much heavy-handed symbolism. Almost five centuries after the Spanish invasion of Mexico, a lone conquistador washes up on a beach in the country he once helped conquer. Undeterred, he embarks on the route…
The Meaning of Hitler is a bold, risk-taking work from a confident directorial duo. Adapted from Sebastian Haffner’s The Meaning of Hitler, a book that the film admits is mostly sold at bookshop cash registers to appease anxious white liberals, this stylish documentary from Petra…
A documentary whose goofy, DIY sensibility matches its endearingly amateur subject matter, Lucy Harvey and Danielle Kummer’s Alien On Stage is the quintessential homegrown hero. Following the most British cast ever assembled, Alien On Stage tells the story of a group of Dorset bus…
Following the success of a documentary based on their experiences as addicts, two of the subjects and the director of Reindeerspotting: Escape From Santaland take the after party all the way to Bangkok. Director Joonas Neuvonen returns home as planned, while the other two,…
