This month’s Sight and Sound features a review of Takashi Miike’s new film Gozu, and tentatively calls 2001’s Visitor Q his masterpiece. The reviewer’s take on Miike’s prolific career (Visitor Q and Ichi the Killer are c[…]

FT Top 100 Films
39: THE BREAKFAST CLUB
HEY! HEY! HEY! HEY!
The thing about The Breakfast Club is that it’s the only one of the bratpack movies that’s really about school. In (most of) the others, school is there (apart from the couple t[…]

An alien in my salad
You can always tell when a new brood of creative caterpillars has successfully survived its infancy in advertising and grown into beautiful butterflies.
Suddenly, for a few months, those dull, formulaic, panel-tested commercial b[…]

Great Teletext TV Listings Of Our Time
1640 BRILLIANT CREATURES A girl reveals how she was trapped in a toilet by a spitting cobra[…]

FT Top 100 Films
40: GINGER SNAPS
Odd that I was talking about Catwoman earlier, as here is a film where a girl turns into a wolf. Not Wolfgurl, and this is certainly no superhero movie. This is probably the smartest werewolf movie since An American […]

So there are these women right, who throughout history have worn cat masks. All of whom, one imagines, were brought back to life by stinky cat breath and then went leaping around like – well actually not like a cat because cats can’t clim[…]

Why the weird dry gulch years of movie trailers? — a general observation here. Trailers in the 1930s through 1950s/60s seem to be a classic mishmash of screen projections (“A CAST OF THOUSANDS! LIONS EATING EXTRAS!”), random colla[…]

FT Top 100 Films
41: BLACK NARCISSUS
Antony Easton says:
It’s a back lot dream of religious exoticism, its about the nature of desire, its about power and control in relation to sex, its about viewing the divine temporally instead of celestiall[…]

How do you turn a good film into a franchise? The Bourne Identity was a surprise hit back in 2002, a surprise possibly because the first time it was filmed it flopped. But some assured direction from Doug Liman and some excellent casting was coupled […]

FT Top 100 Films
42: X-MEN
How do you turn a really successful, but really complex comic book series into a film. Its easy with Batman, Spider-Man or Superman as everyone knows what they do and to some extent why. But the messy, convoluted story of t[…]