Downwards Is the Only Way Forwards: Welcome to David Fincher’s ‘The Game’
Twenty-one years on, David Fincher’s The Game (1997) has come to be seen as a prescient, schadenfreude look at the gulf between us and the…
Tim Pelan
‘Horror Implied, as Opposed to Explained… That’s Michael Mann’s Strength (Will)’—‘Manhunter’
In 1986, Michael Mann’s Manhunter elevated schlock-horror to a thoughtful, stylised, forensically psychological level, introducing the concept of a serial killer to a wider base,…
L.A. Breakdown, a Hitman In Crisis: Michael Mann’s ‘Collateral’
When people think of Tom Cruise, what do they see? That shit eating grin, the Scientology, star power? I prefer to think of Cruise as…
Rats In the Attic: William Friedkin’s ‘The Exorcist’
Forty-five years after its powerful debut, and with all the attendant publicity, analysis and second-hand knowledge, from satire to theological debate that has existed around…
Duct Soup: The Daffy, Dystopian Design Nightmare of Terry Gilliam’s ‘Brazil’
Brazil is the demented, surreal flip-side of George Orwell’s dystopian warning—1984 1/2 was director Terry Gilliam’s originally mooted title. Yet it is Gilliam’s comic vision that…
Steven Soderbergh’s ‘Out of Sight’: An Achronological Time-Out from Conventional Crime Narrative
Steven Soderbergh’s 1998 adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s crime novel Out of Sight experiments with form, tussles with it even. Opening in medias res, with bank…
Approaching Menace: The American Pathology of Martin Scorsese’s ‘Taxi Driver’
Many rightly attribute Taxi Driver’s success to screenwriter Paul Schrader, director Martin Scorsese, and method leading man Robert De Niro—together they forge a Holy Trinity…
Married to the Enemy: The Pathological Obsession Beneath Michael Cimino’s ‘Year of the Dragon’
No-one does excess quite like Michael Cimino, director of Heaven’s Gate and The Deer Hunter. And when you factor in a co-writing credit by Oliver…
A Carpenter of Death and His Four Horsemen: Samuel Fuller’s ‘The Big Red One’
In Hollywood, personal films can often become bloated vanity projects. With Samuel Fuller’s semi-autobiographical WWII memoir, The Big Red One, there is nothing vain or…
Limitation of Life: You Can’t Go Back in John Frankenheimer’s ‘Seconds’
Who we are depends on a multitude of influences, societal and blood-borne. Mankind is the only entity on the planet with a philosophical understanding of…