Film

Film grain has often divided black-and-white photographers. Some detested it and chose their film stock and chemicals to minimise it, while others liked graininess and saw it as a quality. It probably depended on the kind of photography you most admired, and the gritty “Tri-X look” or “HP5 look” was certainly obvious in great images […]

  THE LITTLE STRANGER FILM ADAPTATION We are delighted to announce the release of a film adaptation of Sarah Waters’ chilling thriller: The Little Stranger. The film will be released in the UK this autumn, plenty of time to re-read the book! Plus, we will be releasing a film tie-in edition of the book: watch this […]

‘Is Rachel bad or good? Innocent or guilty, carnal or ‘pure’? Or does the truth lie somewhere else? Is she an anachronism, full of life, possessed of sound mind and spirit, enjoying her sexu-ality as and where and with whomsoever she might wish, a woman in a man’s world, determined to escape from the limitations […]

Logan The third and last movie in the Wolverine franchise is in my opinion the best X-Men film yet and one of the best films yet in the Marvel Universe, period (my other favourites being Captain America: Winter Soldier, and Captain America: Civil War, Iron Man 1 and Guardians of the Galaxy). It benefits from […]

1. Yoda Yoda, in much of the original Star Wars trilogy, could be mistaken for a senile muppet. When I watched A New Hope after seeing him in The Phantom Menace, it seemed like he was filling the Jar Jar role this time around, bumbling and nonsensical, fighting with R2-D2 and stealing Luke’s food. Where was the […]

We don’t do Hallmark.

1. Princess Leia from Star Wars Though the next two Episodes could still change everything for Leia Organa, no self-respecting list of powerful humans in science fiction could leave her off. Continually saving the butt of her Jedi brother and her rascal on-again-off-again boyfriend, Leia is a badass of the highest degree without ever tapping into […]

Anastasia (1997) Honestly, I have no idea why I like this film so much. I suspect my affection stems in part from the fact that it’s an ambitious failure – I love an ambitious failure – and in part because it’s just so damned weird. Oh, also, Dimitri is like the hottest cartoon dude. Honestly.  Anyway, […]

TRUE ROMANCE As a Valentine’s Day treat I took my husband to see True Romance (1993), his favourite film, on the big screen. It was the first time I’d seen the movie in five or six years, and it still holds up, though it’s written by Quentin Tarantino and therefore skates along the dodgy edge […]

And yet, in their immediate career retrospective of David Bowie, the BBC didn’t even list mention it.  Perhaps the oversight can be explained because the movie bombed in cinemas. Perhaps the oversight can be explained by the fact that Labyrinth is a genre film, which high-falutin’ types tend to ignore under the best of circumstances, or because […]

It’s a movie about a space princess named Jupiter Jones who’s the reincarnation of the mother of a race of space emperors and they all want to marry her or kill her or both meanwhile, she falls in love with a half-dog/half-man supersoldier named ‘Caine Wise’ because of course he is and she can control bees […]

Ever since W.S. Lach-Szyrma first introduced the term ‘Martian’ to science fiction in his 1883 novel Aleriel, the Red Planet and its inhabitants have exerted an enduring appeal for writers and filmmakers. It would be impossible to list every single fictional version of Mars but here, in chronological order, are just a few of our […]

  Thunderball (1965) What the early Bond films feature (and which only really came back with Casino Royale) is brutality: the Bond of the 60s is an elegant monster. Thunderball, which Fleming wrote for the screen and then turned into a novel, features man-eating sharks, nuclear bombs and a pretty tremendous villain. Many might find […]

Our new Marketing Assistant Harriet went to see X-Men: Days of Future Past over the weekend. A long time fan of the X-Men films (she called her first pet Storm), here’s what she thought. So this weekend I went to see X-Men: Days of Future Past. The premise of the film is that Wolverine is […]

Today we have a guest blog post from Adam Whitehead, who blogs over on The Wertzone on all things SF and fantasy. You can follow Adam on Twitter and be sure to check his blog out for more on SF and fantasy films and culture. Films in 2014 In the cinema 2014 looks set to be […]