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20 Apr

Sky One Sci-Fi Intergalactic: ‘It’s a Road Movie Through Space’

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The time is February 2020. The place? Manchester’s Space Studios, on the extraordinary set of Intergalactic, Sky’s new sci-fi drama series. From an immersive set, cramped within the bowels of a prison ship, to concept art of stunning sci-fi landscapes, there’s nothing to remind us of a mundane present that will, only a month later, come to seem like something of a lost utopia. Well, almost nothing. The screensaver on one of the ship’s computers bears the logo of Her Majesty’s Government. Is time travel involved, then? Nope. It’s a relic from previous work on Cobra, the Sky political drama…

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15 Feb

The Happening Revisited Through the Lens of a Pandemic

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When the pandemic hit it was Steven Soderberg’s Contagion rather than M Night Shyamalan’s The Happening that people wanted to revisit. Perhaps Mark Wahlberg running away from the wind wasn’t the vibe people were looking for. Revisiting this much maligned but secretly wonderful curio in light of where we are in the world now, though, throws up some interesting parallels. The big difference between the way the characters in The Happening dealt with their pandemic and what’s going on in the world now is lockdown. What the characters battling the airborne infection in The Happening should have done is self…

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03 Dec

Link Tank: Looking Back at Black Swan Through the Perspective of Ballerinas

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Black Swan may be a great movie, but a terrible reflection of the ballet world. Ten years later, that perception among ballerinas has not changed. “Ask any dancer: Ten years in the backbreaking world of ballet can be a lifetime, and Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan is certainly starting to show its age. To some, it’s a time capsule from an ancient age in dance history, when misogyny and sexual exploitation went unchecked. But beneath its theatrics and fever dream of a third act, Black Swan still presents a mirror those dancers would rather bash and shatter…” Read more at Thrillist. From The Godfather to…

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02 Dec

Link Tank: How the Horror Genre Got Us Through 2020

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Now that we’re in the last month of the year, let’s take a look back at how the horror genre helped us cope with 2020. “It’s tempting to think that since 2020 was basically one real-life nightmare after another, the last thing anyone would want to do is engage with fictional horror on top of that. But that would be discounting the positive power of certain horror movies, TV shows, and video games that helped us navigate through the year’s darkest times.” Read more at Gizmodo. YouTube is bigger than ever in 2020. Here are the top trending videos on…

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12 Nov

Steve McQueen’s Small Axe: ‘I Wanted These Stories to Go Through the Bloodstream of the Country’

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If there’s a sense of planetary alignment in the timing of Steve McQueen’s Small Axe – five films about London’s West Indian community airing weekly from this Sunday on BBC One – it’s not by design. Over a decade in the making, the creators couldn’t have known that these stories would land in a year marked by both the global Black Lives Matter protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd, and the disproportionately devastating impact of Covid-19 on black communities in the UK.  The collision of 2020’s events with five stories celebrating black British history feels fortuitous to the cast. “The…

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01 Oct

Clive Barker Says We’re ‘Living Through’ A Time Of Horror

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Clive Barker is back. After a period of relative silence, the acclaimed horror and fantasy author and filmmaker seems to be everywhere: a new movie based on his seminal Books of Blood arrives next week, a reboot of Candyman (based on his story “The Forbidden”) is due out in 2021, and TV shows based on Hellraiser and Nightbreed are in development as well. He’s also got three new books on the way, which he signals are a return to his horror roots. For Barker, his own return to horror — and the invigorated state of the genre itself these days…

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21 Jul

How Psych Evolved Through the Character of Carlton Lassiter

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Early on in the Psych pilot, Shawn Spencer’s (James Roday Rodriguez) ludicrous plot to impersonate a psychic in order to solve crime suddenly takes on grave stakes: Chief Vick (Kirsten Nelson) informs him that if he’s lying, he’ll be prosecuted for hindering a police investigation. Just like that, he’s locked into his lie, and has no choice but to let it snowball—into a private eye business with his best friend Burton Guster (Dulé Hill), but also into a lucrative consultancy gig for the Santa Barbara Police Department that, psychic antics be damned, legitimately saves lives. But while it’s the Chief…

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18 Jul

What We Do in the Shadows: Colin Robinson Steals Our Energy Through the TV

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“Hopefully I am defining what an actual energy vampire is instead of someone on the outer edges of society,” says Mark Proksch, who plays the life force gourmand on FX’s What We Do in the Shadows. The actor who plays that Dilbert-looking guy who shares a house on Staten Island with a liquid-diet trio tells Den of Geek about the many challenges and bonuses to being an energy vampire. Regular vampires, the classic kind played by Nandor (Kayvan Novak), Nadja (Natasia Demetriou), and Laszlo (Matt Berry), drink blood, a virgin’s if possible. It is a reliable staple as far as…

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03 Jul

Warrior Nuns Through TV History

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TV nunning is a broad church. Sometimes, it’s all gunfire, demon-dissolving punches and running through walls, as in Netflix’s latest comic book adaptation Warrior Nun. In that show, a mystical artifact gives a non-believing teen superpowers passed down the generations from holy sister to holy sister. Defeat the demons, protect the world, praise the Lord, and so on. Other fictional TV nuns lead quieter, more cake-focused lives, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t also fighters. You might say that like superheroes, not all warrior nuns wear capes. You’d be wrong – nuns definitely wear capes. They’re called mantles and though…

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16 Jun

Why Gladiator Continues to Echo Through Eternity

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French artist Jean-Léon Gérôme’s 1872 painting of gladiators and spectators, “Pollice Verso,” remains one of the defining portraits of ancient Rome. With its depiction of two fighters in the Colosseum, one standing and the other vanquished, pleading for mercy, it works as a paradox: The viewer is given both a sense of moral superiority over the distant past and a discreet delight as the crowd lowers their thumbs in bloodlust, demanding death. Historically accurate or not, it sets imaginations aflutter, and it alone convinced Ridley Scott to direct Gladiator. Producer Douglas Wick remembers that well. After all, it did lead…

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16 Sep

My Journey Through French Cinema

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Writer-director Bertrand Tavernier is truly one of the grand auteurs of the movies. His experience is vast, his knowledge is voluminous, his love is inexhaustible and his perspective is matched only by that of Martin Scorsese. This magnificent, epic documentary has been a lifetime in the making. Tavernier knows his native cinema inside and out, from the giants like Renoir, Godard, and Melville (for whom he worked as an assistant) to now overlooked and forgotten figures like Edmund T. Greville and Guy Gilles, and his observations and reminiscences are never less than penetrating and always deeply personal. [Cohen Media Group]Rated:…

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