Latest in: Film Reviews

Short films are not something people get overly excited about, are they? It was puzzling, then, to enter the cinema on the opening night of Mayhem’s tenth film festival and see the anticipation on the audience’s faces; it felt like an event. And they kept laughing and talking animatedly...

Mike Leigh’s biopic of artist J. M. W. Turner (here played by Timothy Spall) covers the latter part of Turner’s life, by which time he had already established himself as an artist and unorthodox character. The film charts the painter’s slow decline in health and popularity, as well as...

What to say on the Scooby–Doo-episode-gone-wrong that is The Texas Chain Saw Massacre? In review terms at least, everything that could be said about this landmark, pivotal, groundbreaking (no superlative is too great!) grimefest in less than a 1,000 words pretty much already has been. And so as an...

The darkest of Mayhem’s opening night offerings (though considering the rest of the content was supplied by the irreverent and hilarious Astron-6 collective, that’s not all too surprising), Let Us Prey presented to audiences a taut, beautifully shot horror-thriller with a relentlessly increasing sense of “as if this is happening now…” After...

Expanding their niche of irreverent and madcap throwbacks to the low-budget classics of their childhood, Canadian production company Astron-6 descended on Nottingham with their gore-soaked giallo homage, The Editor. In a loving pastiche of a genre most fondly remembered for its sheer crapness, Astron-6 have gone to great lengths to replicate the shoddiness that makes the...

There is much to fear in The Canal. The chilling sense of dread permeating the whole film, the question of whether David’s house is haunted or just his unwinding mind. The biggest fear, though, is that The Canal has, in my eyes, suffered the same fate that befell 20,000 Days on...

If you watch a film like Love, Rosie, you undoubtedly know exactly what you’re letting yourself in for. A romantic comedy to the core, the film packs in two adorkable leads, a predictable storyline and many clichéd moments. However, despite the cheesy tone and the use of typical rom-com...