With the plethora of vampire films out there, it’s a brave debut director indeed to tackle one of the most well trodden genres of recent small and big screen offerings. However, Scott Leberecht’s debut feature Midnight Son toys with the genre and portrays it as an affliction or aliment in his low-budget film – and [...]

Writer-director Barnaby Southcombe offers up a tense, dreamlike noir that celebrates his charismatic mother, actress Charlotte Rampling, with I, Anna. This downbeat thriller that features one of London’s most imposing pieces of architecture, The Barbican, uses the sinister facades as well as retro finishes – old fashioned phones – to set a stylish murder scene. [...]

Never, ever underestimate the power of the open road – it does things to a person to release their inner being, good or bad. Ben Wheatley’s black comedy of hilarious proportions, Sightseers, about a couple who caravan around Northern Britain’s more unusual sights with deadly consequences is full of creepiness, delicious surprises, shocks and irony. [...]

Those who favour the ‘cops on camera’ TV shows can expect much the same style of ‘caught of camera’ thrills and spills from Harsh Times and Training Day director David Ayers’ gritty and affecting End Of Watch. Ironically, as well as hooking you in from the start and sparking curiosity as to where the story [...]

Its blood-splattered poster, complete with promises of ‘genuinely scaring the hell out of you’ depends on your previous encounters with spooky goings-on in condemned houses. Sinister by The Exorcism of Emily Rose creator Scott Derrickson, in summary, certainly puts the ‘creepy’ back into four domestic walls, but the horror tick boxes of bumps in the [...]

There is a real sense with the second round in Luc Besson’s father-marauding saga that both writer and cast signed up to a totally different project at the start, only for a daft decision from above to make it accessible to a wider (and younger) audience to ruin things, and hence, kill of what made [...]

Brad Pitt reunites again with writer-director Andrew Dominik (The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford) to adapt George V. Higgins’s novel, Cogan’s Trade for the big screen. It’s another successful outcome, entitled Killing Them Softly – referring to hits by strangers on strangers in the underworld. As Cogan, Pitt embodies his standard [...]

Producer-Director Oliver Stone, best known for his political thrillers, war films and a recently completed Castro documentary, reverts back to Natural Born Killers/U-Turn type for his latest film, Savages, appealing to a wider commercial market wanting pulpy, consumable, popcorn action thrillers without any political intensity. In a way, Savages is a satisfying all-action trip with [...]

Fans of the hit 70s TV series have no fear: Director-writer Nick Love has taken the heart and soul of the iconic characters, Regan and Carter, and given them a cosmetic 2012 facelift, thrusting the chauvinistic, hard-nosed coppers into a contemporary, clinical crime-fighting environment, complete with latter-day baddies. In fact, Love is wise not to [...]