[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQE7NGkJZHs] It feels, just a little, like science fiction cinema is trying to do some new things. It’s usually viewed, sometimes wrongly, as the sole purview of Michael Bay shouting at explosions and arty well meaning movies that no one bloody watches, but, just now, there seem to be an upswing in films that …
Weegee was a legendary, and controversial, crime scene photographer. This photo, pointed my way by the fantastic Anne Bilson, is the antithesis of everything he’s best known for. It’s magical, the cinema audience suspended beneath the luminous cable of imagery carrying them away to somewhere better, or at least further away from their own lives …
This is the piece I submitted to the first 48 Hour Magazine, a fascinating project put together by a group of editors who decided to see if they could take a magazine from concept to proof in 48 hours, the concept for the zero issue being the word ‘hustle’. I put this together, on magic, …
Adolescence is skin deep invincibility. You find yourself clamped to the handlebars of a motorcycle with the throttle jammed open, hurtling towards adulthood, sex, money, furniture and everything in between. You can’t turn, you can’t stop and if you slow down the only thing that will happen is every other driver will laugh at you. …
Chaos, punctuated by familiar figures in combat gear. They move with practiced ease and kill with absolute efficiency as they wage war across a warehouse in a derelict town. It could be any war in the last thirty years and, crucially, it could be any game in the last twenty. We follow one character as …
The pantheon of heroic scientists contains some of the greatest names in science fiction; Professor Bernard Quatermass, Professor Henry Jones II, The Doctor and many more. But there’s one in particular who has strode across the world for twenty five years, a man whose genius is matched only by his compassion and musical ability; Doctor …
Happy Anniversary, Doctor Banzai: The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension
James Cameron is coming home.The director of The Terminator, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Aliens and The Abyss Cameron was, along with Ridley Scott and John Woo, pivotal in creating the grammar of action and genre cinema in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Whilst Scott favoured worlds that were both functional and richly detailed and Woo became …
The Apollo program died the moment Neil Armstrong’s flickery cathode ghost touched down on the moon’s safe and uttered one of the most famous phrases in human history. Everything that followed him, from the genial charm of Al Bean’s Apollo 12 crew to the ‘successful failure’ of Apollo 13 and the arrival of Harrison Schmitt, …