Movies

‘Dancing On My Own’ is a song which transcends generations. It first appeared in a season four episode of Gossip Girl, shortly after the release of Robyn’s seminal album ​‘Body Talk’ (2010), and in the last 16 years, the song has been featured in everything from frothy episodes of reality television to more prestigious dramatic fare. There’s an orchestral…

The inner lives of buildings and institutions provide an intriguing and enlivening way of looking at the modern landscape, particularly through film. Just as human beings have personal histories that cause their bodies and minds to change over the course of time, so do buildings and the wonders of the natural landscape.  Pompei: Below the…

In “Mercy,” Chris Pratt plays a police detective accused of murdering his wife. It takes place in the future, when the judicial system is turned over to an AI “judge” played by Rebecca Ferguson. Until the final third of the film, everything takes place in a cyber-courtroom. He is trapped in a chair and has…

It’s wild to think, going into the fifth season of Apple TV’s lush, sorely underrated science fiction series “For All Mankind,” that Ronald D. Moore‘s alt-history saga began with a simple premise: What if the Russians beat us to the Moon by just a few weeks back in the 1960s? In the seasons since, Moore,…

They Will Kill You opens with a happy family gathered around a dining table. Two young sisters stand out in the dark and the pouring rain, looking in at this alluring shop display. They are excluded from its ideal, not just by the intervening window, but because their own notion of a home life has been cruelly broken…

If the Netflix Norwegian crime thriller series “Jo Nesbø’s Detective Hole” had been packaged into five or even six episodes, it might well have been masterful. Stretched over nine long chapters and stuffed with a dizzying array of subplots, the production stalls a bit in the middle and occasionally turns down some side roads that…

Treating adult film as a material, cultural object allows the Whittinghams to actually manage safe access to these explicit experiences. They describe how ​“platforms tend to ban certain bodies, kinks or expressions while allowing others, and legislation like the UK’s Online Safety Act increasingly requires ID verification to access adult material online” shifting the view on…

Can cinephiles not have a moment of peace? Barely eighteen months after London’s beloved Prince Charles Cinema was forced to launch its Save the PCC campaign to extend their lease against a landlord with other ideas, yet another independent cinema is under threat. The Ultimate Picture Palace, a single-screen cinema in East Oxford, an iconic art-deco building and…

The character of Ahmet is a beautiful example of how in this story, less is more. Creating such beautiful brevity would not be possible without the bravura performances of Unkowski’s cast. Both Jaqup and Agashev are huge finds – Jaqup’s quietly intense performance is heightened by his breath-taking star quality. It’s difficult to look at anything…

Innocent people nabbed from their homes and imprisoned under false pretences. Terror-driven interrogation methods employed to secure phoney confessions. Revolting, filth-caked jail cells that wouldn’t be fit for your grandma’s old stink hound, let alone a prize academic. Sweeping, instant punishment for anyone who does not tow the party line. No, not America in 2026, but…