“Luke, I am your father.” Dr. Malcom Crowe’s realisation that he is a ghost, in the final chilling moments of “The Sixth Sense.” Chuck Heston’s discovery that “The Planet of the Apes” is really a post-apocalyptic Earth with our simian cousins now in charge. Surprise endings, twists in the tale, stinging revelations and shock reveals […]
Author: Martyn Conterio
10 Best Films of the Year… So Far
We’re halfway through the year, folks. Which means it is summertime. Yay! Also, in the movie calendar, it’s when Hollywood spews out its annual roster of ridiculously expensive blockbusters. Yay? The jury is still out on that one… It is, however, a perfect opportunity to take stock of the past six months and ask: which […]
8 Horror Movies to Watch this Summer
Note: Contains images that may be considered graphic and disturbing to some readers. Hollywood blockbusters are a firm tradition during the months of summer, but it is prime stomping ground, too, for the horror genre. Yes, the days might well be long with plenty of sunlight, but gore flicks, ghost stories and the whole black […]
10 Recent Movies Based on Great Novels
The art of the screen adaptation is to somehow capture the spirit of the novel and transfer it into the film format. It is easier said than done, of course, and one of the major complaints often voiced by fans is that the film version “wasn’t as good as the book.” Equally, movies that slavishly […]
Awesome Robot Characters in Recent Movies
Ever since Fritz Lang’s sci-fi epic “Metropolis” (1927) gave the world Evil Maria, synthetic beings have reflected many of our fears and desires regarding the role of technology in society. From the malfunctioning computer system HAL 9000 in “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968) to nerdy messenger C3PO (“Star Wars”), all the way to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s […]
5 Soundtrack Albums You Should Have on Your iPod
From the silent era of cinema, through to the Hollywood’s golden age complete with maestros such as Dmitri Tiomkin and Bernard Hermann, to the current trend for bands scoring films, music has been an integral part of the movie-making process. The fad for replacing old-school composers with electronica and rock groups began proper in the […]
10 Films Destined For Cult Status
Cult movies rose as a phenomenon in the 1970s, thanks to the likes of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s “El Topo” (1970) and “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” (1975). A general cultural shift, too, in assessing the value of motion pictures ensured that certain movies picked up devout followers, and it didn’t matter if critics or the general […]
10 Movies That Mess With Your Head
It is often said that movies are the closest thing we have to re-experiencing our dreams. As can often happen after eating a block of cheddar cheese before bedtime, directors can present us with perplexing movie-dreams packed to the gills with the absurd, the baffling, the confusing, the mind-melting and sometimes just the plain old […]
Cool Movie Posters of 2014
Upon the glorious advent of the Internet, the studios were able to spread the word of a film’s release far easier than they could in the Dark Ages (i.e. before the days of the World-Wide-Web). Posters once took exclusive pride of place on billboards, bus stations and on the walls of video shops; as well […]
10 Movies That Should Have Won Best Picture Oscars!
Film fans are used to the Oscars getting it wrong. The Academy voters deemed Robert Redford’s forgotten “Ordinary People” (1980) to be a superior work of art to Martin Scorsese’s “Raging Bull!” And what about “Crash” (the Paul Haggis one, not David Cronenberg’s 1996 masterpiece) bagging Best Picture, over the likes of “Brokeback Mountain” and […]