Iranian director Jafar Panahi has spent his career turning barriers into creative inspiration. Working under travel bans, house arrests and periodic detention, he had made powerful films that show everyday life in Iran through quiet moments, daily struggles, and small talk on streets under surveillance. He shows people who are restricted by repressive rules, yet […]
Sinners, a blues-soaked horror film set in 1930s Mississippi, was preemptively tagged by many film industry insiders as an inevitable flop. But it became a word-of-mouth sleeper hit that continues to draw huge audiences globally, weeks after its release. On its opening weekend, premium screening formats such as in Imax cinemas accounted for 45% of […]
On a warm and sunny May bank holiday in 2003, I had one of those rare days that truly changes your life forever. I sat in my bathroom, hands shaking as two pink lines emerged on the pregnancy test I was holding. I was 38, single and broke. This pregnancy was the result of a […]
French director Jacques Audiard’s “Emilia Pérez” first made waves among critics at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2024, when it won multiple awards. It went on to receive 10 Golden Globe nominations, winning four, including best musical or comedy. “It is so beautiful to see a movie that is cinema,” gushed Mexican director Guillermo […]
How can universities build better relationships with the communities around them? Academia is increasingly considering this question. And finding innovative ways to demonstrate value and connect with wider society. This was on my mind when I learnt about a fascinating collaboration between the police and aspiring, young filmmakers at the University of Sunderland, which shows […]
Type text into AI image and video generators, and you’ll often see outputs of unusual, sometimes creepy, pictures. In a way, this is a feature, not a bug, of generative AI. And artists are wielding this aesthetic to create a new storytelling art form. The tools, such as Midjourney to generate images, Runway and Sora […]
In the 1980s, film scholar Barbara Creed coined the term the “monstrous-feminine”. It refers to the way that female monsters are typically portrayed as threatening and disgusting for reasons connected to their bodies and their sexuality. New film The Substance takes a leaf out of Creed’s book by proposing a feminist critique of female experience […]
With a flash of garish colour and the blaring of an ’80s rock track we are on Mount Olympus, home to the pantheon of ancient Greek gods and goddesses. But its not the Mount Olympus you’d normally think of. It’s an opulent house with large-screen TVs and gold watches. Overseeing it all is mighty Zeus, […]
Legendary filmmaker Stanley Kubrick spent a lifetime trying to make his final film, Eyes Wide Shut, a reality. He had been struggling to make it from the moment he began making feature films, some 75 years ago. When he finally did, 25 years ago in 1999, it killed him. The plot centres on a physician […]
Twenty-four hours after the release of Macklemore’s pro-Palestine protest song Hind’s Hall on social media on May 7, the video had already notched up over 24 million views. In two minutes and 49 seconds, the music video uses found footage gleaned from social media feeds intercut with the songs lyrics in white text on a […]
