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All Published Work

Looking for the sum total of my writing career till now? Then look no further. Ignoring my earlier student writing and a select few print-only pieces this is everything I've had published since graduation. You can even use the filter to navigate by publication.

Filmhounds Magazine •

Film Review: Three Revolutionary Films by Ousmane Sembène

In a Western film market saturated with Übermensch police propaganda in the form of superhero movies, and an art cinema stuffed with placifying bourgeois masturbation, it's easy to forget the revolutionary power cinema can hold. And yet images continue to cut through state disinformation—whether it's the proliferation of videos on TikTok depicting the war crimes being committed in Gaza, or the utility of social media during the Arab Spring protests between 2010-2012.
Filmhounds Magazine •

Film Review: Misunderstood

Once the opening credits of Misunderstood (1966) have finished—a series of static shots of lovingly-maintained pastoral paintings, indicative of the bourgeois Florentine home much of the film is set in—we find our perspective locked to the side of a black car as it rolls up a lengthy driveway. The man inside, UK Consul General John Duncombe (Anthony Quayle), is returning from the funeral of his wife, a fact we learn after the car stops and our perspective switches to outside the car looking in.
Filmhounds Magazine •

Film Review: Black Tight Killers

When someone mentions “pop art” and “the 1960s”, it's easy to leap to the American titans: Andy Warhol; Roy Lichtenstein; James Rosenquist. And yet, as with most artistic movements, the seeds sown in one continent took lift and bloomed in countless others. In Japan, artists like Keiichi Tanaami fused Western visions of psychedelic excess with images characteristic of the Japanese contemporary; the new wave of acid rock pressed against the searing scars left during World War II.
Filmhounds Magazine •

Film Review: The Bounty Hunter Trilogy

It's often been observed that Sergio Leone's early Spaghetti Westerns were inspired by the samurai pictures of Akira Kurosawa—so much so that Toho, the Japanese production company where Kurosawa worked for much of his career, won a lawsuit arguing Leone's A Fistful of Dollars was an unauthorised remake of Yojimbo. And while the overt similarities can't be denied in that instance (Kurosawa himself observed “It is a very fine film, but it is my film.”), such a tit-for-tat exchange isn't representative of the many, many examples of creative cross-pollination occurring from East to West during the same period.
Filmhounds Magazine •

Film Review: The Roaring Twenties

As we venture into the middle period of the 2020s, an era defined by multiple cost of living crises, the unchecked rise of extremist political factions, and a pervasive tendency among politicians and media outlets toward burying one's head in the sand, the swingin' excesses of the prior century's equivalent decade can't help but seem hopelessly naïve—a period of dazzling economic brightness that contained its own inevitable demise.
CINEMA YEAR ZERO •

Feature: Intro to Volume 16: VISCERA

“If you can’t bear pain, you don’t live up to your reputation.”

That line, spoken in Chang Cheh and Pao Hsueh-li’s The Boxer from Shantung (1972), speaks to a common sentiment found in the many kung fu films produced in Hong Kong under the Shaw Brothers. For the humble martial artist, the body isn’t only the means by which they perform their craft, or enact violent comeuppance on local goons, it’s a physical manifestation of their reputation in the wider community.
Filmhounds Magazine •

Film Review: Lone Star

Of the many qualities lacking in the current cinematic landscape, perhaps one of the most underrated is that of the novelist-as-filmmaker. For as long as we've had moving pictures, we've had authors in Hollywood—whether “slumming it” to catch a quick cheque a la William Faulkner (The Big Sleep, 1946) or Raymond Chandler (Double Indemnity, 1944), or, in the case of Stephen King's cocaine opus Maximum Overdrive (1986), tiring of seeing their written work adapted to such varying success.
Filmhounds Magazine •

Film Review: By a Man’s Face Shall You Know Him

It's barely been a month since Radiance put out the excellent I, the Executioner (1968), and they're already back with another Tai Kato banger, this one taken from ever so slightly earlier in his career. By a Man's Face Shall You Know Him (1966), a title that is as wonderfully overwrought as it is pointed in its questionable wisdom, marks somewhat of a transitional film for the Japanese director—still working in the yakuza genre, but repurposing his characteristic unflinching eye for violence.
Filmhounds Magazine •

Film Review: World Noir Vol. 1

It's easy to think of film noir as a distinctly American tradition, a genre defined by the cynical attitudes that emerged in the US in the years after World War II. But even in its nomenclature noir reveals its international origins, coined, as it was, by French critics looking to categorise the wave of hardboiled, stylised American crime dramas. Indeed, many of the filmmakers making these true-blue American pictures were, in fact, European emigrés.
Filmhounds Magazine •

Film review: Elegant Beast

From the minute the opening credits roll of Elegant Beast (1962), it's evident that something strange is afoot. As the names of cast and crew appear on screen, the camera sticks to an extreme wide shot of a fairly unremarkable apartment in urban Japan. Inside, a middle-aged couple are moving objects between rooms with a practised urgency; not packing for a move, nor preparing for a dinner party, but still working with a sharp specificity.
Filmhounds Magazine •

Film Review: Black God, White Devil

When Letterboxd shifted its algorithm earlier this year in an attempt to correct regional- and fanbase-specific biases, one of the major casualties was the cinema of Latin America—and particularly Brazil. Films like Central Station (1998), A Dog's Will (2000), They Don't Wear Black Tie (1981), and Aquarius (2016) were all booted from the site's Official Top 250 Narrative Feature Films list, pushed out for holding greater import in their home country than elsewhere.
Filmhounds Magazine •

Film Review: The End of Civilization: Three Films by Piotr Szulkin

In what's already been a great year for underappreciated Polish auteurs comes the latest box set from Radiance, The End of Civilization: Three Films by Piotr Szulkin. The three films collected here, all taken from Szulkin's loosely connected 1980s Apocalypse tetralogy, are science fiction at their most grimy and grounded, a distant cry from the fantastical whimsy of the post-Star Wars sci-fi boom occurring in contemporaneous America. And while the omission of the first entry in that tetralogy, Szulkin's feature debut Golem (1980), seems odd, this set still marks the best way to see Szulkin's unsettling visions of life under oppressive police state rule.
The London Magazine •

Feature: The Art of Leading a Witness in Anatomy of a Fall by Blaise Radley

What is a courtroom if not a staging ground for storytelling? Every aspect of a trial, be it criminal or corporate, hinges on two opposing sides laying claim to a particular version of events, each new witness and piece of evidence placed in a neat order to lead their audience, the jury, to a set conclusion. In the end, the victor will be the side that spins the most convincing yarn, regardless of any overriding “truth” of the matter. But what pushes a juror to ignore the ambiguities such duelling perspectives leave behind and choose one narrative over another? In French director Justine Triet’s latest film, the courtroom drama Anatomy of a Fall (2023), it’s not only the lawyers that are leading the witness but the formalised aspects of filmmaking craft.
Filmhounds Magazine •

Film Review: One False Move

There's a certain irony to be found in reviewing a home release of One False Move, given that the film in question was originally intended for the straight-to-video wastebin. Directed by Carl Franklin in his feature debut, at a time when Franklin was most known for his run as an actor on The A-Team, and premised on the kind of generic culture clash that bargain buckets are weighed down with—two sardonic LA cops get paired with a small town yokel police chief to solve a brutal series of drug-related murders—it's remarkable that it was successful in securing last-minute theatrical distribution. That it's also one of the finer examples of ‘90s neo-noir, lifted by its well-observed character moments and Franklin's deft touch behind the camera, is most remarkable of all.
Filmhounds Magazine •

Film Review: Tod Browning's Sideshow Shockers

In many ways, the circuses of the early 20th Century have a similar allure to pre-Code Hollywood cinema; lawless, illicit, and exotic in spite of their appearing on home soil. That sweet spot between the introduction of sound in 1927 and the enforcement of the Hays Code in 1934 (a self-imposed rule set that banned profanity, sexual innuendo, and interracial relationships, amongst many other bigoted moral edicts) runs firmly against perceptions of older American cinema as stuffy and tight-lipped.
CINEMA YEAR ZERO •

Feature: A Star is Burns, or Homer vs. Film Criticism

Over the course of its (remarkably still ongoing) 34-season run, Matt Groening has only asked that his name be scrubbed from the credits of The Simpsons on one occasion. Let that sink in for a moment. When jerkass Homer refused to give poor old Abe his kidney not once, but twice, Groening’s name was there. When Homer got botched laser eye surgery and his eyes made that horrible sound as they crusted over, Groening’s name was there.
The London Magazine •

Feature: The (Ig)noble Sacrifice of the Author in Afire

Literary history is littered with so-called troubled geniuses, authors whose work is revered in spite of, and often even due to, their infamous tempers and tempestuous personal lives. One needn’t go far to find eyebrow-raising stories about Ernest Hemingway and his penchant for intoxicated brawling and adulterous womanising, or the abusive behaviour of reclusive drugged-out “mad doctor” Hunter S. Thompson.
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