By allowing characters like Sugar and Baron Samedi to play with these stereotypes as part of their plot to destroy racist villains, Sugar Hill empowers them to perform a violent rejection of these stereotypes.

When it was released in 1963, Federico Fellini’s 8½ won two Academy Awards, including Best Foreign Language Film. In 1987, thirty European filmmakers and intellectuals declared 8½ to be the most important, influential example of European cinema to date, and ...

In her widely-read 2014 article “Toward a Theory of a Dead Girl Show”, Alice Bolin discusses how television mystery shows often rely on the suffering and silence of beautiful, infinitely inscrutable “Dead Girls”. Dispatched before the series commences, these young ...

The films of David Lynch are replete with performances that reveal rather than obscure. Whether appropriated for the purposes of music or theatrics, the Lynchian stage is a place where hidden truths are made manifest and artifice is stripped away. ...

Toys are often the earliest conduits for our fantasies. Silent actors, they play out our hopes, dreams and aspirations. Toys enable us to project our intangible desires onto the substance of the material world. Yet, toys can also be unsettling. ...

*Spoilers for a film that turned 60 this year Some Like It Hot (Billy Wilder, 1959) is one of the most joyfully, unapologetically subversive films to emerge from a Hollywood that was, in the middle part of the twentieth century, ...

Childhood memories always seem uniquely potent. Inhabiting a dim space in the distant past, they appear irrevocably estranged from the conscious mind. At the same time, however, when evoked — by the smell of freshly-cut grass, the taste of a ...

*In memory of French film actress Edith Scob Although often referred to as a dark, gothic fairy tale, Georges Franju’s 1960 film Eyes Without a Face (Les Yeux Sans Visage) is perhaps more aptly described as a frozen, static fairy ...

The Last Unicorn (1982) is a strange, melancholic and deeply unsettling film. Despite its often-vivid colour palate, bold lines and frames busy with marvellous detail, it is at its heart a story of loss and disillusionment. Based on a 1968 ...

Over the last few months multiplatform distributor 88 Films has added two memorable, and potentially controversial, horror sequels to its expanding range of new releases. The first of these, Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh was Bill Condon’s divisive follow-up to ...