Threads “After all, what acte gratuit, what vulgar outrage or moronic barbarity can compare with the black dream of nuclear exchange” Martin Amis, Einstein’s Monsters Threads (1984) is a television film that went against the grain of the medium itself, one of its very rare masterpieces, and one impossible to watch and be left unshaken. The feature-length drama portrays the build up to a nuclear attack on Britain, the attack itself, and its

A look back at Narciso Ibanez Serrador's haunting 1976 cult horror movie Who Can Kill a Child? Spanish Director Narciso Ibanez Serrador directed only two films, The House that Screamed , 1968, and Who Can Kill a Child (AKA Island of the Damned ), 1976. The former is an influential high-point of the horror genre, the latter one of its masterpieces. Both were smash hits in Spain, but were heavily cut and badly distributed in the US and the rest of Europe. The Uruguayan-born

A long-form article about Roman Polanksi's 1968 film Rosemary's Baby, and how it relates to collectivsm, conformity and his experience as a Jew during the Second World War.

Famously, Night of the Hunter , Charles Laughton's 1955 noir, was the only film that he directed. One of the great actors of his generation ( Mutiny on the Bounty ,1935; Jamaica Inn ,1939; The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1938), he didn’t intend the film to be his last. He’d planned to follow it with an adaptation of Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead , but was so dispirited by the negative reviews that he gave up on the idea. The plot of Night of the Hunter is simple en

A reappraisal of Louis Malle's 1963 film The Fire Within and its source nove, and how the film relates to various philosopies of sucide, in particular those of Schopenhauer and EM Cioran. Also discusses henri Bresson's 1964 movie Mouchette.