“I call out your name in glass bottles shattered against concrete walls, and in the wind that anxiously rushes through the corridors of abandoned tenements.”
[Poetry] — Jemima Khalli
“one day / men / will realise / they too / gave birth”
[Essay] Not a Horror: How Marketing Ruined Crimson Peak — Lucas Hill-Paul
“We have been conditioned by modern horror to expect certain breeds of scares.”
[Essay] Characterisation in Battle Royale — Dan Norman
“No character is wasted or put on screen to simply be a throwaway body.”
[Essay] We’re All Jay Gatsby – Mariana Des Forges
“Like Gatsby’s commodified wealth, ‘Likes’ and ‘Retweets’ become the currency in which we quantify our self-worth”
[Essay] British India: Empire, Ideology & Race — Joseph Barker
“Simply by offering political and social benefits to particular classifications of race, the British were able to create competition between Indian groups where none existed prior to colonial rule.”
[Fiction] — Jonathan Cardew
“I was going to ask him to place both hands on the pole, but he was a grown man.”
[Essay] Based on a True Story: The Biopic Today — Lucas Hill-Paul
“This violence is key to biopics of this nature, with Everest and Straight Outta Compton portraying the brutality of the events in blunt and honest fashion.”
[Poetry] — R.W. Haynes
“As burgerish Torvald smites the ivory keys / With spousal diligence, his manly face /
A study in patient tolerance”
[Essay] Little Miss Sunshine: Dysfunctional Families on Screen — Jacob Bernard-Banton
“I confess. I was charmed.”
[Essay] Floyd Mayweather: The Willing ‘Bastard’ of Boxing — Michael McGinley-Hughes
“His unmarked face, a benefit of his unparalleled defence, became the symbol of the audience’s disdain.”
[Essay] Robert Redford in The Candidate: the Politics of Image and the Image of Politics — Jacob Bernard-Banton
“McKay trades on authenticity, but his campaign is like any other: laboured over with painstaking precision, a machine.”
[Essay] 45 Years: Deciphering Film Quality — Eliza Slawther
“The film causes a strange paradox: it makes for utterly awful viewing that is apparently all a part of the experience.”
[Essay] Making Myth: Purple Rain and The Assassination of Jesse James — Dan Norman
“Purple Rain is a transparent – yet very effective – attempt at creating an origin for its star which its target audience can buy into, exploiting our urge to mythologise public figures.”
[Essay] Pornoentropia — Louis Armand
“The nakedness of the image is always an interstice – something into which the visualization of desire is constantly projected in a type of pornographic monomania.”
[Essay] Adam Sandler: Show Me the Funny — Jacob Bernard-Banton
“The American funnyman is juvenile, even antisocial, but wins over the doubters by way of maddeningly unfunny films that are both mawkishly sentimental and transparently unrealistic.”
[Essay] The Mythology of Starbucks — Maddy Howard
“Just as Barthes says the texture of steak, its sanguine juiciness, seem to be magically health-giving, the foamy, insubstantial milkiness of a cappuccino or latte has its own special sublimity.”
[Essay] Jennifer Aniston: Breaking the Typecast — Melissa Roberts
“The cinema is a place of escape, however, we have also constructed it to be a place where some actors are irrevocably trapped within a role we demand them ceaselessly to reprise.”
New Critique 