More than sixty years ago, the brilliant Marco Bellocchio made Fists in the Pocket, his deeply disturbing and utterly brilliant satire about a homicidal young man who decides to combine his psychopathic urge to murder with his desire to be wealthy, using his family as targets. It is quite simply one of the greatest films…
Category: dark comedy
The Anniversary (1968)
“Misery loves family” – Tracy Letts may have popularised this sentiment with August: Osage County, but he certainly was not the first person to explore the tensions that simmer beneath the surface of an ordinary group of individuals bound together by their blood relation, but torn apart by their varying insecurities and personal grudges held…
The Rivals of Amziah King (2026)
Some people enter our lives for a reason, others merely for a season – this is much more than a hackneyed adage that has adorned many household decorations and social media captions, and instead perhaps the simplest but evocative summary of the fickle nature of friendship, something to which we can all relate to an…
Happiness Is So Close! (2026)
Every profession brings its own unique set of insecurities, but there is one fear that is shared universally, regardless of each person’s chosen vocation: the fear of becoming redundant. We all like to believe ourselves to be irreplaceable and essential, since without the feeling of being consistently useful, there’s never really any purpose in continuing…
Digger (2026)
There’s a quip by the beloved humourist Dan Nilsen, who compared satire to pornography by evoking Supreme Justice Potter Stewart, who himself famously said (of the latter): “I know it when I see it” – and in the centuries that we’ve been analysing the subject, there are few descriptions more appropriate when it comes to…
Wild Horse Nine (2026)
As the famous saying goes, we are all born to die. However, some people seem to think that they were born to kill, which is how we get the supposedly thriving industry of professional assassins, a vocation that apparently has deep roots in the global political landscape, although very few of us, thankfully, have any…
Heel (2026)
How do you correct bad behaviour? Every parent has a different approach to the art of discipline, some preferring a more gentle, language-based approach, others believing that the only way to curb misbehaviour is through physical means. In both accounts, it is a very contentious topic, despite being very personal and tailored to each individual…
3 Days in September (2026)
How would you handle it if, on the day of your wedding (which is supposed to be one of the happiest moments in your life if the socially mandated beliefs are held to be true), a stranger suddenly emerges and reveals that your soon-to-be-spouse has actually been unfaithful, to the point of having engaged in…
Infinity Baby (2017)
As the great Lana Del Rey once said, we are born to die – and while she may have had more philosophical reasons for such a bold statement, it does point to the reality that we essentially begin the process of making our way towards our inevitable demise the moment we are born, a bleak…
Lake George (2024)
For decades, cinema has had a peculiar relationship with the film noir genre. At one point, it was arguably one of the most popular genres in Hollywood, but much like the western and musical, it faded away during that ambiguous period towards the end of the Golden Age, and was revived in the early 1970s…
