Martin McDonagh is one of our greatest living playwrights, with his work being widely produced, from the sacred stages of Broadway to the smallest public theatres in Asia, and everywhere in between, his penchant for darkly comical morality tales being the source of many fascinating discussions under the direction of a range of artists who…

Something we don’t speak about very often is the vast number of comedies about outright murder produced during the 1940s. It seems like this decade, more than any other, made films that intentionally provoked laughter on the subject of the cold-blooded killing of people, whether it be strangers or those from within one’s domestic circle….

We’ve spoken on many occasions about the fact that Hollywood’s favourite topic of conversation is itself – you’d struggle to find someone within the industry that didn’t operate in a way where they loved nothing more than the sound of their own voice. There is certainly not any shortage of works that make bold and…

They say imitation is the highest form of flattery – and it would appear that Alessandro Genovesi certainly wanted to honour François Ozon in the form of 7 Women and a Murder (Italian: 7 donne e un mistero), which is an almost shot-for-shot remake of Ozon’s iconic 8 Women, which is in the upper echelons…

“There is just no end to surprise. I feel sad for us and the queer part we play in our own disasters. But out of some persistent sense of large-scale ruin, we keep inventing hope. And this is where we wait…together” Through the hallowed halls of 20th-century literature, there are few writers more influential or…

A priest, a heavy metal musician and a television host walk into a building – this sounds like the set-up for a classic joke, but in reality is the central premise of The Day of the Beast (Spanish: El día de la bestia), the deliriously funny and hopelessly bleak dark comedy by Álex de la…

It seems that one of the great cinematic inevitabilities is that every major director, should they work for long enough, will end up making a film that is immensely personal to them. The two broadest categories are those that focus on their upbringing (which have become more common in recent years), and self-reflective examinations of…

The act of describing Novocaine is certainly a challenge. Not too many films like this tend to come about all that often anymore, and when they do, they’re mostly defined by a very precise control of tone and register that establishes them as potential cult classics, something that has yet to be bestowed on this…

Very few novels have had as bizarre a journey to the screen as Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the semi-autobiographical account of the trip he and his eccentric lawyer took to Las Vegas in the early 1970s, focusing on fictionalized adventures of Raoul Duke and Dr Gonzo, the surrogates for the…

One of the most beautiful aspects of postmodernism is that once a work of art aligns itself with this revolutionary movement that has questioned reality for the better part of half a century, there’s very little that can be viewed as implausible. So many artists have found ways to stretch the boundaries of the collective…