Laurence Smither

The Witchfinder is the bewitching new comedy written by Neil & Rob Gibbons, produced by BabyCow, which aired on BBC 2 in March.

The trailer is a short-form cultural phenomenon that predates the internet, but what is that makes a trailer so important and, most crucially, how can you tell a good one from bad?

In the gallery of cinema’s heroes, director Ingmar Bergman’s plinth stands tall.

Despite much to be admired with The Northman, unfortunately I did find myself rather tired of it. Its plodding second act made me feel, dare I say, bored.

A deep fake is a simulated image created by inputting pre-existing images and sounds into deep learning artificial intelligence algorithms.

However, there is one designer in the last few years who has proven his artistry with a consistently unique style, humour and gameplay, all while working with a small independent team, he is Lucas Pope.

For over two decades director Sean Baker has directed some of the timeliest and most interesting films that capture the crumbling American dream and the people left in its wake. His previous feature The Florida Project (2017) tackled the grim reality of poverty from the perspective of a childhood fantasy around a motel on the borders of the biggest fantasy factory there is: Disneyland. His latest, Red Rocket takes us to a Texas gulf city outskirt in the midst of the 2016 presidential campaign, uncovering the US’ dark underbelly and emerging as one of the best films of 2021. Mikey…

The world is your oyster so they say, and when growing up with the bountiful opportunities that life throws, it’s often best to grab them by the shell and slurp. But what if those opportunities aren’t what you expected? What if you run out of oysters? What if you didn’t order oysters at all? The Worst Person in the World (Verdens verste menneske), the new film by Joachim Trier, explores these questions by illustrating the pitfalls of trying to be a grown up while still feeling like you’re growing. In its twelve chapters, with prologue and epilogue, we spend four…

“Does the haunting beat of savage drums fascinate you? Are you captivated by the forbidden ceremonies of primitive people?” invites the listener, in the liner notes of Les Baxter’s 1951 album Ritual of the Savage. It is this beckoning that highlights the cornerstone of a strange and enchanting music genre: Exotica. Exotica is a mix of varying musical genres that span jazz, Latin and samba with recorded sound effects and studio orchestration. Like its sister genre, ‘space age pop’, the listener is transported to worlds unknown: deepest jungles, ancient rituals, or the arms of a hypnotic temptress. Using a mélange of…

When I was younger and far meaner than today, I recall playing a trick of mistruths on a younger brother of a friend. Peter Jackson’s King Kong was on the television and exploiting this poor boy’s fear of this gargantuan ape, his brother and I concocted a fiction that the iconic movie monster was in fact real. But regaling our frightened target with stories of Kong’s exploits could only get us so far, we needed proof. This was in the early 2000s, before social media, before even YouTube; if we were to show evidence it had to be televisual, or…