Brian Connor

Plagues Used to be Even Less Fun The Great Plague of 1665 ripped a deadly swath through England, killing tens of thousands and destabilizing a country still recovering from the civil war a decade earlier.…

If You Go Down to the Woods Today Vlogger Brian is losing his mojo. Reporting for Vice Compound, a website with an extremely familiar-looking logo and modus operandi, he´s tired of covering the stupidest of modern…

Donnie Darko, Fight Club, The Thing… all ‘cult’ films that made the square root of nada at the box office but have been critically vindicated since. 20 years ago, Josie and the Pussycats joined this hallowed…

A sub-genre of the “found footage” films, computer screen films have been less prevalent than their Blair Witch-related cousins but can, as in the case of Searching or the Unfriended movies, be surprisingly effective. If they’re…

The Wanting Mare opens with text informing the audience that, in the city of Whithren on the world of Anmaere, citizens are desperate to travel to the wintry land of Levithen on the once-a-year ship…

The Allyn brothers’ biggest collaboration to date, No Man’s Land, begins with the lines, “The U.S. and Mexico share one of the world’s longest borders. In Texas, border fences often lie far north of the…

What Does Hollywood Have Against 2049? 2049 and three weeks after what is referred to as “The Event”, humanity faces extinction, except for the extravagantly named Augustine Lofthouse (George Clooney), who has remained at his…

Norwegian psychotherapist Finn Skårderud once posited the idea that humans are too sober. He believed the ideal running level for mankind was a blood alcohol level of 0.05%. (Interestingly, fellow noted scientist Elizabeth Hurley had…

On November 24, 1971, D.B. Cooper jumped out of a plane with two hundred thousand dollars in ransom money and disappeared. Now, the phrase “living the dream” is thrown around a lot these days, but……

I Am Sam, Grace Of Monaco, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. All made with the express purpose of winning Oscars. All absolute garbage. Joining this lackluster group is Ron Howard’s latest Hillbilly Elegy. A lifeless, hacky…

Night Of The Living Dead. Paranormal Activity. The Blair Witch Project. All micro-budget horror films that made an absolute fortune at the box office. Which, unfortunately, leads hundreds of people to think making a horror film…

America has always been a fertile ground for new movements and splinter groups. Heck, the Pilgrims were basically a church looking to — in the words of Bender Bending Rodriguez — start their own colony,…

10 years ago, André Øvredal made his feature debut with the fast and loose found-footage monster movie Trollhunter. It was just before the found-footage fad fell off and it became something of a cult hit,…

How bad is Love, Guaranteed? Well, this is what’s displayed before the end credits:   While you’re busy throwing up, I’ll watch a cat video for a bit.   Love, Guaranteed opens with Rachael Leigh Cook’s…

Unknown Origins, David Galan Galindo‘s first solo feature as director (he previously helmed one of the sections of portmanteau film Al Final Todos Mueren) brings the world of comic book fandom to the serial killer genre…

“The desire to be a politician should bar you for life from ever being one.” – Billy Connolly Since 1935, The American Legion has sponsored Boys State (and Girls State, which is somehow a separated…

Promising to do for Airbnb what Unfriended did for Skype, The Rental takes two genre types and blends them to chilling effect. Two couples, comprised of Silicon Valley tech-bro Charlie (Dan Stevens) and his partner…

Clearing up after a film shoot, Day (Theeradej Wongpuapan) takes a break to float in a 6-meter deep pool on an inflatable. Unfortunately, it’s a slowly draining pool and after a little nap, he wakes…

For a country with a population of only five million people, Norway punches above its weight in the world of scary movies. Maybe it’s the unfathomable depths of the fjords, maybe it’s the long dark…

Netflix’s record with original Hollywood action movies is patchy at best. When the so-so Extraction is among the finer examples of their big-name blockbusters, there’s something not working. With The Old Guard, though, they might hopefully…

Young couple Emily and Randall (Liana Liberato and Noah Le Gros) travel to a getaway beach house for a weekend of relaxation. On arrival, they find the beach house double-booked with an older couple Jane…

Adú is director Salvador Calvo’s sophomore feature and is a big step up from the solid 1898: Our Last Men In The Philipines. It covers three lightly interconnected stories that take place across Africa. In…

Looking for a cinematic pick me up? Feel The Beat throws a bunch of feel-good genres into a blender, and delivers 90 minutes that should put a smile on 99% of faces. (There’s just no…

In a (slightly more) dystopian near-future, The USA is preparing to turn on the ‘American Peace Initiative’, a signal that acts as “a synaptic dampener making it impossible for a person to carry out an…

Two decades on, the after-effects of Mission: Impossible 2 are much stronger for other franchises than the Mission: Impossible franchise itself. M: I-2 villain Dougray Scott was famously lined up to take the role of Wolverine…

How To Build A Girl is based on the semi-autobiographical novel by English journalist and broadcaster Caitlin Moran. As a woman who was writing for a national music magazine at 16 and writing for The Times…

The Baztan Trilogy by Dolores Redondo has sold over a million copies worldwide and has been translated into 31 languages so far. It was inevitable the three stories would be adapted for TV or film.…

Romcoms generally exist in a world unlike ours. That’s to be expected, people like a bit of escapism. There’s nothing wrong with that. Especially at the moment, 90 minutes in a world of charming, attractive,…

After last week’s The Platform, Netflix continues something of a roll for Spanish releases with David and Àlex Pastor’s The Occupant, a viscerally dark meditation on masculinity and status in an increasingly precarious world. (And…

To All the Boys I Loved Before was one of Netflix’s more notable successes. Released to little fanfare in the middle of summer, it took off in a big way. It sits at 97% fresh…