“Do You Want to Mango With Me?” An Exploration of Female Pleasure in Alli Hapasalo’s ‘Girl Picture’ (2022)

Girl Picture, alternatively titled Girls Girls Girls, is a bold coming of age film centred around the lives of three girls navigating the treacherous landscapes of sex, commitment and self-exploration. Mimmi (Aamu Milonoff), prone to frequent outbursts of anger as a release of her overwhelming emotions, grapples with a sense of abandonment from her mother…

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REVIEW: White Lotus Season 2, A Week in Paradise Begins

HBO’s The White Lotus is back for a second season after the critically acclaimed first, which took home a handful of Emmys, including one for Outstanding Limited or Anthology Series. This time, it takes place at a resort in Sicily, and stars Jennifer Coolidge, Theo James, Aubrey Plaza, etc.  The episode starts out the same…

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LFF 2022 REVIEW: A Baumbachian Descent into Calamity Culture and Disaster for ‘White Noise’

“As Baumbach satirises consumer culture, he in turn finds dignified meaning to the lives of Delilo’s terrified counterparts” The notes I made during Noah Baumbach’s screen talk following his new film’s premiere at the London Film Festival range from abstract at best to unintelligible at worst. Sitting across from my favourite director of modern times,…

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REVIEW: ‘Meet Me in the Bathroom’ is a Hit of Nostalgia for Noughties Indie Kids

We begin with home movie footage showing a pair messing with an electronic keyboard, preparing to show their parents a new song they had written. The pair are The Moldy Peaches, a band perhaps synonymous with the iconic Juno soundtrack, and the way in which it helped a whole new generation discover the twee indie pop of…

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In ‘Coming Home in the Dark’ (2021), Revenge Is Nothing More Than a Continuation of Violence

A film less concerned with trying to force viewers to sympathise with its characters than simply presenting them, Coming Home in the Dark is a brutal film about institutional abuse and the part its subsequent lifelong pain plays in the cycle of violence.

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‘Less Than Zero’ at 35: The Great Debate of Unfaithful Adaptations

In 1985, at the tender age of twenty-one, an unknown writer named Bret Easton Ellis sold his first novel for five thousand dollars. Named after the Elvis Costello song, Less Than Zero follows the icy hearts of its over-privileged young characters in sunny Los Angeles. It paints a vivid picture of the disastrous effects of…

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From ‘Bly Manor’ to ‘Bodies Bodies Bodies’: The Comfort of Quietly Queer Horror

“Not only are each of these projects situated within specific subgenres of horror, they also feature very queer, very human protagonists. What makes this fact even more notable is the fact that none of them were marketed to audiences on the basis of queer content, instead placing the focus on their genre.”

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‘Revenge of the Cheerleaders’ (1976): Rewinding Back to a Simpler Time

Revenge of the Cheerleaders, filmed in 1974 and released in 1976, is evocative of a time that was considerably looser and freer than today. For one thing, there was far less of a negative stigma against the portrayal of sex/nudity in film. In fact, many popular film genres of that time included such depictions. There was also…

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Final Girls and Talking Killers: Feminist Transgressions in ‘The Slumber Party Massacre’ (1982)

40 years later, ‘The Slumber Party Massacre’ is a still a surprisingly progressive, feminist entry in the slasher genre.

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