Movies In Focus

The 30th edition of the Fantasia International Film Festival will kick-off on July 16 and run through to August 2, 2026. The physical festival takes place in Montreal, Canada – but Movies In Focus will be covering things remotely. Who says technology is all bad, eh? A myriad of reasons means that I haven’t covered the festival since 2020 when it went online, but Fantasia always has an exciting…

Nothing quite captures the zeitgeist like a horror film. The Exorcist, The Blair Witch Project and The Sixth Sense (to name but a few) were all monumentally successful and enthralled audiences with huge box office grosses. Curry Barker’s Obsession can now be added to that list. Made for under $1 million, the film blew away its opening box office projections and continued to gross more on each…

  Roger Michell – 1999 Notting Hill is an entertaining and well put together London-centric romantic comedy. Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts make a good pairing and there’s an interesting cast of satellite characters for them to bounce off. This Richard Curtis written flick ticks all the right boxes and follows the well-worn genre template, right down to the upbeat soundtrack. This is good, solid…

Ron Shelton – 1988. A muscular baseball movie starring 

I didn’t like Sam Raimi’s Send Help. It tries too hard and ultimately doesn’t go far enough in its excesses. Rami is a director who can be deliciously subversive when he wants to be (see Drag Me To Hell) and he used to be a down and dirty filmmaker who would push his audience to the limit. Years working in the realm of big budget studio movies (see Oz: The Great And Powerful) appear to have…

Set in Los Angeles during Christmas, Above The Line sees six Hollywood wannabes get the invite of a lifetime when a mysterious messenger gives them the opportunity to steal the Best Picture Awards belonging to an unscrupulous film producer, played by Gregg Henry.  Directed by Jeffrey Scott Collins, Above The Line is an on-point black comedy that takes plenty of potshots at Hollywood and the film…

Over the course of the last half century, Gregg Henry has become one of the most prolific – and one of the best character actors around. A man who has notched-up seven guest-starring roles in Murder, She Wrote alone and who has starred in six Brian De Palma projects as well as movies like Payback, Jason Bourne and the Guardians Of The Galaxy films – to name but a few.  I first noticed him…

Raymond Chandler’s iconic – and laconic – private detective Philip Marlowe has been fodder for Hollywood all the way back to Murder, My Sweet in 1944 starring Dick Powell. That film ripped Marlowe from the pages of Chandler’s written work and introduced him to cinema audiences for the first time. However, the character of Philip Marlowe is probably best known from Humphrey Bogart’s take on the…

It has been announced that Lionsgate is changing its planned release schedule for its two-part sequel to Mel Gibson’s The Passion Of The Christ.  Part One of The Resurrection Of The Christ was scheduled to open on March 26, 2027 – but this has now been switched to May 6, 2027. Meanwhile, the second part, which was previously set to hit screens just 40 days later on May 6, 2027 – has now been…

Since its release in 1991, Michael Lehmann’s Hudson Hawk has always been something of an under-appreciated masterpiece. The Bruce Willis starring action-comedy was hammered by the press before it even came out and it ultimately bombed at the US box office when it opened 35 years ago, grossing a little over $17 million. Since then, the film has been a Hollywood punchline for excess, grouping it…

Mark Jenkin’s Rose Of Nevada is an elliptical film that starts with a curious event and ends with a whole set of questions left dangling. Even the genre is unquantifiable. Is it a mystery? A ghost story? Or is it a time-travelling tale? In a sense, it’s all of these – yet none of them at all. This dreamlike film takes a concept that had the potential to have been commercial fodder and focuses it…

  Michael Schilf’s The Wolf And The Lamb is a real curio of a western-horror hybrid with a stacked cast that includes Cassandra Scerbo, Adrianne Palicki, Zach McGowan, James Landry Hébert, Q’orianka Kilcher and Clint Howard.  A strange blend of western series, Deadwood and Stephen King’s  Salem’s Lot, this a true ensemble film that really plays with the horror slow burn as a quiet evil begins to…

There used to be a time when films just came out. Yes, they would have reviews that were good, bad or indifferent, but they would play simply as entertainment. Today there’s so much noise – maybe it’s devised by marketing teams as a way to get above the constant din of an increasingly hectic world, or maybe it’s just social media chatter that raises opinions and thoughts to such a level that…

Cinema is an interesting art form. It can be used for far-fetched escapism, offering up a couple of hours refuge from the troubles of the real world as you are transported into another realm in thrilling ways. However, cinema can be something thought provoking – a film that captures the attention and makes you think about real life situations and moments that you’d never have even imagined. It…

A film called The Yeti sets up a certain amount of expectations – and filmmakers can either embrace those expectations or totally ignore them. That can lead to a very happy audience, or an audience that’s ultimately disappointed by the bait and switch. What writer-directors Gene Gallerano and William Pisciotta have managed to do is a little bit of both. They absolutely give you the film that you…

You might have certain expectations when going into a film called The Yeti. However, filmmakers Gene Gallerano and William Pisciotta blow those expectations out of the water with their surprising new monster film. A horror pic with a difference, this period creature feature has a strong cast that includes Brittany Allen, Eric Nelsen, Jim Cummings, William Sadler and Corbin Bernsen. The Yeti…

  Returning guest Pen Densham joins this episode of the Movies In Focus podcast. Pen is a hugely talented writer, producer and director who is probably best known for writing and producing Kevin Costner’s iconic 1991 adventure,  Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves alongside his film-making partner, John Watson.  He also has a whole host of other interesting film credits to his name – including: Blown…