Savage Steve Holland’s Better Off Dead is an anarchic gift of a comedy. Nominally, it revolves around teenager Lane Myer, played by John Cusack, as he sinks into a pit of [...]

Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance is the first and most anarchic film in Park Chan-Wook’s vengeance trilogy – possibly the most anarchic film in his career. On the one hand, [...]

With The Wicker Man, Robin Hardy crafted folk horror as we know it today – and he did it to chart the folk revival of the 60s as it turned sour on the brink of a new [...]

Manhunter and The Silence of the Lambs were perfect films, so there was no point in repeating them when it came to Hannibal, Ridley Scott’s adaptation of the third novel of [...]

Red Dragon is one of the stranger entries in the Hannibal Lecter universe. It’s written by Ted Tally, the screenwriter responsible for The Silence of the Lambs, and yet [...]

Like Yasujiro Ozu or Wes Anderson, Dario Argento has spent most of his career minutely refining one aesthetic worldview – that of the serial killer, a figure he has [...]

Manhunter was a horror masterpiece but The Silence of the Lambs may well be the greatest horror film ever made. In its emotional complexity, its beautiful command of [...]

The 2022 version of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre may not be the worst film in the franchise – that title probably belongs to Leatherface, the previous release – but in [...]

Michael Mann’s Manhunter is the first adaptation of Thomas Harris’ Hannibal Lecter cycle and would easily be the greatest if The Silence of the Lambs didn’t happen to [...]

Dario Argento may be renowned for his excess but he was a master of restraint in his debut film, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, which often feels as much a work of music [...]