Sanctuary
SANCTUARY is a well-considered film that draws the audience into the tangled and shifting power dynamics of sub-dom kink and keeps the audience guessing until its unfortunate final moments.
All posts by Simon Bowie
Polite Society
Nida Manzoor’s POLITE SOCIETY closed Glasgow Film Festival 2023 on a high as one of the festival’s strongest and most creative films.
Glasgow Short Film Festival 2023
Associate Editor Simon Bowie reflects on the 2023 edition of Glasgow Short Film Festival, and its themes of machine learning, ‘weak’ artificial intelligence, and taking control of your own life or the tools you use.
How to Blow Up a Pipeline
HOW TO BLOW UP A PIPELINE is a tense heist thriller about ecoterrorism that doesn’t hold back from clear and explicit recommendations about what property we need to trash to lessen planetary catastrophe.
Therapy Dogs
Ethan Eng’s debut feature THERAPY DOGS is an astonishingly inventive blend of documentary and drama exploring the high school experience.
Adopting Audrey
ADOPTING AUDREY’s emotional beats are slight, often landing with less force than they could. However, it still explores something interesting about the generational divide between boomers and millennials.
Eo
EO works by using the language of cinema to pull us into the subjectivity of Eo and the other animals he encounters. The film feels like a milestone for recognition of the consciousness of the beings with whom we share a planet, writes Simon Bowie.
Hommage
Premiering in Europe at the Glasgow Film Festival, HOMMAGE (오마주) is a surprising and heartfelt cinematic mystery about women filmmakers, the collaborative process of filmmaking, and the ghosts of those that came before. It’s got some incredibly striking imagery and is a hidden gem of this year’s GFF. Ji-wan (Lee Jeung-eun) is a director of … Continue reading Hommage
Zalava
In Arsalan Amiri’s ZALAVA (زالاوا), demons are loose in a small village in pre-revolution Iran and mob mentality grips the village’s people. ZALAVA is a confident, creepy, and at times hilarious Middle Eastern horror film with an impressive cast, striking camera work, and gestures towards wider political discussions. Set before the Iranian Revolution, Zalava is … Continue reading Zalava
Superior
Simon Bowie reviews Erin Vassilopoulos’ SUPERIOR and argues that it fails to live to up its many David Lynch references and genre pastiches.