In Under the Skin, Scarlett Johansson is an otherworldly, not-quite-human alien disguised as a voluptuous young woman who’s out scouring the streets of Glasgow for vulnerable and isolated young men to hunt and kill. She’s enabled in this task by a stern male alien in motorbike leathers, who begins to hunt her when she starts…
Read moreWorld War Z
World War Z, if you hadn’t heard, is a book that’s styled as an intellectual history of a massive, unprecedented global calamity which happens to involve zombies. Written by Max Brooks, it’s obviously not high art, but it is terrifically well written and the world it conjures is truly vivid and truly scary. So when…
Read moreCloud Atlas
Although Cloud Atlas polarised the critics, I’m going to say simply that I thought it an astonishing, moving and utterly unforgettable film. I watched it twice, in somewhat quick succession, and the second viewing was even better than the first. Don’t get me wrong, the six interweaving tales of how reincarnated souls move through the…
Read moreDoomsday
A couple of years ago, in the middle of the night, we were woken by the sounds of shouting in the streets outside our loft. Sounded unnervingly like a riot – which would be unusual but not entirely unheard of in South Africa, after all. It turned out to be a movie production, featuring people…
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