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I am a culture journalist and film critic based in London. I contribute to TIME Magazine, Vulture, British GQ, Big Issue, A.V. Club, AnOther, and other publications.

I am available for interviews, profiles, reviews, festival coverage, op-eds, programme notes, and booklet essays.

AnOther •

La Grazia, a Sentimental Political Drama from Paolo Sorrentino

Neapolitan filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino has many recurring themes and motifs – beauty, loneliness, tradition, electronic music, sensuality as a window into the soul, often all bound up within a single protagonist. But he has one true acting muse – Toni Servillo, who shares with Sorrentino a Naples birthplace and a fascination with the conscience of powerful Italian men.
“[Sorrentino] gave me a real present [of] seven beautiful, wonderful characters,” says Servillo. It’s the day after the Venice Fi...
TIME •

The Surprising History Behind The Bride!

“I am alone, and miserable; man will not associate with me; but one as deformed and horrible as myself would not deny herself to me. My companion must be of the same species, and have the same defects. This being you must create.”So commands the Creature to his creator Victor Frankenstein in Mary Shelley’s novel. The Creature thinks his suffering can only cease if it is replicated in another, and expresses this desire through possessive, dehumanizing language. His companion must be female becaus...
Inverse •

One Forgotten Japanese Sci-Fi Movie Predated A Beloved Anime Adaptation By Decades

The films of Nobuhiko Obayashi are a particularly satisfying and surprising niche in Japanese cinema. His filmography is bookended with dazzling works that combine the exuberance of adolescence with discoveries of historic suffering — beginning with House in 1977, and concluding with Hanagatami in 2017 and Labyrinth of Cinema, which released months after the director’s demise in 2020.During the 1980s, Obayashi directed several adaptations of sci-fi books and travelogues for entertainment conglom...
AV Club •

When Pixar filmmakers venture into live-action, the Brain Trust goes bust

In the years that the filmgoing world has tried to pin down the secret to animation giant Pixar’s success, a few frontrunners have emerged as possibilities. First, there’s the Brain Trust, the company’s collaborative, rigorous development process that lets senior creatives periodically contribute to their peers’ ongoing projects. Next, there are its 22 Rules For Storytelling, each one a satisfying and sensible maxim for narrative design that helps partially explain why Pixar’s first run of films...
BFI •

Zi review: Kogonada’s return to indie filmmaking

A Hong Kong violinist grapples with visions of her future self in a meandering drama where resonant moments are few and far between.Kogonada’s zi is light on its feet and unbound by narrative convention, a film that feels like a direct reaction to the director’s most recent film, the earnest, studio-funded A Big Bold Beautiful Journey (2025), which was widely panned by critics upon release last year. The former video essayist filmmaker renders Hong Kong as a site of almost sublime anonymity, whe...
AnOther •

Wagner Moura Is Making Oscars History with The Secret Agent

Wagner Moura makes no bones about what in the world makes him angry. The star of The Secret Agent, and first Brazilian to be nominated for a best actor Academy award, is the face of the fury and compassion coursing through the simmering political thriller from Kleber Mendonça Filho, set amid the Brazilian military dictatorship of the 1970s.
“My temperature in life is more explosive when it’s about injustice,” Moura tells me when we sit down to talk at the London Film Festival in October, months...
Inverse •

The Legendary Epic That Inspired 'Dune' Just Got A Huge Upgrade

The truest, purest way to watch Lawrence of Arabia — David Lean’s historical epic about British officer T.E. Lawrence fighting in the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire — is projected on 70mm. The landscapes, the colors, and the striking intimacy of tortured souls against a backdrop of tremendous desert beauty are what the large-format film gauge is best at. But as we’re not all lucky enough to know a guy who can project it for us whenever we feel like it, a 4K Blu-ray is the next best thing...
In Review Online •

Everybody to Kenmure Street — Felipe Bustos Sierra [Sundance '26 Review] | In Review Online

In 2021, a residential area in the southside of Glasgow, Scotland, exploded into an impromptu stand-off against police and deportation officers. Early on May 13, a unit from the UK Home Office’s immigration enforcement taskforce staged a dawn raid on Kenmure Street that abducted two Sikh men — longtime residents of the area — and ferried them into their van. This is as far as the “prisoner removal service” ever got, as locals quickly milled onto the street to livestream and protest the deportati...
In Review Online •

Ghost in the Machine — Valerie Veatch [Sundance '26 Review] | In Review Online

Every threat to a sane and healthy life posed by AI is a continuation of some already existing social and political deterioration. Our societal tipping point from AI skepticism to acceptance (or, helplessness) was only fluid because our lives have already become so siloed, automated, and precarious. Technocapitalism decided humans are most valuable as a mass expression of processed, packaged, sellable data, a sea of targets for gambling ads and unmanned drones alike; everything deplorable about...
BFI •

10 great British heist films

As the Scorsese and Tarantino-endorsed British crime thriller Strongroom is re-released in cinemas, we break open the history of the British heist film and make off with the goods.A Saturday shift at a suburban English bank draws to a close. The bank manager and cashier are surprised by robbers, their features contorted and smeared by tights pulled over their heads. They break into the strongroom, nicking the loot and locking the two bystanders inside. The bank won’t reopen until Tuesday, but th...
AnOther •

A Guide to the Searching Cinema of Richard Linklater

It’s been 40 years since Richard Linklater founded the Austin Film Society, beginning his crusade to make scrappy, personal, romantic and boisterous cinema. It’s fitting for a director who first broke out in the 1990s “Indiewood” boom that his latest film, Nouvelle Vague, is an origin story of cinema’s enfant terrible par excellence, Jean-Luc Godard, mounting his iconic debut film Breathless. As Linklater’s first non-English film, Nouvelle Vague feels like a film fanatic has staged and animated...
TIME •

The True Story Behind 'The Big Fake'

At the start of The Big Fake, a Netflix dramatization of one criminal’s involvement in the most tumultuous events in post-war Italy, Toni Chichiarelli (Pietro Castellitto) is a talented painter living hand-to-mouth as a portrait artist on the streets of Rome. It’s the 1970s, deep in Italy’s “Years of Lead," an era of turmoil marked by political terrorism by neo-fascists and far-left militants like the “Red Brigades,” not to mention interference from the Italian state and profiteering from organi...
AV Club •

The Bone Temple's villain makes an existential struggle for survival blandly literal

Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell) arrived in a postscript cliffhanger to last summer‘s 28 Years Later dressed in the tacky, eyesore garb—tracksuit, wig, and plastic jewelry—instantly recognizable to British audiences as an homage to Jimmy Savile, the media personality and philanthropist who was exposed as one of Britain’s most prolific sexual predators after his death in 2011. This completely unpredictable coda—a promise of what was to come in 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple—triggered a fl...
AnOther •

Cover-Up: Laura Poitras on her Spiky Love Letter to a Journalistic Hero

The opening seconds of Cover-Up show footage from a 1968 news report in Utah, after a US Army nerve agent killed thousands of sheep at the Dugway Proving Ground. Institutional recklessness and an absence of accountability haunts the scene, themes that recur throughout the film – a thorough and occasionally spiky profile of investigative reporter Seymour Hersh. 
In addition to exposing America’s chemical and biological weapon programmes, Hersh was responsible for several pivotal feats of journali...
BFI •

Noah Baumbach on his portrait of a movie star, Jay Kelly: “It’s part of the culture in America that no-one ages”

With Jay Kelly, the director of Frances Ha and Marriage Story turns his lens on the fragility of fame, following George Clooney as an ageing movie star reckoning with his past. In this conversation, Baumbach explores why Hollywood icons make the perfect mirror for our own vulnerabilities.Each Noah Baumbach film feels in some way distinct from the one before. After breaking out with neurotic, dysfunctional dramedies in the 2000s, Noah Baumbach embraced a freer comedic style with Frances Ha (2012)...
AnOther •

10 Intimate Winter Films to Add to Your Watchlist This Season

Nearly every Christmas film hinges on a seasonal, often kitschy surge of sentimentality in the final act. But for all the reunions, reconciliations and promises of renewal that occur at the end of the year, there is something to be said for the filmmakers who tap the rest of the winter months’ potential as a backdrop for introspective, humanist storytelling.
Winter is a deceptively intimate time of year. It brings a heightened awareness of nature’s harshness and the contrast of warm, manmade hea...
AnOther •

A Guide to the Feral, Fugitive Cinema of Lynne Ramsay

Although she has only directed five feature films in a quarter-century career, Scottish director Lynne Ramsay’s influence can be felt throughout British cinema today – blending an immediate, sometimes painful naturalism with the impressionistic qualities of photography. Watching her social-realist drama Ratcatcher, set in an impoverished burgh in Glasgow during the 1973 refuse strikes, or Morvern Callar, about a woman fleeing her boyfriend’s suicide from Scotland to Spain, you can track the subj...
Vulture •

20 Frankensteins From (Nearly) a Century of Cinema, Ranked

Almost 100 years ago, Frankenstein (the man, not the monster) declared an ecstatic, revelatory victory over scientific dogma: “It’s alive!” He had imbued life into a body constructed from dead human tissue and, in the process, kick-started a cinematic tradition that nearly every film featuring a mad scientist has been indebted to. In Universal’s Frankenstein, directed by British filmmaker James Whale in 1931, Mary Shelley’s powerhouse gothic text was truncated to a compromised 70-minute version...
Paste Magazine •

It Was Just an Accident Is Jafar Panahi's Suspenseful and Human Search for Answers

For more than six months across 2022 and 2023, director Jafar Panahi was imprisoned in Iran. The filmmaker, who began as a protege of Abbas Kiarostami, was originally sentenced in 2010 for his support of the Iranian Green Movement – although he would not go to prison for a dozen years after sentencing, the Islamic Republic of Iran banned him from filmmaking, traveling, and speaking to the international press for 20 years, effectively immediately.Since then, Panahi’s films have been made in secre...
Men's Health •

The Rock Is Wrestling With Himself in 'The Smashing Machine'

BEFORE ONE OF the big fights in the mixed martial arts biopic The Smashing Machine, prize fighter Mark Kerr (Dwayne Johnson) is arguing with his girlfriend Dawn Staples (Emily Blunt). The heavyweight wrestler was an emerging talent in the late 1990s, before MMA was a billion-dollar industry, and in this specific scene, he's high on painkillers. He feels defensive when his girlfriend calls him out for it, which leads him to accuse her of being out of control. Johnson delivers the line with so muc...
Inverse •

33 Years Later, David Lynch's Notoriously Misunderstood Masterpiece Just Got A Huge Upgrade

A soothing waterfall, a gently humming mill, a fetching northwestern forest: these are the sights of Twin Peaks, a throwback town that disguises its mystery and selfishness under a visage of true Americana. David Lynch and Mark Frost’s mystery series focused on the murder of popular but troubled high schooler Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), with the intrepid, boyish FBI Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle Maclachlan) discovering a nest of demonic spirits implicated in her death. For years, the prequel film that...
TIME •

The Wild Political Story That Inspired 'One Battle After Another'

The novels of Thomas Pynchon—which include towering canonical works such as Gravity’s Rainbow and V.—are challenging. They’re also brilliant: intoxicating, hilarious, maddening, and vulgar, aggressively lampooning the fascist-capitalist sweep of history and rich (sometimes overwhelmingly so) with cultural references. These challenges are key to his appeal among devotees, including Paul Thomas Anderson, the beloved director whose latest project, One Battle After Another, is a loose adaptation of...
BFI •

10 great films set in 1970s America

From The Ice Storm to Inherent Vice: 10 period pieces that capture a nation caught between the aftershocks of the 60s and the dawn of Reagan era.During Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm (1997), 14-year-old Wendy (Christina Ricci) watches with attentive but cynical eyes as a Watergate-snared President Nixon spins and deflects on television, all while her parents argue in the background. It’s a concise and expressive example of the power of American films that look back to the 1970s – children scrutinising...
Teen Vogue •

Jacob Elordi Is a Monster in 'Euphoria.' In 'Frankenstein,' He’s More Human Than Ever

In this review, writer Rory Doherty explores Jacob Elordi's track record of playing monsters and how his role in the new film Frankenstein contributes to that legacy.Guillermo Del Toro says he cast Jacob Elordi as Frankenstein’s Monster because of his eyes: that piercing, vulnerable stare we’ve seen over the years on screen used as a tool of intoxication and control against the people under their spell — or in their way.It’s that history, and that gaze, that make his performance as the monster i...
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