For the first ten minutes or so, The Dog Stars feels like it might be heading in an all too familiar direction. A man, a dog, a deserted cityscape, the remnants of civilisation: it’s hard not to get flashbacks to Will Smith in I Am Legend. But Ridley Scott’s film gradually reveals something far more interesting than its…

In rural Pakistan, where roads barely reach isolated mountain communities, cable cars are not tourist attractions – they are lifelines. For some children, they are the only way to get to school. Mohammed Ali Naqvi’s documentary, Hanging by a Wire, drops us straight into the terrifying reality of what happens when that lifeline doesn’t just fail,…

Ahead of the release of Christopher Nolan’s IMAX adaptation of Homer’s The Odyssey, we take a look at what this classic story has in common with… Dude, Where’s My Car? Spoiler: It’s more than you’d ever expect. We explore how Jesse and Chester follow the same mythic path as Odysseus, why every bizarre encounter functions…

From Casablanca to There Will Be Blood, Close-Up Culture list our 25 favourite final lines in film history. 25. “Now, where was I?” – Leonard Shelby, Memento (2000) 24. “I hope I can make it across the border. I hope to see my friend and shake his hand. I hope the Pacific is as blue as it has been…

With Stop! That! Train! arriving in cinemas, it’s the perfect excuse to look back at some of the greatest train sequences ever committed to film – whether that means a spectacular action sequence, an intimate conversation or a tiny model railway becoming the setting for an epic chase. Read our Stop! That! Train! Review 10. Indiana Jones…

You can barely have the TV on for five minutes without Gordon Ramsay, Nigella Lawson or, my personal favourite, Guy Fieri showing up. Chefs and cooking shows are big business. So, given the film industry’s reliance on biopics, it felt inevitable that a few films about culinary greats would come around – and it’s no…

Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma left me both captivated and slightly disoriented. I walked out of the cinema thoroughly entertained, even exhilarated at points – one bloody sequence set to the drifting sounds of Counting Crows’ A Long December stands out as a particular highlight. Yet, I was also entirely unsure…

The history of cinema has always been tied to trains – and sometimes, in the unfortunate case of damsels in distress, quite literally to the train tracks themselves. The Lumière brothers’ Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat helped establish the extraordinary power of moving images to make an everyday event feel like a spectacle. Just a…