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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 •

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...
TIME •

The True Story of Mark Kerr and 'The Smashing Machine'

The day before the premiere of The Smashing Machine at the Venice Film Festival earlier this week, former mixed martial arts fighter Mark Kerr describes his emotional state as “vibrational.” It’s tough to pin down where jet lag ends and nerves begin, but not long before audiences will see Dwayne Johnson act out his life story for the first time, the 56-year-old is just trying to roll with the absurdity of the moment. Keeping a clear head has been at the top of his agenda for some time now: the f...
Flicks •

“We’ve become very, very paranoid”: Ari Aster explains Eddington

In a small, isolated New Mexico town, an emasculated sheriff channels the tension of his home life into a feud with the charming but corrupt mayor. Plans to install an environmentally costly data centre show how ambitious the town’s leaders are, while the early policies of the COVID-19 pandemic trigger ordinary, alienated townsfolk to erupt with frustration. Where does everybody turn? To digital worlds where everything feels more certain, personal, and paranoid. This is Eddington, the latest wor...
AnOther •

Five Key Visual References Behind The Bear’s Cinematography

For four seasons, The Bear has taken the adage “if you can’t handle the heat, get out of the kitchen” to psychological extremes. Rarely can the inventive, disciplined head chef Carmy Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White) handle his demons, but he’d never leave the only place he can prove himself. The hit restaurant drama stars White, Ayo Edebiri, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, and a fleet of character actors and famous guest stars in the ongoing saga of Michelin star ambitions, Italian beef sandwiches, and fallout...
AV Club •

Primer: An eerie road through the disaffected world of Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Primer is The A.V. Club‘s ongoing series of beginners’ guides to pop culture’s most notable subjects: filmmakers, music styles, literary genres, and whatever else interests us—and hopefully you.
The world painted by Kiyoshi Kurosawa is one of disaffection. The Japanese auteur has made a career of identity thrillers, metaphysical horror, and cultural commentary, with films often sporting deceptively simple monosyllabic titles—Cure, Pulse, Chime, and now Cloud—that circle around existential themes...
Big Issue •

Legendary filmmaker David Cronenberg: 'Technology is not alien – it’s completely human'

The Shrouds takes David Cronenberg’s contemporary style to an ultra-modern place – the film is filled with screens, digital tampering and tech industry sabotage, all of which add a strange tension to the story’s very human grief and despair. Karsh is a direct expression of his own creator, not just because they both sport a white shock of hair. Like Karsh, Cronenberg lost his wife to illness after decades of marriage, and the way that grief consumed him led him to questions about the ways we mou...
Vulture •

Every (Live-Action) Superman Movie, Ranked

For nearly 90 years, Superman has been the archetypal superhero — a man of extraordinary ability, with warm, handsome features, dressed like a heroic strongman. He has the entire starter pack of classic and enviable superpowers: flight, superstrength, superspeed, X-ray vision, and a secret identity so mild-mannered that no one believes their dorkish newsroom colleague could possibly be a titan from another world. Since Superman debuted in Action Comics No. 1 (the creation of writer Jerry Siegel...
AV Club •

A death-obsessed Britain serves as the bloody spine of 28 Years Later

Like any country rigidly divided by wealth and marginalization, there was no essential experience of the COVID-19 pandemic in Great Britain. Instead, there was a fiercely felt mass of contradictions—a projection of stiff-upper-lip and chummy camaraderie (or “Blitz spirit”), but also the insistence of individualism in direct defiance to community policy. Why should we care about our fellow humans when our entire history, culture, and mythos is based on the comfort of feeling more legitimate than...
TIME •

The True Story Behind Netflix's Trainwreck: The Astroworld Tragedy

In November 2021, the third Astroworld music festival commenced in Houston, Tex., the hometown of rap superstar Travis Scott. Scott had a personal affinity for the Six Flags AstroWorld theme park in Houston that had closed its doors in 2005, naming his six-time platinum certified 2018 album after it and holding the inaugural festival near the site of the demolished amusement park. After canceling the 2020 edition because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Astroworld 2021 promised to be bigger than the tw...
Flicks •

Meeting The Phoenician Scheme cast in Cannes feels like we’re in a Wes Anderson movie

Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme has just celebrated its world premiere at Cannes Film Festival.
While at the fest, Rory Doherty sat down to chat with seven of its cast – Benicio Del Toro, Mia Threapleton, Michael Cera, Riz Ahmed, Richard Ayoade, Rupert Friend, and Jeffrey Wright.
Being ferried between different hotel suites to talk with seven different, immaculately presented artists over a single hour evokes the experience of being in a Wes Anderson movie yourself: pockets of focused, cha...
Men's Health •

‘Adolescence’ Is About Fathers

The following story contains spoilers for all four episodes of Netflix's Adolescence. IT'S EPISODE TWO of Adolescence, the four-part British miniseries that exploded on Netflix last week, and DI Luke Bascombe (Ashley Walters) is at a school investigating the death of teen Katie Leonard. Throughout the half hour of police interviews, pupils have been alternately emotional and evasive, and Bascombe is still in the dark about what could have caused the shocking crime. That is, until Bascombe’s 15-y...
AV Club •

Primer: The socially conscious spectacle of Korean sci-fi

Primer is The A.V. Club‘s ongoing series of beginners’ guides to pop culture’s most notable subjects: filmmakers, music styles, literary genres, and whatever else interests us—and hopefully you.
Mickey 17 is Bong Joon Ho’s biggest English-language film yet. The slapstick sci-fi blockbuster that satirizes the industrial commodification of labor is also his long-awaited follow-up to Parasite, a historic Best Picture winner that satirized domestic labor dependency in Korea. The man loves his pet th...
Men's Health •

Gene Hackman Brought Real Men to Movies

IF GENE HACKMAN movies want you to know one thing, it’s that Gene Hackman can’t have everything. No matter how close his anti-heroes get to catching their man, or getting off scot-free, or untangling themselves from conspiracy, there’s often some intangible, existential cost that their survival depends on. Consider the hollow determination on Popeye Doyle’s face at the climax of The French Connection, as he assures his partner he’ll catch the European drug fiend, willfully ignoring that he’s jus...
British GQ •

Director Osgood Perkins on the inspiration behind Theo James gorefest The Monkey

The following article contains spoilers for The Monkey.Life sucks, and then you die. So says Osgood Perkins’ The Monkey, the gory new adaptation of the 1980 short story by Stephen King, which spans the troubled adolescence and arrested development of Hal (Theo James), whose timid preteen years (played as a child by Christian Convery) are violently interrupted by the discovery of his absent father’s toy monkey. As it turns out, the doll is cursed, resulting in the variously bizarre, slapstick, an...
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