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Jul 26, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Daniella Alconaba |Chris Shields |Ben Walters |Samuel Thomas Davies
As a summer of sports crowds our screens, with Wimbledon and the European Championship passing the baton to the Olympic Games, Younger documents the personal lives of four female athletes over 60, celebrating another side to a traditionally youth-focused sporting world. Metal clanks in Younger’s opening scene as Joylyn, a lifelong runner, cumbersomely unloads medals, plaques and trophies won from tournaments. Red ribbons cover the floor, entangled as if to form one colossal achievement.
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Apr 16, 2024 | 
mancunion.com | Daniella Alconaba
As a bored and directionless 20-year-old, one of my many muses was the MUBI Podcast. I spent countless bus journeys to my mundane barista job, listening to the expansive ways Rico Gagliano would unfold the many brilliant “stories behind great cinema.” Despite it being a non-fiction podcast, the stories felt so fanciful to me as someone who would love to be “behind great cinema,” but was ultimately tethered to that bus journey. One particular episode made a nest in my brain.
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Mar 16, 2024 | 
mancunion.com | Daniella Alconaba
Manchester film fans can rejoice as the Manchester Film Festival (MFF) makes its annual return to Deansgate’s Odeon Great Northern. This time round they’re celebrating double digits as the festival turns ten years old. For a decade MFF has been screening films never seen before by Mancunion audiences and this year’s no different.
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Feb 12, 2024 | 
mancunion.com | Daniella Alconaba
On the dark, cold, and windy evening of February 6, huddled the coolest kids of Manchester, burning to watch a preview of The Iron Claw set up by MASSIVE Cinema. Everyone in Screen 7 of the Odeon Great Northern automatically gained bragging rights; they could now say they had watched The Iron Claw days before it was nationally released – free of charge might I add.
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Dec 11, 2023 | 
mancunion.com | Daniel Collins |Daniella Alconaba
The festive season is here bearing the inevitable question of what gifts to buy for your friends and family. Film lovers may seem like an easy person to buy for as a simple DVD or a trip to the cinema can do the job, but a problem arises when they’re engulfed in a niche that the average person only knows so much about.
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Nov 24, 2023 | 
mancunion.com | Daniella Alconaba
Manchester’s hallmark cinema HOME, hosted this year’s Manchester Animation Festival. Here, an audience of Studio Ghibli enthusiasts enjoyed a preview screening of the highly anticipated The Boy and the Heron. Vaguely based on the 1937 novel by Genzaburo Yoshino titled How Do You Live?, The Boy and the Heron follows 12-year-old Mahito Maki (Soma Santoki) as he and his father Shoichi (Takuya Kimura) move to a new town as his father remarries after the death of his mother.
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Nov 9, 2023 | 
mancunion.com | Daniella Alconaba
M (1931) by Fritz Lang is one of the 20th century’s most critically acclaimed films. It was regarded as the most important German film of all time and claimed the 36th position on Sight and Sound’s 2022 Greatest Film of All Time list. Despite being made 92 years ago, it still stands as the quintessential thriller. Released towards the end of Germany’s post-WWI Weimar Republic, M showcases a Berlin in mass hysteria as an unknown serial killer claims children as his victims.
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Nov 1, 2023 | 
mancunion.com | Daniella Alconaba
Alongside their annual Halloween programme showing on the screens of UK TVs, Film4’s FilmFear brought an exclusive selection of handpicked horror films and premieres to Manchester’s HOME cinema. In front of an intimate audience of horror fans, joined by directors Jane Giles and Ali Catterall, the vibrant documentary SCALA!!! opened the weekend of frightful films. SCALA!!! documents the rise and fall of the legendary London cinema of the same name.
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Oct 15, 2023 | 
mancunion.com | Daniella Alconaba
If you manoeuvre yourself to the back of the Northern Quarter’s busy Fierce Bar, climb three flights of stairs, and swiftly turn left you’ll find a brick-walled room in which a film projector sits perched upon a pirate-esque beer barrel. This is where Rough C.U.T.S and their garnered film devotees have gathered once a month since last summer and will do so again this coming winter for their new film programme.
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Oct 15, 2023 | 
mancunion.com | Daniella Alconaba
I would stamp Molly Manning Walker’s How to Have Sex as one of the best debuts in contemporary British cinema. In a film centred around partying, underage drinking, and Brits abroad culture, How to Have Sex’s beacon lies within its female solidarity, subtext, and refusal to sensationalise the effects of being under the influence. So many films on this topic can feel out of touch with today’s youth, yet Walker’s film is devoid of cringe, brutally highlighting the pressures of being a teenage girl.
