Martyn Conterio

Nov 3, 2024 | bfi.org.uk | Martyn Conterio

Trained as a painter and hailing from the elite art scene of 1970s New York, Kathryn Bigelow instead became a Hollywood maverick who embraced populist genre cinema. If her 1980s and early 1990s titles focused on the intoxicating allure of screen violence, or the threat of it, complete with seductive images and edgy attitudes, her later 21st-century films tackle social, historic and political topics in closer to realist terms. This switch, this reinvention, gives her filmography a bisected quality.

Sep 22, 2024 | nme.com | Martyn Conterio

Damien Leone’s Terrifier (2016) harks back to a simpler time of blood-and-guts horror cinema. Featuring eerie villain Art The Clown, a harlequin maniac wearing a Joker-style grin, the film made waves for its use of delightfully gooey special effects and extreme scenes of bodily carnage. Audiences lapped it up. When Terrifer 2 came out in 2022, Art, who looks like a cross between Marilyn Manson and revered mime artist Marcel Marceau, was fully embraced as a new genre icon.

Aug 26, 2024 | crimereads.com | Martyn Conterio

Oliver Stone’s mesmerizingly gaudy tale of criminal lovers Mickey and Mallory Knox carving a trail of death and destruction across America’s arid Southwest, became a cause célèbre, upon release in August 1994. In the US, Great Britain and France, the press played armchair shrinks, attempting to blame Natural Born Killers for a spate of homicides in their respective nations.

Jun 18, 2024 | gamesradar.com | Martyn Conterio

Though reasonably well-received in 1985, Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome is generally considered the least-essential entry in George Miller’s post-apocalyptic saga. True, the threequel does take a step away from the punky cynicism and bleak violence of its predecessors, but this is a virtue, not a creative misstep. The tone is more audience-friendly, the humor sillier; Miller was keen to inject proceedings with a sense of slick spectacle fit for the age of MTV and the summer blockbuster.

Jun 12, 2024 | nme.com | Martyn Conterio

Filmmaker Iain Softley, like many growing up in the mid-1960s, found Beatlemania inescapable. “Right at the beginning of primary school, everybody was starting to talk about The Beatles,” the 67-year-old Backbeat director says, recalling the cultural presence and impact of Liverpool’s most famous sons on his childhood. “They were part of my life really from almost, you know, my first memories.