Very excited to be introducing ONE FALSE MOVE in a double bill with THE LAST SEDUCTION (presented by Two Draigs partner Craig Williams) for a smalltown noir double bill at London’s uniquely wild grindhouse cinema, The Nickel, in Clerkenwell.

THE NICKEL is home to the most subversive, bewildering, sensational, fearless, sublime, shocking, transgressive, death-defying, psychedelic, psychotronic, bizarre, rebellious, baffling, degenerate cinematic treasures - from the silent era to the digital age.

Visit The Nickel: 117-119 Clerkenwell Road, EC1R 5BY. Doors to the shop and bar open 30 minutes prior to screenings.

Tube and Train: Chancery Lane station - 7 minute walk; Farringdon station - 10 minute walk; Holborn station - 13 minute walk; Buses: 40, 63, 55, 243

I wrote here about Reverse Shot’s No.9 picture of 2025: MISERICORDIA (it was number 1 on my list).

“Vacillating through genres, as life does—social drama; noir; suspense; satire; farce—Guiraudie audaciously rejects the single-mindedness of most modern drama, and leans into and sublimates the great mystery of desire. Motives are cloaked in darkness, and our discombobulation is a perverse cinephilic comfort. By framing its intrigue as a return to a past we never quite discover, the film exhibits a curious melancholic nostalgia for the bland and weird, and finally promotes the uncontrollable and the inexplicable: cinema as one bafflement after another.”

Craig and I enjoyed a leisurely weekend in Wales (the birthplace of Two Draig Films, after all) supporting THE FAIRY MOON in the shorts programme at ABERTOIR. We also watched an avant-premiere of PRIMATE, a moderate monkey chiller.

THE FAIRY MOON played in the shorts competition at London’s prestigious FRIGHTFEST in August. A warm, vibrant atmosphere for films of depravity and luridness!

Second time at L’Etrange (solo this time as Craig and I had clashing dates - he went the following weekend!). THE FAIRY MOON was well received by the French in the main. I briefly met with Ben Wheatley and his longtime producer, Andy Starke. Also these two young whippersnapper filmmakers (more experienced than I), Aron Meinhart and Misha Gankin.

I wrote here about this beautiful but upsetting film…

“Amongst many wrenching and lurid sequences in When Evil Lurks, the one that stays with me most vividly is the first encounter with the central “rotten,” Uriel—named for the biblical archangel who figures in Haydn’s Creation and prominently in Gnostic and folk Catholic tradition as one who collaborates with demons. The protagonists, Pedro (played by the striking, gaunt Ezequiel Rodriguez) and his brother Jaime, are led matter-of-factly into Uriel’s dank, squalid grief hole of a bedroom. The apparition on the bed is barely human, resembling someone from an exploitative TLC documentary about monstrously obese people crossed with someone from another exploitative TLC documentary about terrifying dermatological conditions. Uriel is carrying a demon, so is on his way to being possessed in the manner of Regan from The Exorcist, but by contrast to Regan he is merely a stricken carrier, passive and immovable, wallowing in his own abjection and suppuration. By the end of the scene, the helplessness of his condition has become more overwhelming than the threat he poses or the repulsive nature of his appearance.

I’m so privileged and delighted to have collaborated once again with writer-director CRAIG WILLIAMS on our second short film THE FAIRY MOON, shot in Letchworth in February 2025 with the legendary SEAN PRICE WILLIAMS at the camera once again. It stars the jaw-dropping JAMES SWANTON, genre legend JOHNNY VIVASH and the mythical JULIA DAVIS. It premiered at the prestigious FANTASIA Film Festival in Montreal in July 2025 and it will grace numerous other festivals throughout the world this autumn, including FRIGHTFEST (London) and L’ETRANGE (Paris).

Cast and crew - including fellow producer Evrim Ersoy and my boy Ashley Allen - on wrapping the shoot in Letchworth Garden City, February 2025

Lead actors James Swanton (Syd) and Johnny Vivash (Roger) - title art by Richard Wells

Special screening at ICA (London). l-r: Writer-director Craig Williams; Producer Julien Allen; Actor Johnny Vivash; Actor James Swanton

I was thrilled to be invited by editor Annabel Brady-Brown to submit a piece on the Clint Eastwood film Invictus (2010) for the gorgeous new Metrograph magazine. It appeared as part of a career retrospective featuring some heavy-hitting Clint fans: Tarantino, Woo, Desplechin, Denis, Hamaguchi, Assayas, Kurosawa… Pick up a copy at The Metrograph cinema, 7 Ludlow St, NYC.

Invictus

Director: Clint Eastwood

“Eastwood’s unparallelled ability to articulate only what matters on screen means this wildly ambitious project (a “sports movie” about how the 1995 Rugby World Cup catalysed a momentous rapprochement in South Africa’s history) was always in safe hands. Yielding to Morgan Freeman’s amicably stubborn Mandela – a performance of rare serenity and warmth – Eastwood concentrates his camera on those forsaken places he always films with such economy and profundity: street corners, crowded back-rooms, late night lamplit offices and here, the darkened tunnel before the match, the stadium crowd humming in anticipation.”

I was thrilled to write about a film which Wyrm of Bwlch Pen Barras filmmaker Craig Williams put me onto: CUADECUC, VAMPIR (Pere Portabella, 1971) for Reverse Shot’s annual Halloween Pumpkins feature. To read my piece, you can click the image of a leering Christopher Lee above, or here.

So why watch Cuadecuc, vampir on Halloween? Because it is a treatment of horror which examines and elevates the sensations one normally experiences when watching horror: the sense of anticipation, of mystery and bewilderment, and fascination at extraordinary and uncanny imagery, conjured here by a potent mix of pure classicism and pure innovation.

Albert Serra’s first present-day film steers us into a cinematic register at the intersection of Chris Marker and Michael Mann, at once naturalistic and surreal, sublime and subliminal. Benoît Magimel’s De Roller is the slippery, white-suited High Commissioner to French Polynesia, an intoxicating South Pacific collectivity of paradisiacal beauty and colonial chicanery, teeming with stories true and untrue, between myth and deception. De Roller’s power is ebbing, though you wouldn’t know it at first as he parades about the island, mingling with the local nightclub’s Ori Tahiti dancers and taking meetings with concerned locals. One of the islanders, Shanna (Māhū actress Pahoa Mahagafanau), the film’s only open-book character, detects his vulnerability early and reverses the political polarity by becoming his protector and companion. As the sea of intrigue rises and De Roller’s obscure, aesthetically bewitching fantasies begin to emerge, we sense his hold on things listing, then slipping away. His principal antagonist, the slight, whey-faced “Admiral” (Marc Susini), whose naval cap doesn’t quite fit, brings to mind Delphin Servaux’s headmaster in Vigo’s Zero for Conduct—comically grotesque and all the more intimidating for that. By prolonging each sequence beyond its natural duration, Serra calibrates the action to the oneiric pace of that world and underscores the extent of De Roller’s impotence and the emptiness of his monologues. The Admiral’s final speech—from a disgraced colonial power which treats its “property” as a nuclear testing ground—blows the film off course, lurching on waves of imbecilic patriotism, running Serra’s film aground in a dreadful reality: to France’s eternal, devastating shame.

For our 20 year anniversary symposium, writers were invited to examine how their approach to - or stance on - a film had changed over a period of time. I chose a film I was scared to write about - CITIZEN KANE - at a time when I didn’t know I was a writer. You can read the piece here or click on the photo above.

What Citizen Kane talks about is pretty much common currency everywhere now. The supremacy of the self, the squandering of talent, the exploitation of ignorance and fear, the abandonment of virtue. Welles himself lived all of this at the sharp end, while working in the film industry, from the release of Kane in 1941 until his death in 1985. Yet there is a romantic way to look at it…if we want.

A sweet weekend in Aberystwyth with The Wyrm of Bwlch Pen Barras at the Abertoir Festival. We drank with Chris Cronin and the makers of The Moor on Saturday, met Robin Ince and attended his podcast, I watched Corman’s The Tomb of Ligeia on Sunday morning, had lunch with Bryn and his brilliant wife Anna, then a lovely screening of Wyrm with The Sin Eater.

The first Amicus film - British micro-budget horror, CIty of the Dead.

I provided this year’s Fourth Night Pumpkin for Reverse Shot. It’s about a very peculiar, and potentially quite influential horror film: CITY OF THE DEAD.

“It’s a confrontation, mirroring the film’s plot, between ancient and new. It’s also a statement, and in a sense a dirty trick, but a devilishly good one too. Nothing that follows this sequence feels the same as before, nor can it really be so. Every subsequent image, which might have looked staid or studio-bound, has now been contaminated with something resembling realism and impregnated with the dread that accompanies unpredictability. It’s almost like a bond of trust has been broken between the filmmakers and the audience and replaced by a gloriously assaultive atmosphere of threat.”

Cesar Troisgros with his team in Frederick Wiseman’s Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros

“To Wiseman, a non-invasive camera changes nothing in the process of a human being simply playing the role of their own life. Not for Wiseman the hang-ups of cinéma vérité purism or hidden cameras, because in the great theater of life, we are all more or less concerned with showing our best side, articulating our best interests and creating a spectacle by our actions which we want others to see. In other words, we are all acting anyway. The only condition Wiseman sets himself is that the camera must serve the purpose of capturing the subject and not interfere further—any looks to camera, for example, are cut in the editing process. But this inevitably means that Wiseman must accept (within reason) a divergence in how his protagonists react to the camera’s presence by instinct—and the results are illuminating.”

You can read the review here, or click on the photo above.

With Craig Williams on the red carpet at LÉtrange Festival 2023

Craig and I hopped over to Paris for a night to introduce our film (in French) before the screening as part of the short film competition. Thanks to Eric Challard who was a most gracious and entertaining host.

Photograph: Carol Morley

It was an honour to present The Wyrm of Bwlch Pen Barras on behalf of director Craig and myself at its UK premiere at the Shetland Screenplay Festival. I was interviewed beforehand by horror expert and all-round critical royalty, Mark Kermode.

A really good house (85+) was in attendance - a very generous and knowledgeable crowd, in a terrific, intimate setting (the arts centre, Mareel, in Lerwick). I received some lovely, encouraging feedback from delegates who recognised the influences of the Mabinogion and other folk-horror ideas.

Photograph: Matt Bauer

Our second and final private cast & crew screening was held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts on Saturday 20th May. A wonderful occasion, graced by the crew (l-r: JA; Isaac Whittingham (gaffer); Matt Wildman (sound recordist); Christian Hughes (clapper loader); Jamie Cobb (key grip); George Bettles (standby carpenter); Vic Pugh (Anwen) and Craig Williams (writer-director).

Julien with writer-director Craig Williams at the Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff. Poster art by Richard Wells.

It was such a thrill to see THE WYRM on the big screen. Thanks to Cardiff’s Chapter Arts Centre and to all those who came to support the film, especially Seán Carlsen, who plays the sinister Dai. We’re hoping to play at festivals throughout the autumn and I’ll update the Rushes with news.

Samantha Morton in Steven Spielberg’s MINORITY REPORT (2002) - a film which deploys Bach’s Cantata BWV 147

I contributed a short piece to The Bach Choir’s website on Choral Music and Cinema showcasing the Choir’s own numerous contributions to cinematic soundtracks over the years (and of course not forgetting its classic 1962 War Requiem recorded with Sir Benjamin Britten, filmed by Derek Jarman in 1988).

I was thrilled to be asked by debut writer-director Craig Williams to produce his new film, the Welsh folk horror short THE WYRM OF BWLCH PEN BARRAS (2023). We shot it on 16mm (with renowned cinematographer Sean Price Williams) in and around the North Wales town of Ruthin and on the mighty Bwlch Pen Barras mountain pass itself. The film is in post production. More details to emerge soon.