carl-neville

14 Articles by:

Carl Neville

Carl Neville has written two books on film, Classless (Zero, 2010) and No More Heroes (Zero, 2015), and a novel, Resolution Way (Repeater Books, 2016).

One Man’s Trash

In the dark days of John Major’s Britain, Channel 4’s Eurotrash took aim at Britain’s relationship with ‘the continent’ and created a low-art surrealist classic in the process.

We Are the Pigs

The first ever anime feature, now back in cinemas, combines anthropomorphic animals and anti-Western agitation; it was also a work of fascist propaganda.

Ways of Ending

Mike Leigh’s apocalyptic ‘Naked’ was a terrifying picture of early 1990s Britain, alone in the director’s oeuvre in its brutal pessimism. How does it stand up in the equally bleak early 2020s?

Invented Traditions

Ben Wheatley’s ‘In the Earth’ uses the contemporary setting of the pandemic to play with some increasingly familiar imagery of folk horror and hauntology.

Together in Electric Dreams

A documentary film about the science fiction motif of ‘the world as a hallucination’ reveals something quite different — the tragedy of the means people use to cope with reality.

The Trawler and the Seagulls

‘Inhuman Resources,’ starring Eric Cantona, is an improbable thriller about a worker thrown on the scrapheap who becomes a heroic supervillain – a story which resonates with populist insurgencies of right and left.

The Holocaust on Film

A film adaptation of Jerzy Kosiński’s Holocaust book, ‘The Painted Bird,’ is a bracing but humane treatment of what ‘modern’ Europe descended into in the 1940s – and a reminder of what could happen again.

Last Exit to Hollywood

‘Disclosure,’ a heart-warming documentary about trans representation in mainstream cinema, mixes some radical politics with conservative aesthetics.

The Promised Land

Gurinder Chadha’s Springsteen-themed blockbuster Blinded by the Light is a poignant account of the class and racial ties that bind.

Documenting Dignity

Agnes Varda has died. Her last film is a reminder that those on the margins of society are often most worthy of the camera’s gaze.