Two weeks ago I paid for a subscription to Grok Imagine and decided I was going to make a samurai short film. In my head, this was going to be relatively straightforward. Type a few prompts, generate some scenes, stitch them together in Shotcut and upload the finished masterpiece to YouTube. Judging by some of the advertising, I assumed I was only a few hours away from becoming the Akira Kurosawa of Yorkshire. The reality was somewhat different. Promotional poster for The Keepsake (2026), my first AI-generated samurai short film. From Prompt to Production: Planning an AI Samurai Film What I quickly discovered is that AI is a bit like employing an incredibly talented artist who has consumed several pints of strong cider before arriving for work. Sometimes it produces something astonishing. Other times it appears to have forgotten how swords, people and basic reality function. My original plan was simply to generate video clips and build the film from those. That lasted about five minute...

The ABC cinema on Vicar Lane no longer exists, but a surprising amount of my childhood still seems to be living there. The building opened as The Ritz in 1934 and survived long enough to witness the arrival of television, video recorders, multiplexes and the internet before finally closing in February 2000. A few years later it was demolished. Today, unless you already know what stood there, you could walk straight past the site without realising that generations of Leeds families once spent their Saturday afternoons disappearing into its darkness. The ABC Cinema, Leeds. Any resemblance to an old photograph is entirely intentional.   Part 1: Memory I occasionally find myself doing exactly the opposite. I walk past and remember. Not continuously. Not in some sentimental, misty-eyed fashion. More in flashes. An old film poster. The smell of the foyer. The anticipation of arriving half an hour early because my parents preferred to leave nothing to chance. Memory tends to work like...

The first thing Angel Heart does is lie to you. Not openly. Not maliciously. It simply introduces itself as a detective story and waits patiently for you to believe it. There's Harry Angel, a shabby New York private investigator played by Mickey Rourke back when he looked like he had been carved out of cigarette smoke and bad decisions. A wealthy client hires him to find a missing singer named Johnny Favorite. The job seems straightforward enough. In cinema, this is usually the point where the detective follows clues. In Angel Heart , he follows a trail of corpses, and the deeper he digs, the stranger the world becomes.   Original illustration created for this review, inspired by the themes and atmosphere of Angel Heart (1987). Film Noir Goes to Hell By 1987, film noir had been revived, reinvented, deconstructed and occasionally strangled by critics armed with French terminology. Director Alan Parker looked at the genre and asked a different question: What if the detective story ...

There are crime films, and then there are crime sermons. Underworld U.S.A. doesn’t so much tell a story as it shouts one from the alleyway, kicks you in the ribs, and leaves you bleeding under the neon. Directed by Samuel Fuller in 1961, it’s one of the director’s most unrelenting noirs, a film obsessed with vengeance, power, and America’s love affair with organised crime. It isn’t pretty. It isn’t subtle. But like a glass of cheap whiskey at 3am, it does exactly what it should. The dark, revenge-driven world of Samuel Fuller’s Underworld U.S.A. (1961) Samuel Fuller: The Man Who Spat on Hollywood’s Carpet Samuel Fuller wasn’t a man for polish. He was a crime reporter at seventeen, a soldier in World War II, and later a filmmaker who made movies the way prizefighters throw punches—fast, raw, and aimed at the jaw. Underworld U.S.A. came late in his noir cycle, after Pickup on South Street and The Crimson Kimono. If those films toyed with subtlety, Underworld U.S.A. tears subtlet...