strand

Illustration by Maddy Maguire Every woman with a Letterboxd account and an attraction to the opposite sex can tell you precisely where they were when Timothée Chalamet first bewitched them. Personally, I was in my living room, pretending to revise for my A-level mocks. Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird  (2019) was on the television, muted, and I looked up for two seconds only to forget what it meant to breathe. It’s a terrible truth, but it is my own. There Timothée was, in all his Fr

At Strand Film Festival’s Interactive Horror Night, audiences weren’t just watching, they were deciding who lived and who died, while slowly abandoning morality in favour of spectacle.

Photo by Wallace Chuck via Pexels under the Pexels content licence “A man who’s not dangerous will never be seen as successful. You can’t be a little bitch,” Andrew Tate declares in the opening montage of Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere  (2026), setting the tone for a documentary steeped in aggressive, chauvinistic rhetoric. While such vitriol may shock some viewers, it will come as little surprise to those familiar with the growing prevalence of online misogyny. In an

Photo by Bence Szemerey via Pexels (licensed under the Pexels Licence ) A century after the genre first haunted the silver screen, Gothic sensibilities and traditions have crept back into cinema, uncannily suited to express the anxieties of the 2020s. While some Gothic monsters remain the most recognisable figures in literature and film, these stories have always been less about the monsters themselves than about the systems and histories that give rise to them. From the ec

Harrowing to watch and impossible to ignore, Guy Trevellyan’s Plastic Surgery is an unflinching look at the pollutive waste within us all.

Photo by Rawpixel via Openverse (licensed under CC0 1.0 ) Most disheartening about the reception to Game of Thrones’  final season was what it seemed to mean for future on-screen adaptations of George R.R. Martin’s work. With spinoffs being announced and then cancelled left, right and centre, and Martin himself beginning to openly blog about his own feelings of disappointment, fans began to take any A Song of Ice and Fire news with a pinch of salt. For a while, the legacy o

In the film and TV industry, live-action adaptations have become the new craze. They cater to the existing fans of a piece of media, while also trying to amass the biggest possible viewership, but can both sets of viewers be successfully satisfied?

All images credited to Rebecca Woolich The world of film is multifaceted. We often focus on the stories told in long-form: but the individuals who make short films have an equally important message to tell, and deserve recognition and platforming. One such film is BOY , which follows Danny, a young gay man looking for a casual hookup. He meets Mark on a dating app and invites him over to fulfil his desire. But Danny soon realises that he’s not the only one with a mission. The

"My personal grief is my secret", whispers director Céline Sciamma, as she presents her short film This is How A Child Becomes a Poet on a rainy Wednesday evening in a lecture theatre at the London School of Economics.

Photo by nidan via Pixabay (licensed under the Pixabay Content Licence ) Since the release of its first trailer, “ Wuthering Heights ” (Emerald Fennell, 2026) has made one thing clear: this is not a story about love conquering all, nor even about love consuming everything; rather, it is about the romanticisation and commodification of abuse shrouded under the pretense of love. Calling it an adaptation of Wuthering Heights  would be an overstatement; many critics and devoted