Katie Driscoll

In the first of a series of columns, Katie Driscoll reflects upon the painter Edvard Munch’s figurative works through the lens of Agoraphobia.

Our appetite for the anti-hero has always been an abiding feature of the cultural landscape. Think of Tony Soprano. Walter White. Even Joaquin Phoenix’s The Joker. All characters that we root for, despite the fact that their behaviour is often morally dubious at best, and downright sociopathic at worst.

The unlikable female character onscreen, meanwhile, is still viewed with an aura of revelation. The trend of finally allowing women to join the boys club of bad behaviour has led to the modern...

Kate Bush is a songwriter deserving of a renaissance. From The Shining to Ulysses, the English singer slipped in film and literary references throughout her career.
Kate Bush’s ‘Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)’ from Hounds of Love is number one on the UK singles chart and padded shoulder suits are all the rage, but, no, it’s not 1985.
Just as a new generation of listeners were introduced to the wonders of Queen thanks to 1992’s Wayne’s World, Gen Z have been inaugurated into the mystic...

Before the subculture’s 21st century commodification, punk inspired many other art forms, not least film. From Derek Jarman to Julien Temple, punk lived authentically on screen as well as the stage.
K-Punk writer Mark Fisher once wrote that we are in the cultural era of “nostalgia mode”, doomed to recycle history while divorcing ourselves from the reality of that history.
That’s nowhere as true as with punk, a small yet era-defining moment in 1977 that sunk its claws into the collective cultu...

Licorice Pizza is many things: a sun-soaked paean to 1970s LA; an earnest exploration of first love; a joyfully juvenile tribute to screwball cinema; a silly and voyeuristic behind-the-scenes slice of Tinseltown. But most of all, Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest film is a journey of the self, masquerading as a coming-of-age romance.
We open upon a meet-cute of the most unlikely kind: she’s the photographer’s assistant at his high school’s picture day. Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman, son of the l...

During the pandemic, vital care services that learning disabled individuals across the country depend on were suddenly stopped. Non Optimum: When It’s Safe To Do So is a film documenting those months in lockdown and revealing the lives of four people with learning disabilities who started attending a weekly virtual club to connect, dance and socialise together. Review by Katie Driscoll
Non Optimum: When It’s Safe To Do So is the latest documentary by Lucy Gaizely, leading artist and key colla...

For KCL's Inspire the Mind.
Disclaimer: The following blog discusses graphic content shown in various horror films which some readers may find distressing.
I had always, at first jokingly and later, in the vein of exasperation, with an eye roll attached, been referred to as a hypochondriac.
The definition of a hypochondriac, “a person often worried about their health”, always felt like a great misunderstanding of the illness. I wasn’t abnormally anxious, at least not to me. To me, it felt like I was the only sane one ar...

For years, the idea of my body stopped at just that: an idea. It was a distant, separate thing I had no control over, something for the whims of others or occasional somatic exercises in fun, a sentient thing which got me from A to B but in which I took no pride or pleasure.
Then the pandemic came, the invisible contagious disease that was terrifying and brutal and not discriminatory at all. Suddenly I, along with many others on the planet, was forced to reckon with my body, to come to terms ...

Love always used to feel like pigging out, the same kind of bottomlessness. Sex was for cold mornings where you forgot to close the blinds or for hot summer afternoons, when the urge took you, when the sun was watching but you didn’t care, all white rumpled sheets like an advert. But love was felt through those times that I felt a lack of inhibition with someone, our affection expressed through meals: hot boxing a room with takeout pizzas; all Sunday spent watching Broad City; making silly co...

As a part of Sick! Festival’s Mindscapes programme (premiered on YouTube), four filmmakers two from Manchester and two from Rotterdam, revisit the neighbourhoods they grew up in, and through this, explore the dichotomy between the physical reality of places and the temporal space that can linger forever in the mind. Review by Katie Driscoll
The first piece, Lucien a Circel, by Dutch artist Lucien Rentmeester locates the specific within the universal, like how everyone’s origin story is unique...

As cinemas reopen and the COVID-streaming era seemingly ends, we look back at lockdown's most-talked about film
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There were many important films nominated at this year’s Oscars, but perhaps none has had a bigger impact than Promising Young Women. Mentioned in five categories (and winner of one) the film’s bold narrative and willingness to tackle difficult subjects like rape and sexual assault marked it out from the crowd. But what also made it so unique, and has been written about far...

Apocalypse Now showed the stifling oppression of war, how its devastating effects could wreak havoc on the psyche whilst in combat. Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket showed how the harsh regime of training could lead to a mental breakdown. One film, Jacob’s Ladder, provided an insight into PTSD and the aftereffects of war, once you’re home and everything is supposed to be over, except where it lingers in your mind. However, we now have this year’s Cherry (available to stream now on Apple TV+), wher...

There is too much rosé (the Graham Norton brand your mum likes, because all mums love Graham Norton). There is your mum crying while Elvis sways his hips on TV and your dad snoring upstairs, long gone to bed because he thinks you’re both acting too drunk and loutish, screaming at Elvis on the TV and talking about death. Mum cries around this point, because Elvis makes her think of her dead mother and that makes her think of her dead father.
And then there is Top of the Pops, and the stories I...

A
naked light bulb in a dark and ruined room” is how British filmmaker and gay activist Derek Jarman described his mind while his body was decaying from the effects of Aids. It’s a Sin, Russell T Davies’ latest series on Channel 4, keeps that light alive, celebrating the legacy of the people at the frontline of the Aids pandemic – the people who fought and died for the advancements we have today.
In the five-part drama, set between 1981 and 1991, HIV/Aids doesn’t reverberate openly – it is sp...