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Martin P. Lumbridge (not his real name) persists in writing about film even though he has no professional qualifications or compelling reason to be believed. Expect spoilers.

Censor / Surge

CENSOR Prano Bailey-Bond's Censor makes a link between censorship and (emotional, psychological) repression that's pretty obvious, but the film has a knack of making the obvious work – which has the additional virtue of being thematically appropriate. After all, the...

London Film Festival 2019: Vivarium / Scales (and End Of The Century)

VIVARIUM Director Lorcan Finnegan and writer Garrett Shanley's second film sadly doesn't manage to fulfil the promise of their previous feature, 2016’s Without Name. The LFF brochure compares it to The Twilight Zone and Black Mirror but while it could pass for one of...

Under The Skin

I took a half day off work to see this, and thus missed Ann Widdecombe on the Jeremy Vine show talking about 'What It Means To Be Human'. However, this offered a roughly comparable experience. An attractive alien disguised as movie star Scarlett Johanssen drives round...

The Toxic Avenger (1984)

It's fair to say that showings of films in the Cult strand at the BFI have been somewhat underpopulated. In spite of a mention in Time Out, this is no exception – which is as it should be. What point is there in a cult film if everyone wants to see it? This is one of...

Kinoteka 2019: Love Express and Fugue

LOVE EXPRESS: THE DISAPPEARANCE OF WALERIAN BOROWCZYK Kuba Mikurda's documentary presents a pretty standard view of Borowczyk, which won't be a problem for people who have no idea who Borowczyk is I suppose, and they are the vast majority of the population, and...

Frightfest 2019 Part One – Home Discomforts

Set in my ways as I am I prefer to buy my Frightfest tickets in person, at whatever passes for a 'box office' nowadays. Over the years this has become more and more difficult and now entails leaving it to the very last moment. This time around I thought my resistance...

White Devils: Get Out, The Transfiguration and Whity (1971)

GET OUT In Get Out a black American guy Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) goes with his white girlfriend Rose (Allison Williams) to visit her (rich) family, only to find them a little overbearing in their acceptance of him. Sure, they're liberal, but as he wearily agrees with...

Empire of the Ants (1977) / Contamination (1980) / Alien 2: On Earth (1981)

EMPIRE OF THE ANTS (1977) Bert I Gordon, director of such vintage extravaganzas as 1958's Attack Of The 50ft Woman briefly returned to cinema screens in the 1970's with a couple of films which were, nominally, adaptations of H G Wells stories, though B.I.G. (note...

Screen Time

MYSTERIES OF LISBON (2010) Lockdown was a good time to finally sit down, maybe even lie down, and watch those films whose running time demanded an entire day devoted to them, and their extras. The Chilean director Raúl Ruiz, in the extras on the New Wave Films DVD of...

Horromford 2: Unspeakable: Beyond The Wall Of Sleep

Not content with having a horror film festival, Romford now has a film festival – which also features a lot of horror. I turned up for just the one offering, Chad Ferrin's Unspeakable: Beyond The Wall of Sleep. Ferrin is a prolific director, and no doubt too busy to...