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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.

BFI London Film Festival 2014: Three Horrors at the Odeon Covent Garden

SPRING If you thought Richard Linklater's Before Sunset might have been improved if Julie Delpy had periodically turned into a squid (and is there anyone who doesn't?), then this may well be the film for you. American backpacker Evan (Lou Taylor Pucci) hooks up with...

THE UNTAMED RAW NOCTURAMA

THE UNTAMED This London Film Festival showing represented my first visit to the Picturehouse Central. Entering, you feel like you've walked into a bar, and a busy one – and you have. Retreating in horror from all this socialising, which is not what I come to the...

CITIZENFOUR

I hardly ever go to see documentaries because they're about real life, and I can see that for free. But recently, every time I looked at the ICA website, I noticed that they were giving me yet another opportunity to see Laura Poitras' film about Edward Snowden, as its...

Peeping Tom (1960)

I used to say that Michael Powell's Peeping Tom was my favourite film. That I don't say it now has nothing to do with the quality of the film or my changing perception of it; more, it's down to a realisation that there are too many films, and that I have too many...

Frightfest 2014: Bad Milo!

Frightfest has relocated from the Empire Leicester Square to the Vue Leicester Square, which seems to be a good thing. No more cramped Discovery Screens, we now have the run of numerous larger screens over several floors. And it's even nearer Burger King, where I sit...

La Grande Bouffe (1973)

Marco Ferreri’s 1973 film La Grande Bouffe has airline pilot Marcello Mastroianni, chef Ugo Tognazzi, TV director Michel Piccoli and judge Philippe Noiret gathering in Noiret’s old family pile to indulge themselves in hedonistic pleasures until the toilet backs up -...

45 Years

Tom Courtenay and Charlotte Rampling play Geoff and Kate, a couple in their 70's who seem to think they are happily married until his ex-girlfriend Katya turns up, entombed in ice in a Swiss glacier and apparently unchanged since she fell into a fissure back in 1962....

The Hart Of London (1970)/Sodom (1989)

Experimental cinema – you either love it or you hate it. Or you don’t know what to think. The BFI’s Will Fowler assembled this double bill in January 2015 under the heading of ‘Transcendence’. And rightly so, I think. The Hart of London confounds our expectations from...

LFF 2018: Tumbbad / The Nightshifter

TUMBBAD Indian horror films are something of a rarity, but Kothanodi was one of my highlights of 2015's London Film Festival, and that was a horror film – sort of. This one, my first film of this year's festival, definitely is - or wants to be. It begins with an...

Gentrified Horror: The Nightcomers (1971) and Us

THE NIGHTCOMERS In Nick Pinkerton's positive Sight and Sound review of Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich (which I thought was shit by the way) I first encountered the phrase 'gentrified horror', a pejorative term for the kind of upmarket horror that plays to...