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.
Winnie The Pooh: Blood and Honey / The Brain From Planet Arous (1957)
by Martin | December 2, 2023 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
WINNIE THE POOH: BLOOD AND HONEY Not all bad films are good. The inspiration behind Winnie The Pooh: Blood and Honey was apparently writer-director Rhys Frake-Waterfield's understanding that A.A. Milne's characters were going out of copyright, and so fair game for...
Downton Abbey (2019) / Ray and Liz (2018)
by Martin | April 7, 2021 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
DOWNTON ABBEY For many years the TV series Downton Abbey, created by Julian Fellowes, mined the Sunday night craving for reassurance about the past, presenting it as a world in which everyone knew their place. The past, at least the past we never knew personally, is a...
A Prince, The Animal Kingdom, Behind The Mountains and Birth/Rebirth
by Martin | April 1, 2024 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
A PRINCE Pierre Creton's film featured in both John Waters' top ten and Sight and Sound's top 50, so it should have been made for me – but there's no accounting for taste. All I can say is that it certainly gives you the feeling that director/co-writer Creton knew...
Blue / Trog (1993 and 1970)
by Martin | November 1, 2015 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
In his introduction to Derek Jarman's Blue John Waters, who selected it as one of his favourite British films for a celebration of all things JW at the BFI, recalled how the first time he saw it the cinema had posters up warning punters that Blue was a film that...
Salvo
by Martin | April 26, 2014 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
Mafia hitman Salvo (Saleh Bakri) kills a guy but instead of despatching his sister Rita (Sara Serraiocco) - a witness to the crime - he chooses to hide her in an abandoned factory and keep her fed and watered. Why? Love? Pity? Or is he caught on the horns of a...
BFI London Film Festival 2014: Hard To Be A God
by Martin | October 25, 2014 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
What better way to ease yourself gently into a film festival than with a nearly-three-hour black and white Russian film based on an sf novel I've never read? Aleksei German's film (based on a novel by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky) is set on a planet which has been...
Horromford
by Martin | May 19, 2024 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
Soon every town in the country will have its own horror film festival, which I suppose is no bad thing, although I could hardly keep up when it was just Frightfest. I saw one film that escaped me at Frightfest (Austin Jennings' Eight Eyes) in late January at...
A Cat In The Brain (1990) and Slugs (1988)
by Martin | July 8, 2018 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
A CAT IN THE BRAIN It may seem an odd thing to say of a film called A Cat In The Brain but - inured as I am to disappointment in such matters (almost counting on it, you might say) - the last thing I expected to see in it was a cat clawing at someone's (living) brain....
The Hart Of London (1970)/Sodom (1989)
by Martin | May 23, 2015 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
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...
The Incredible Melting Man (1977)
by Martin | July 25, 2015 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
Arrow Video keeps up the good work of supplying us with pristine transfers of films that possibly don't deserve it with this DVD/Blu-Ray combo of William Sachs' 70's creature feature. 'Alex Rebar as the Incredible Melting Man' the opening credits say, denying Rebar's...