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Everlasting Love (Amor Eterno)

by Martin | April 26, 2015 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

Showing at BFI Flare, Marçal Forés’ Everlasting Love presents a more plausible woodland cruising ground than did Alain Guiraudie’s overpraised Stranger By The Lake, even if this one does feature teenage cannibals. Forés’ last (and first) film was Animals, which...

Kothanodi (BFI London Film Festival 2015)

by Martin | November 1, 2015 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

Indian horror films are hard to come by – and this isn't one either, or not exactly. Nevertheless, Kothanodi (it means 'river of fables'), a compendium of four interlinked folk tales from Assam, is almost grim enough to qualify. In the most optimistic of these tales...

Aaaaaaaah!

by Martin | March 20, 2016 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

Two men (Steve Oram and Tom Meeten) who only communicate in ape-like grunts, are in the woods mourning the passing of a loved one (we assume) by pissing on a framed photo of her. That done, they set off into the city, to bring (so we might imagine) their primitive...

Pacifiction/Infinity Pool/The Outwaters/Beau Is Afraid

by Martin | July 1, 2023 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

PACIFICTION Back in 2013 I almost killed myself hurrying from a London Film Festival showing of Denis Coté's Vic And Flo Saw A Bear on the South Bank, to Albert Serra's Story of My Death in Leicester Square. Given the title of Serra's film, it would have been an...

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...

mother!

by Martin | November 12, 2017 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

The release of Darren Aronofky's latest film was preceded by a director interview by Trevor Johnston in Sight & Sound urging viewers not to read it until they'd seen the film, since (even more than is usually the case) the more you knew about this film in advance...

BFI London Film Festival 2017: The Wound, Most Beautiful Island

by Martin | January 28, 2018 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

THE WOUND Up for the Sutherland First Feature Award was this South African tale whose hero Xolani (Nakhane Touré) returns every year to the countryside to become a 'caregiver' to initiates in a tribal ritual wherein boys become men by dint of such activities as...

45 Years

by Martin | October 24, 2015 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

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....

Frightfest 2019 Part Two

by Martin | October 19, 2019 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

BLOOD AND FLESH: THE REEL LIFE AND GHASTLY DEATH OF AL ADAMSON The Cineworld discovery screen offered up David Gregory's documentary about Al Adamson, the 60's /70's exploitation director responsible for such films as 1965's Psycho-A-Go-Go and 1971's Blood of Ghastly...

Power Games: The Childhood of a Leader and The Student

by Martin | February 18, 2017 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

THE CHILDHOOD OF A LEADER This is out on DVD now, I discovered it in Sainsbury's, the cast staring balefully out at me from the cover and seeming to condemn me for my lack of professionalism in not getting round to review this back in September 2016, when I...