Select Page

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.

The Wolf Of Wall Street

Mere seconds after rogue stockbroker Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) appears in Martin Scorsese's film, I was eagerly awaiting his comeuppance, if not actual slow death by steamroller. Unfortunately I had to wait nearly 3 hours and even then (SPOILER ALERT) it...

LOCKDOWN! The Giant Claw (1957)

How often have I fantasized about the government forbidding me to leave the house so that I am finally compelled to watch all the DVDs I have accumulated over the years? Well never, since that would have been absurd, even for a fantasy. Nevertheless here we are. Or at...

Sins Of The Fleshapoids (1965)/Orphans Of The Cosmos (2008)

I settled down for this Kuchar Brothers double-bill at the BFI with three cushions (Christmas presents for Mum) in carrier bags, a burden bulky enough to suggest that I should have splashed out on another ticket. With an amused gay man on my left and Brian Sewell...

Barbican Nights – Into the Woods Part One

In an unusual attempt at consistency I thought I'd review this folk horror season curated by Cigarette Burns (Josh Saco), consisting of four films showing at the Barbican during May, the first being: THE COMPANY OF WOLVES (1984) Only I didn't go to that one. I...

Further Dispatches From BFI Flare

Futuro Beach On the face of it this has everything you could possibly want from a Brazilian- German co-production – it begins in Brazil and it ends in Germany – and beneath the surface there’s enough happening to offset a vague sense of one's having seen something...

Strongroom (1962)

Vernon Sewell's career in British film started, weirdly enough, with a German film - Morgenrot (1933) a collaboration with Gustav Klimt's illegitimate son (one of them) that premiered in front of Adolf Hitler. Apparently Hitler liked it. His next collaborative...

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...

Goodnight Mommy

TV presenter Mommy (Suzanne Wuest) returns from plastic surgery with a bandaged face and a bad temper, so that her twin boys Elias and Lukas start to wonder if she's really Mommy at all, the question mark over her identity deftly conveyed in a scene where she plays a...

Frightfest 2015 Day One

The Rotten Link Raulo and Roberta (Luis Ziembrowski and Paula Brasca) are two unlikely siblings: a simple-minded hulk, he looks old enough to be her father while she is a pretty young thing barely out of her teens. But they fit into their isolated Argentinian...

BFI London Film Festival 2017: Casting, 9 Fingers

In the toilets next to NFT2 a man was calling out for someone called Antonio – he had been asked to do so by a woman outside. Antonio didn't pipe up, although one of the cubicles was in use I noticed. Conceivably Antonio was inside - asleep, dying, or simply unwilling...