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Frightfest 2021

Frightfest 2021

by | Dec 14, 2021 | movies, reviews

NIGHT DRIVE A mysterious fugue enveloped Frightfest last year – it’s like it didn’t really happen. But suddenly here I am again in the Empire Leicester Square, and – after a few ‘missing’ years – Dave is even back, and sitting next to me....
Censor / Surge

Censor / Surge

by | Oct 10, 2021 | movies, reviews

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....
In Pictures 2: Rope (1948) /Possessor (2020)

In Pictures 2: Rope (1948) /Possessor (2020)

by | Aug 30, 2021 | movies, reviews

ROPE On the extras on my DVD of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope screenwriter Arthur Laurents nails several of the reasons why this adaptation of Patrick Hamilton’s play (based on the Leopold/Loeb case in which a couple of students felt entitled to kill a 14 year...
Apples / In The Earth

Apples / In The Earth

by | Jul 17, 2021 | movies, reviews

APPLES Who on earth, returning to the cinema after – well OK, during – a global pandemic would go and see a film that is about the pandemic, even if obliquely? About six people (including me) is the answer, if this afternoon showing is anything to go by. Apples seems...
In Pictures

In Pictures

by | May 30, 2021 | movies, reviews

BLOOD AND BLACK LACE (1964) Mario Bava’s The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963) is said to be the first giallo, but of Bava’s films it is this that feels like the ur-giallo, a template for everything that came after – not just 70’s gialli, but 80’s...