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Hereditary

Hereditary

In theory it ought to be possible to respond to a film without taking into account to the critical reaction to it, but once you are aware of that reaction and have seen it pasted on the sides of buses, there's not much you can do about that: it's already in you. But...

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A Cat In The Brain (1990) and Slugs (1988)

A Cat In The Brain (1990) and Slugs (1988)

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....

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Three Against Nature

Three Against Nature

THE SAILOR WHO FELL FROM GRACE WITH THE SEA (1976) 'An insult to any audience' concludes the review of Lewis John Carlino's film The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea (hereafter referred to as Sailor) in my damaged-in-transit Waterstones-freebie edition of the...

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Frightfest 2016 Day Three

MAN UNDERGROUND Or do I mean Day Four since I skipped Day Three? Oh what the hell. Nobody's paying me to do this. By this stage (Bank Holiday Monday) 'not really horror' (a term coined by Anton Bitel in a recent article for Sight and Sound online) seemed to be turning...

In Pictures

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 slasher films as well....

FrightFest 2024 – Mental Health Issues

The big screen at the relocated FrightFest (Odeon Leicester Square) is almost scarily big now: I couldn't face it. For single ticket buyers like me the seating options weren't promising anyway. So I stuck with the Discovery Screens and found myself in another cinema...

mother!

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...

Arrival

Denis Villeneuve's Arrival brings to our attention something about contact with alien life forms that to my knowledge hasn't been thoroughly explored up until now – how boring it might be. That's not to say that the film itself is boring – although it does hover on...

Weapons /Bring Her Back

WEAPONS There was a lot of hype around writer-director Zach Cregger's follow-up to the promising Barbarian – I remember noticing a website ranking the characters in Weapons in order of how 'iconic' they are. No doubt it is old-fashioned of me to expect to wait a few...

Santo in the Wax Museum (1963) / Santo Vs. The She-Wolves (1976)

Just when you thought it was safe to go back to the cinema... it IS safe. Oppressively so. I don't know about you but walking into a room full of people in surgical masks doesn't 'make me feel safe' – it makes me feel uneasy. And so I haven't joined the rush to get...

Crazy About Love: Fingernails, Vincent Must Die, and Tchaikovsky’s Wife

FINGERNAILS Love is lighter than air, sings Stephen Merritt of The Magnetic Fields. It floats away when you let go. Love therefore needs to be grounded: in Greek director Christos Nikou's follow-up to his debut film Apples it is grounded in having your fingernails...

Under The Skin

I took a half day off work to see this, and thus missed Ann Widdecombe on the Jeremy Vine show talking about 'What It Means To Be Human'. However, this offered a roughly comparable experience. An attractive alien disguised as movie star Scarlett Johanssen drives round...

The Colossus Of New York (1958) / The Alligator People (1959)

In American monster movies of the early 50's the monstrous generally had a scientific explanation – of course the science didn't always stand up to close examination, but then it rarely got any. It was only required to generate panic - for the length of the film, at...

Some more reviews.

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