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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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New Year’s Evil (1980) / Bloody New Year (1987)

New Year is, as everybody knows, a massive anticlimax. We all get frantically excited about what turns out to be just a glib transition into more of the same. Here are two films (showing in the BFI's Cult strand) which try to give New Year some genuine significance...

Frightfest 2019 Part Three

DEPRAVED In 1991's No Telling, Larry Fessenden's first take on the Frankenstein story – and first film, in fact – the mad scientist has, by the end of it, managed to weld a Border collie and a calf together, which would only have made the third act in a standard...

Horromford

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...

More Quite Good Films of 2014

L FOR LEISURE The fact that people are nostalgic for the 90's is beguilingly weird to me - I was there, and barely noticed them – but maybe this is why I enjoyed Whitney Horn and Lev Kalman's goofy, dreamy, possibly inconsequential L For Leisure so very much. It was...

GUILT-FREE CINEMA? The New York Ripper (1982) / Hitch Hike To Hell (1977)

At some point in the run-up towards Christmas I found myself watching a documentary on BBC4 by Catherine Bray that encouraged us not to feel 'guilty' about watching 'bad' films. It seemed to be right up my alley and for a good twenty minutes all seemed to be well....

Exhibition

Director Joanna Hogg's first two films – Unrelated (2007) and Archipelago (2010) – are about upper-middle class English families on holiday in Tuscany and the Scilly Isles respectively. They were more interested in absorbing you in a landscape and situation than in...

Hail Caesar! / High Rise

One of the funnier scenes in the Coen Brothers' 50's Hollywood-set latest has Ralph Fiennes as a fussy English director struggling to incorporate studio-imposed Western star Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich) into his drawing room comedy Merrily We Dance. Before his utter...

Pride And Prejudice And Zombies

In theory this could be my ideal film, uniting art and trash with no middle ground; but there's a difference between theory and practice. I remember years ago, when I used to work in Waterstones, looking at the cover of the book this is based on and wondering if there...

Our Time / Once Upon A Time In Hollywood

OUR TIME There was quite a high turnout for this three-hour epic of directorial self-laceration from Mexican director Carlos Reygadas, although admittedly this was at the Minema screen at the Curzon Bloomsbury, which seats about 20 people. I had a guy ahead of me...

Stray Dogs

‘What is this life if, filled with care/We have no time to stand and stare?’, said the Victorian poet W. H. Davies. Good point, and a view clearly shared by Chinese director Tsai-Ming-liang, who transfixes (hopefully) his audience with fixed shots of his characters...

Some more reviews.

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