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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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The Voices

A toy factory worker in a small American town, Jerry (Ryan Reynolds) is your standard eager-to-please psychotic passing for normal, at least until he starts ticking the box marked ‘serial killer’ by stabbing his indifferent love-object (Gemma Arterton) to death and...

The Hart Of London (1970)/Sodom (1989)

Experimental cinema – you either love it or you hate it. Or you don’t know what to think. The BFI’s Will Fowler assembled this double bill in January 2015 under the heading of ‘Transcendence’. And rightly so, I think. The Hart of London confounds our expectations from...

Frightfest Halloween 2018

Yes I know, we are already well into 2019 but let me take you back, BACK to when the self-service checkouts in Poundland were still speaking in the voice of Bela Lugosi ('Have a spooooky day!') In truth I wasn't all that inspired by the films on offer at Frightfest...

The Devil’s Rain (1975)

I've taken to listening to Shaun Keaveny on BBC6 Music in the mornings, via my TV – specifically Freeview 707. A couple of months ago my just-awoken fingers were fumblingly pressing those figures out on the remote and hesitated too long, inadvertently accessing 70, at...

Phantoms of the Opera

IL MOSTRO DELLA OPERA (1964) In the days before the cities became tombs and the cinemas morgues I went to a showing of this obscure Italian film at the Barbican on a Saturday morning, only to discover that I was encroaching upon a Phantom Of The Opera symposium. Who...

A Brexit Trilogy

GOD'S OWN COUNTRY (2017) Brexit – is it humanity asserting its freedom to be perverse in the face of global capitalism, or is it just a backward-leaning movement composed of people whose preciousness about their 'British identity' makes you wonder who the real...

Final Destination: Bloodlines / Bogancloch / The Shrouds

FINAL DESTINATION: BLOODLINES Horror franchises are noted for their unkillable villains, constantly being resurrected, but the Final Destination films cut to the chase in that the villain is death itself, and who is going to kill him? Or her. Or them. The films settle...

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...

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...

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...

Some more reviews.

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