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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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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 Two

Tenderness Of The Wolves (1973) Don't you just love a true story? This is the one about serial killer Fritz Haarman, who preyed (sexually and murderously) on young boys and drank their blood in post WWI Germany, and who also provided the inspiration for Fritz Lang's...

BFI London Film Festival 2014: Hard To Be A God

What better way to ease yourself gently into a film festival than with a nearly-three-hour black and white Russian film based on an sf novel I've never read? Aleksei German's film (based on a novel by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky)  is set on a planet which has been...

Eyeball (1975) / Short Night Of Glass Dolls (1971) / Spasmo (1974)

EYEBALL The original Italian title of Umberto Lenzi's Eyeball translates as Red Cats In A Glass Labyrinth, which makes very little sense and is all the more impressive for it. However, there is no doubt that Eyeball is more to the point. This giallo is about a busload...

The Toxic Avenger (1984)

It's fair to say that showings of films in the Cult strand at the BFI have been somewhat underpopulated. In spite of a mention in Time Out, this is no exception – which is as it should be. What point is there in a cult film if everyone wants to see it? This is one of...

The Red Queen Kills Seven Times (1972) / Effie Gray (2014)

Before he (apparently) disappeared into thin air, Emilio P. Miraglia made a couple of films blending the giallo with the Gothic, 1971's The Night Evelyn Game Out of the Grave, and this, his last film. The giallo and the Gothic are simultaneously very different (the...

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...

Burke And Hare (1971)

This is director Vernon Sewell’s last film and there’s something fitting about that: after two ventures into the more fantastical side of horror (The Blood Beast Terror and The Curse Of The Crimson Altar from 1966 and 1968 respectively) neither of which went out of...

Kinoteka 2019. Monument

'It won't be easy', warned writer-director Jagoda Szelc before her second film began, which was possibly an example of what she later referred to as her as her 'dry humour' – does anyone go to the Polish Film Festival expecting uncomplicated fun and games? Not that...

BFI London Film Festival 2021: Between Feast and Famine

THE FEAST I remember overhearing a punter at the London Film Festival one year asking the guy next to him what he'd seen and he replied: 'A lot of films that could have been better'. My experience this year (last year) was a bit like that. Even before it started I had...

Some more reviews.

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