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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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A Prince, The Animal Kingdom, Behind The Mountains and Birth/Rebirth

A PRINCE Pierre Creton's film featured in both John Waters' top ten and Sight and Sound's top 50, so it should have been made for me – but there's no accounting for taste. All I can say is that it certainly gives you the feeling that director/co-writer Creton knew...

BFI London Film Festival 2014: Three Horrors at the Odeon Covent Garden

SPRING If you thought Richard Linklater's Before Sunset might have been improved if Julie Delpy had periodically turned into a squid (and is there anyone who doesn't?), then this may well be the film for you. American backpacker Evan (Lou Taylor Pucci) hooks up with...

The Devil Outside / Permanent Green Light

THE DEVIL OUTSIDE In writer-director Andrew Hulme's second film (after gangster drama Snow In Paradise, which I haven't seen but will be sure to catch up with – no doubt on London Live - one day) our adolescent hero Robert (Noah Carson) finds the disconnect between...

Frightfest 2014: The Green Inferno

Movies such as Umberto Lenzi's Cannibal Ferox and Ruggero Deodato's powerful Cannibal Holocaust really do seem to belong to a certain time and place – 70 and early 80's Italy – so it was intriguing to see how Eli Roth of Cabin Fever and Hostel fame would fare in...

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 Secret of Dorian Gray (1969)

Ah, Valentine's Day – my favourite feast day, since my single status means I don't have to observe it. Nevertheless I was moved to recognise it to the extent of braving rail replacement services to get to the Barbican, where film programmer Josh Saco (aka Cigarette...

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...

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...

Privilege (1967) / Duck Soup (1933)

PRIVILEGE On this BFI DVD you get a couple of early short films from director Peter Watkins, one of which is 1961's The Forgotten Faces, an urgent, authentic-seeming account of the 1956 people's uprising in Hungary, filmed in Canterbury. Therein lies the moral of much...

The Manster (1959)

I got this in a DVD box set called Brains That Wouldn't Die ('6 Midnight Movies on 2 DVDs!'). On the plus side, there are some hard-to-see films here – on the downside, such is the picture quality that they often remain hard to see, even while you're watching them....

Some more reviews.

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