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Martin P. Lumbridge (not his real name) persists in writing about film even though he has no professional qualifications or compelling reason to be believed. Expect spoilers.

CITIZENFOUR

by | February 8, 2015 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

I hardly ever go to see documentaries because they're about real life, and I can see that for free. But recently, every time I looked at the ICA website, I noticed that they were giving me yet another opportunity to see Laura Poitras' film about Edward Snowden, as its...
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Frightfest 2019 Part One – Home Discomforts

by | September 21, 2019 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

Set in my ways as I am I prefer to buy my Frightfest tickets in person, at whatever passes for a 'box office' nowadays. Over the years this has become more and more difficult and now entails leaving it to the very last moment. This time around I thought my resistance...
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Frightfest 2022

by | December 18, 2022 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

'Keep On Rollin', says a T-shirt on a little girl outside the Prince Charles Cinema, which I at first imagined was a reference to Jean Rollin, French director of sex vampire films and subject of the documentary Orchestrator of Storms, showing at Frightfest. The image...
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American Fiction

by | February 24, 2024 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

I haven't seen this literary satire, Cord Jefferson's debut film, based on a 2001 book by Percival Everett, but I was fully intending to until I saw the trailer. It put me off. Judging a film by its trailer is a bit like judging a book by its cover, but you can in...
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Horror Express (1972)

by | February 6, 2016 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

Ever since I was a child it seems to me that the BBC has been showing Eugenio Martin's Spanish horror film Horror Express in a late night slot at regular intervals. This kind of reassuring continuity is exactly what I pay my licence fee for. If I had it on DVD I...
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Terror Firmer (1999) / Screamplay (1985) / Suture (1993)

by | July 10, 2020 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

TERROR FIRMER Based on a memoir by Lloyd Kaufman, co-founder of Troma Entertainment, and director of many of its 'hits', such as The Toxic Avenger (also on this Czech DVD under the title Toxicky Mstitel), this film is essentially Kaufman's 8½. He plays a blind...
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Strongroom (1962)

by | August 31, 2019 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

Vernon Sewell's career in British film started, weirdly enough, with a German film - Morgenrot (1933) a collaboration with Gustav Klimt's illegitimate son (one of them) that premiered in front of Adolf Hitler. Apparently Hitler liked it. His next collaborative...
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FrightFest 2023

by | October 21, 2023 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

FrightFest has a new sponsor and is now the Pigeon Shrine FrightFest. It has to be said that Pigeon Shrine isn't the most inspiring name – 'the Pigeon Shrine FrightFest' sounded suspiciously like a bargain basement version of the original, and my fears seemed to be...
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Longlegs / Only The River Flows

by | October 16, 2024 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

LONGLEGS Longlegs has been subject to a lot of hype claiming that it is the scariest film of the year or decade or maybe even century, and it certainly maintains a tense and creepy atmosphere throughout, but the scariest moment comes before the credits, where the...
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Blind

by | May 30, 2015 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

The old Renoir cinema has resurfaced as the Curzon Bloomsbury. It hasn’t got any bigger on top but underneath it’s a rabbit warren, leading me down dark tunnels in search of the ‘Minema’ screen. This sounds small, and so it proves to be – so very intimate that the...
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