Select Page

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.

BFI London Film Festival 2017: The Wound, Most Beautiful Island

THE WOUND Up for the Sutherland First Feature Award was this South African tale whose hero Xolani (Nakhane Touré) returns every year to the countryside to become a 'caregiver' to initiates in a tribal ritual wherein boys become men by dint of such activities as...

Post-Horror: Men / Bergman Island

MEN I see that the Barbican are putting on a summer season of 'post-horror' films. Is that a film you see after a horror film, for light relief perhaps? Well no, apparently – it's just another iteration of our old friend 'elevated horror'. So the films in question...

Frightfest 2016 Day Three

MAN UNDERGROUND Or do I mean Day Four since I skipped Day Three? Oh what the hell. Nobody's paying me to do this. By this stage (Bank Holiday Monday) 'not really horror' (a term coined by Anton Bitel in a recent article for Sight and Sound online) seemed to be turning...

BFI London Film Festival 2017: Rift, My Friend Dahmer, Hagazussa – A Heathen’s Curse

RIFT Apparently the Icelandic title of Rift (Rökkur) more closely corresponds to 'Twilight', but that title, as the director Erlingur Thoroddsen drily points out, was already taken. Though not terribly exciting as a title, Rift is apt enough for this story of two gay...

American Fiction

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...

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...

Apples / In The Earth

APPLES Who on earth, returning to the cinema after – well OK, during – a global pandemic would go and see a film that is about the pandemic, even if obliquely? About six people (including me) is the answer, if this afternoon showing is anything to go by. Apples seems...

Frightfest 2016 Day One

This year Frightfest disconcerted me by moving temporarily to the Vue in Shepherd's Bush. I don't like change. As we sat in the Pizza Express near Soho Square beforehand, which is where we always go on Frightfest Friday, Dave tried to reassure me by showing me the new...

Crimes At The Dark House and elsewhere – some films with Tod Slaughter 1937-1946

Crimes At The Dark House (1940) is nominally a version of Wilkie Collins' novel The Woman In White in which Tod Slaughter is Sir Percival Glyde – or rather he isn't, he's an impostor first seen hammering a tent peg into the real Sir Percival's left ear. Which is to...

Camille Claudel 1915

This meeting of two arthouse legends – Bruno Dumont, a director who has previously always refused to work with professional actors, and Juliette (Chocolat) Binoche – is heralded by posters screaming BINOCHE CLAUDEL DUMONT, in the manner of ads for an action movie...