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.
Frightfest 2015 Day Three
by Martin | October 24, 2015 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
Over Your Dead Body The vexing question of what to see and what not to see at these festivals often results in me scouring the internet for reviews from other festivals. It didn't do me a lot of good in this case since I found two reviews for OYDB, one of which...
Arrival
by Martin | March 18, 2017 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
Denis Villeneuve's Arrival brings to our attention something about contact with alien life forms that to my knowledge hasn't been thoroughly explored up until now – how boring it might be. That's not to say that the film itself is boring – although it does hover on...
Blind
by Martin | 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...
Frightfest 2018 Part Two: Awks
by Martin | October 15, 2018 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
KILLING GOD In this Spanish offering from directors Caye Casas and Albert Pintó, various members of a family gather in an old dark house for New Year's Eve, only to be joined by a dwarf who emerges from the toilet (the room, not the bowl – at least as far as we can...
Kinoteka 2019. Monument
by Martin | May 4, 2019 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
'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
by Martin | January 30, 2022 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
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...
Don’t Step On It, It Might Be Jake Gyllenhaal: Nightcrawler/Enemy
by Martin | April 4, 2015 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
Lou Bloom (Jake Gyllenhaal), the central figure of Dan Gilroy's Nightcrawler, resembles nothing so much as a cockroach that has unaccountably taken on human form – emerging out of the LA night as a petty thief with aspirations, he soon graduates into a 'nightcrawler',...
London Film Festival 2019: Vivarium / Scales (and End Of The Century)
by Martin | January 5, 2020 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
VIVARIUM Director Lorcan Finnegan and writer Garrett Shanley's second film sadly doesn't manage to fulfil the promise of their previous feature, 2016’s Without Name. The LFF brochure compares it to The Twilight Zone and Black Mirror but while it could pass for one of...
Frightfest 2022
by Martin | 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...
Death Bed: The Bed That Eats (1977)
by Martin | September 16, 2017 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
Outside the screen at the BFI stands horror film critic and musician Stephen Thrower (author of several enormous books on horror films which I would love to read if only I had the time - and money) next to a cake in the shape of a four-poster bed - though smaller, of...