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.
A Cure For Wellness
by Martin | March 25, 2017 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
A slice of Hollywood Eurogothic from Gore Pirates of the Caribbean Verbinski, this begins quite promisingly in a vein of deadpan camp – a mode which serves it well enough until it goes (almost literally) down the toilet. Lockhart (Dane DeHaan), a young, reptilian Wall...
Pacifiction/Infinity Pool/The Outwaters/Beau Is Afraid
by Martin | July 1, 2023 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
PACIFICTION Back in 2013 I almost killed myself hurrying from a London Film Festival showing of Denis Coté's Vic And Flo Saw A Bear on the South Bank, to Albert Serra's Story of My Death in Leicester Square. Given the title of Serra's film, it would have been an...
New Year’s Evil (1980) / Bloody New Year (1987)
by Martin | February 11, 2018 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
New Year is, as everybody knows, a massive anticlimax. We all get frantically excited about what turns out to be just a glib transition into more of the same. Here are two films (showing in the BFI's Cult strand) which try to give New Year some genuine significance...
Privilege (1967) / Duck Soup (1933)
by Martin | May 5, 2020 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
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...
Ghost Theatre / Yakuza Apocalypse
by Martin | January 24, 2016 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
GHOST THEATRE Hideo Nakata, director of the Ring movies and the excellent Dark Water returns with this theatrical tale that never comes to life – unlike the dummy being used as a prop in the play Ghost Theatre revolves around. The dummy's head, you see, comes from a...
BFI London Film Festival 2014: Metamorphoses/White God
by Martin | December 7, 2014 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
METAMORPHOSES Christophe Honoré's film is based on something I've not read – Ovid's Metamorphoses – but no need to be alarmed: the stories are spelled out very clearly. Indeed, almost too clearly. The set-up is that Europa (Amira Akili) is a schoolgirl learning about...
The Entity (1982) / Night Watch (1973)
by Martin | June 29, 2025 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
THE ENTITY It has always struck me that the general tone of life in America is one of hysteria. When I said this once to my cousin, who lives in Texas, she maintained that, rather than hysterics, Americans are 'survivors'. If someone claims to be a survivor merely on...
Death Car On The Freeway (1979)
by Martin | July 18, 2015 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
The critical appeal of the recent Mad Max sequel was so across-the-board that it even screened at arthouse venues like the Curzon Soho - while I was in there waiting for Christian Petzold’s (excellent) German drama Phoenix to start, a trailer for it played. The woman...
Evolution (BFI London Film Festival 2015)
by Martin | November 15, 2015 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
Not to be confused with a 2001 David Duchovny film I've never seen, Lucile Hadžihalilović's second feature cranks the eeriness of 2004's Innocence up a notch, coming on like an anxiety dream H P Lovecraft might have had as a child. On a remote volcanic island, a group...
A Cat In The Brain (1990) and Slugs (1988)
by Martin | July 8, 2018 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
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....