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.
Stray Dogs
by Martin | June 13, 2015 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
‘What is this life if, filled with care/We have no time to stand and stare?’, said the Victorian poet W. H. Davies. Good point, and a view clearly shared by Chinese director Tsai-Ming-liang, who transfixes (hopefully) his audience with fixed shots of his characters...
A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night
by Martin | March 1, 2015 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
An Iranian vampire Western? Is this what the world really needs? On the evidence presented here – yes. Not that this is really Iranian, since it is shot in America and is set in a fictional (Iranian) place called ‘Bad City’. Not that it’s really a Western either,...
Exhibition
by Martin | May 11, 2014 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
Director Joanna Hogg's first two films – Unrelated (2007) and Archipelago (2010) – are about upper-middle class English families on holiday in Tuscany and the Scilly Isles respectively. They were more interested in absorbing you in a landscape and situation than in...
Universal Soldier: Day Of Reckoning (2012)
by Martin | August 3, 2014 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
Normally I unearth the cultural artefacts that interest me by dint of patient digging in obscure corners, but sometimes something comes barrelling out of the internet during an idle hour to catch me off guard rather like MMA fighter Andrei 'The Pitbull' Arlovski keeps...
Talk To Me / Asteroid City / Nope
by Martin | September 23, 2023 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
TALK TO ME Directors Danny and Michael Phillipou come to us from YouTube, where they operate some sort of channel apparently, which may explain why this BFI showing was full of young people. They were probably taking advantage of the BFI under-25's offer (as if youth...
Frightfest 2014: Cheerleaders, Show Pieces, and the Babadook
by Martin | September 14, 2014 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
ALL CHEERLEADERS DIE As is well-known, the only way in which girls can achieve any kind of power in that hellish jock-dominated microcosm of American society known as high school is either by means of their bodies or through witchcraft. And witchcraft doesn't work. Or...
Horror Express (1972)
by Martin | 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...
BFI London Film Festival 2017: The Wound, Most Beautiful Island
by Martin | January 28, 2018 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
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...
BFI London Film Festival 2014: Hard To Be A God
by Martin | October 25, 2014 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
What better way to ease yourself gently into a film festival than with a nearly-three-hour black and white Russian film based on an sf novel I've never read? Aleksei German's film (based on a novel by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky) is set on a planet which has been...
The Devil’s Rain (1975)
by Martin | April 26, 2015 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
I've taken to listening to Shaun Keaveny on BBC6 Music in the mornings, via my TV – specifically Freeview 707. A couple of months ago my just-awoken fingers were fumblingly pressing those figures out on the remote and hesitated too long, inadvertently accessing 70, at...