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Gentrified Horror: The Nightcomers (1971) and Us

by Martin | July 21, 2019 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

THE NIGHTCOMERS In Nick Pinkerton's positive Sight and Sound review of Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich (which I thought was shit by the way) I first encountered the phrase 'gentrified horror', a pejorative term for the kind of upmarket horror that plays to...

Pride And Prejudice And Zombies

by Martin | October 23, 2016 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

In theory this could be my ideal film, uniting art and trash with no middle ground; but there's a difference between theory and practice. I remember years ago, when I used to work in Waterstones, looking at the cover of the book this is based on and wondering if there...

White Bird In A Blizzard

by Martin | April 12, 2015 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

This adaptation of Laura Kasischke's young adult novel finds director Gregg Araki in less than full-on mode, and my first impression, such is the uncertainty of tone here, is that when he isn't in full-on mode (eg: Nowhere, Kaboom) he doesn't know what he's doing. But...

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...

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...

The Invisible Life

by Martin | May 25, 2015 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

It was a lovely day, sunshine sparkling on the Thames, Green Park bustling with life. The freshness in the air seemed almost to be trying to dissuade me against seeing a bleak existential drama about death at the ICA, but I was determined - even if, in the event, it...

O Lucky Man! (1973) etc….

by Martin | August 25, 2024 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

My introduction to Lindsay Anderson was being shown the 1968 film If.... in (judiciously edited) half hour portions at secondary school in the 70's in a lesson called 'Design for Living', a rather random class which was used to dispense whatever we had in the way of...

Koko-Di-Koko-Da / Swallow

by Martin | December 15, 2019 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

KOKO-DI-KOKO-DA (LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 2019) Johannes Nyholm's film starts with a mother, Erin (Ylva Gallon) suffering a bout of food poisoning which leaves her face swollen so that she looks, as her husband Tobias (Leif Edlund Johansson) jests, like Freddy Kruger. The...

Mirror Mirror (1990) / Happy Deathday (2017) / Thelma (2017)

by Martin | September 9, 2018 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

MIRROR MIRROR 'Long may it continue', I said earlier in the year about the BFI's 'Cult' strand. Well now it has ended (though replaced by something very similar called Terror Vision) but at least its last showing, curated by feminist film collective the Final Girls,...

La Grande Bouffe (1973)

by Martin | August 15, 2015 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

Marco Ferreri’s 1973 film La Grande Bouffe has airline pilot Marcello Mastroianni, chef Ugo Tognazzi, TV director Michel Piccoli and judge Philippe Noiret gathering in Noiret’s old family pile to indulge themselves in hedonistic pleasures until the toilet backs up -...