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Bone Tomahawk / Chronic

by Martin | March 20, 2016 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

There is, or there was, a 'projection issue' in the Curzon Bloomsbury's Phoenix Screen. A sheet of A4 paper warns you of it just before you go in – though after you have paid for your ticket. It doesn't make it entirely clear, or maybe I didn't read it closely enough,...

A Prince, The Animal Kingdom, Behind The Mountains and Birth/Rebirth

by Martin | April 1, 2024 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

A PRINCE Pierre Creton's film featured in both John Waters' top ten and Sight and Sound's top 50, so it should have been made for me – but there's no accounting for taste. All I can say is that it certainly gives you the feeling that director/co-writer Creton knew...

Three Against Nature

by Martin | June 10, 2018 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

THE SAILOR WHO FELL FROM GRACE WITH THE SEA (1976) 'An insult to any audience' concludes the review of Lewis John Carlino's film The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea (hereafter referred to as Sailor) in my damaged-in-transit Waterstones-freebie edition of the...

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...

Mandy / Knife + Heart / Suspiria

by Martin | February 16, 2019 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

MANDY Mandy sold out very quickly at the London Film Festival, so I was pleased, having failed to secure a ticket, to see that it was showing in that very same week at the Prince Charles Cinema, which meant that I could see it for a fiver rather that sixteen quid. It...

In Pictures 2: Rope (1948) /Possessor (2020)

by Martin | August 30, 2021 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

ROPE On the extras on my DVD of Alfred Hitchcock's Rope screenwriter Arthur Laurents nails several of the reasons why this adaptation of Patrick Hamilton's play (based on the Leopold/Loeb case in which a couple of students felt entitled to kill a 14 year old boy...

Microwave Massacre (1983)

by Martin | June 18, 2017 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

It's a truism that when horror goes wrong it can easily turn into comedy – but what happens when a horror comedy goes wrong? Microwave Massacre, available on Arrow Video, provides one possible answer - a vision of Hell made all the more hellish by the awareness that...

Frightfest 2016 Day One

by Martin | September 24, 2016 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

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...

Salvo

by Martin | April 26, 2014 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

Mafia hitman Salvo (Saleh Bakri) kills a guy but instead of despatching his sister Rita (Sara Serraiocco) - a witness to the crime - he chooses to hide her in an abandoned factory and keep her fed and watered. Why? Love? Pity? Or is he caught on the horns of a...

The Angry Red Planet (1960)

by Martin | January 26, 2020 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

There's often a sense in SF films, especially those of the 50's, that the real subjects of interest are not giant mantises or bug-eyed aliens but women. This is made explicit in director Robert Gordon's 1955 film It Came From Beneath The Sea (1955) where Faith...