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The Colossus Of New York (1958) / The Alligator People (1959)

by Martin | May 27, 2020 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

In American monster movies of the early 50's the monstrous generally had a scientific explanation – of course the science didn't always stand up to close examination, but then it rarely got any. It was only required to generate panic - for the length of the film, at...

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...

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...

Weapons /Bring Her Back

by Martin | January 18, 2026 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

WEAPONS There was a lot of hype around writer-director Zach Cregger's follow-up to the promising Barbarian – I remember noticing a website ranking the characters in Weapons in order of how 'iconic' they are. No doubt it is old-fashioned of me to expect to wait a few...

American Fiction

by Martin | February 24, 2024 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

I haven't seen this literary satire, Cord Jefferson's debut film, based on a 2001 book by Percival Everett, but I was fully intending to until I saw the trailer. It put me off. Judging a film by its trailer is a bit like judging a book by its cover, but you can in...

So This Is Real Life – Three Documentaries

by Martin | January 8, 2017 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

FURTHER BEYOND This is a film about the making of a biopic about Ambrosio O'Higgins, who – back in the 18th century - travelled from Ireland to Spain to Chile, where he became quite a big deal and his son Bernardo even more of one. In a Tristram Shandy kind of fashion...

The Million Eyes Of Sumuru (1967)

by Martin | February 28, 2016 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

'I have a million eyes, for I am Sumuru', says Shirley Eaton in voiceover at the beginning of this particular disaster. She doesn't really have a million eyes - that's the first disappointment. The notional 'million eyes' belong to her followers. Sumuru leads an...

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...

Everlasting Love (Amor Eterno)

by Martin | April 26, 2015 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

Showing at BFI Flare, Marçal Forés’ Everlasting Love presents a more plausible woodland cruising ground than did Alain Guiraudie’s overpraised Stranger By The Lake, even if this one does feature teenage cannibals. Forés’ last (and first) film was Animals, which...

Frightfest 2017: Outliers

by Martin | November 5, 2017 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

DHOGS I'm a genre lightweight really, a dilettante. Of all the films I saw at Frightfest this year, only one – The Glass Coffin - could really be called a horror film, and that was probably the least of them. Why, I wasn't even wearing a black T-shirt. Dhogs isn't...