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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...

Burial Ground (1981)

by Martin | August 7, 2016 | movies, reviews, Uncategorized | 0 Comments

In the prologue to this plot-free Italian zombie opus, also known as The Nights of Terror, a professor raises the dead from an Etruscan tomb just in time for the arrival of a group of privileged merry-makers down for a weekend at the adjoining country house. With one...

BFI London Film Festival 2017: Good Manners

by Martin | January 13, 2018 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

The first film by Brazilian directorial duo Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra was 2011's Hard Labour in which a woman's attempt to get her small business (a grocery store) off the ground is undermined by the corpse of a werewolf lurking behind one of the walls – and also...

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...

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 -...

FrightFest 2024 – Mental Health Issues

by Martin | March 1, 2025 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

The big screen at the relocated FrightFest (Odeon Leicester Square) is almost scarily big now: I couldn't face it. For single ticket buyers like me the seating options weren't promising anyway. So I stuck with the Discovery Screens and found myself in another cinema...

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...

Frightfest 2019 Part One – Home Discomforts

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

Set in my ways as I am I prefer to buy my Frightfest tickets in person, at whatever passes for a 'box office' nowadays. Over the years this has become more and more difficult and now entails leaving it to the very last moment. This time around I thought my resistance...

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...

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...