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Frightfest 2015 Day Three

by Martin | October 24, 2015 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

Over Your Dead Body The vexing question of what to see and what not to see at these festivals often results in me scouring the internet for reviews from other festivals. It didn't do me a lot of good in this case since I found two reviews for OYDB, one of which...

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...

Office Killer (1997)

by Martin | August 14, 2016 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

The first thing I knew about photographer Cindy Sherman making a sort of horror film was when I saw that feminist film club the Final Girls were screening it at the Prince Charles; either that, or I did actually see it at the cinema in the 90's and subsequently forgot...

Foxcatcher/Whiplash

by Martin | March 1, 2015 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

I may boast of my aversion to the mainstream but do I ever really escape it, or is it like Christopher Marlowe said: ‘Where we are is the mainstream and the mainstream is where we ever are’? (OK, he was talking about Hell but it’s the same idea.) I have been slightly...

Evolution (BFI London Film Festival 2015)

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

Not to be confused with a 2001 David Duchovny film I've never seen, Lucile Hadžihalilović's second feature cranks the eeriness of 2004's Innocence up a notch, coming on like an anxiety dream H P Lovecraft might have had as a child. On a remote volcanic island, a group...

Slack Bay (2016) / Zombie Lake (1977)

by Martin | April 22, 2017 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

It was last November that I went to the Cine Lumiere to catch up with the latest offering from Bruno Dumont, showing at the French Film Festival, and it has taken me up until now to process it. In fact that's a lie – I still haven't processed it. In Slack Bay Dumont...

The Boxer’s Omen (1983) / Goodbye Dragon Inn (2003)

by Martin | May 15, 2021 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

THE BOXER'S OMEN I saw this in late 2016 at the Barbican in a season called Cheap Thrills, a celebration of bad taste. Is this then a 'bad film'? If so, we need to dismiss any judgmental qualities that might still be clinging to the word 'bad'. We are not condemning...

The Bat (1959)

by Martin | March 4, 2017 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

This comes from a cheap and pretty random box set of 'horror' DVD's I got as a Secret Santa present – thanks, Lorraine! - so there's no frills here, no trailer or 'Making Of': they barely manage to give you the film itself. Which is bad anyway, so creaky you can...

CITIZENFOUR

by Martin | February 8, 2015 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

I hardly ever go to see documentaries because they're about real life, and I can see that for free. But recently, every time I looked at the ICA website, I noticed that they were giving me yet another opportunity to see Laura Poitras' film about Edward Snowden, as its...

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...