Martin P. Lumbridge (not his real name) persists in writing about film even though he has no professional qualifications or compelling reason to be believed. Expect spoilers.
Kinoteka 2019: Love Express and Fugue
by Martin | May 11, 2019 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
LOVE EXPRESS: THE DISAPPEARANCE OF WALERIAN BOROWCZYK Kuba Mikurda's documentary presents a pretty standard view of Borowczyk, which won't be a problem for people who have no idea who Borowczyk is I suppose, and they are the vast majority of the population, and...
Talk To Me / Asteroid City / Nope
by Martin | September 23, 2023 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
TALK TO ME Directors Danny and Michael Phillipou come to us from YouTube, where they operate some sort of channel apparently, which may explain why this BFI showing was full of young people. They were probably taking advantage of the BFI under-25's offer (as if youth...
LFF 2018: Tumbbad / The Nightshifter
by Martin | January 13, 2019 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
TUMBBAD Indian horror films are something of a rarity, but Kothanodi was one of my highlights of 2015's London Film Festival, and that was a horror film – sort of. This one, my first film of this year's festival, definitely is - or wants to be. It begins with an...
Frightfest 2014: The Green Inferno
by Martin | August 30, 2014 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
Movies such as Umberto Lenzi's Cannibal Ferox and Ruggero Deodato's powerful Cannibal Holocaust really do seem to belong to a certain time and place – 70 and early 80's Italy – so it was intriguing to see how Eli Roth of Cabin Fever and Hostel fame would fare in...
The Witch
by Martin | April 9, 2016 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
I saw this at the Odeon Covent Garden. Amazingly, they are only charging £6.00 a ticket at the moment for any showing Monday to Thursday. I hope this doesn't get out, or my chances of getting an entire screen to myself (that ever-elusive dream) will diminish even...
The Toxic Avenger (1984)
by Martin | June 27, 2015 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
It's fair to say that showings of films in the Cult strand at the BFI have been somewhat underpopulated. In spite of a mention in Time Out, this is no exception – which is as it should be. What point is there in a cult film if everyone wants to see it? This is one of...
Frightfest 2017: Evil Twins
by Martin | October 1, 2017 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
FASHIONISTA As regular readers would know (if they existed), Frightfest usually marks the one time in the calendar year where I don't go to the cinema alone: Dave comes along. Or at least he does for part of the time before he has to duck out due to work commitments...
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...
Privilege (1967) / Duck Soup (1933)
by Martin | May 5, 2020 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
PRIVILEGE On this BFI DVD you get a couple of early short films from director Peter Watkins, one of which is 1961's The Forgotten Faces, an urgent, authentic-seeming account of the 1956 people's uprising in Hungary, filmed in Canterbury. Therein lies the moral of much...
Goodnight Mommy
by Martin | April 9, 2016 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
TV presenter Mommy (Suzanne Wuest) returns from plastic surgery with a bandaged face and a bad temper, so that her twin boys Elias and Lukas start to wonder if she's really Mommy at all, the question mark over her identity deftly conveyed in a scene where she plays a...