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.
Crazy About Love: Fingernails, Vincent Must Die, and Tchaikovsky’s Wife
by Martin | March 3, 2024 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
FINGERNAILS Love is lighter than air, sings Stephen Merritt of The Magnetic Fields. It floats away when you let go. Love therefore needs to be grounded: in Greek director Christos Nikou's follow-up to his debut film Apples it is grounded in having your fingernails...
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...
Horror Express (1972)
by Martin | February 6, 2016 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
Ever since I was a child it seems to me that the BBC has been showing Eugenio Martin's Spanish horror film Horror Express in a late night slot at regular intervals. This kind of reassuring continuity is exactly what I pay my licence fee for. If I had it on DVD I...
Don’t Be Afraid Of The Dark
by Martin | May 11, 2014 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
I've wanted to see the 1973 made-for-TV movie Don't Be Afraid Of The Dark ever since I read about it in Halliwell's Film Guide in the early 80's. I never have, but no doubt it would be just as disappointing as Troy Nixey's 2010 remake, which I watched – in order to...
Monster Mulch: Vintage Creatures From Talking Pictures
by Martin | May 7, 2018 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
I like to think that there is no such thing as a bad film. Philosophically speaking, there is no such thing as a film at all, since films only 'really' exist in the watching of them, and this is done by people, and no two people will experience precisely the same...
Pacifiction/Infinity Pool/The Outwaters/Beau Is Afraid
by Martin | July 1, 2023 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
PACIFICTION Back in 2013 I almost killed myself hurrying from a London Film Festival showing of Denis Coté's Vic And Flo Saw A Bear on the South Bank, to Albert Serra's Story of My Death in Leicester Square. Given the title of Serra's film, it would have been 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...
LOCKDOWN! The Giant Claw (1957)
by Martin | April 24, 2020 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
How often have I fantasized about the government forbidding me to leave the house so that I am finally compelled to watch all the DVDs I have accumulated over the years? Well never, since that would have been absurd, even for a fantasy. Nevertheless here we are. Or at...
A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night
by Martin | March 1, 2015 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
An Iranian vampire Western? Is this what the world really needs? On the evidence presented here – yes. Not that this is really Iranian, since it is shot in America and is set in a fictional (Iranian) place called ‘Bad City’. Not that it’s really a Western either,...
Barbarous Mexico
by Martin | January 9, 2016 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
Raindance! It’s the London film festival I always forget about, tucked as it is into the gap between Frightfest and the BFI London Film Festival but in 2015 I made it to one lunchtime screening at the Vue Piccadilly. It was busy, chaotic even, in the waiting area...