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Blind

by Martin | May 30, 2015 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

The old Renoir cinema has resurfaced as the Curzon Bloomsbury. It hasn’t got any bigger on top but underneath it’s a rabbit warren, leading me down dark tunnels in search of the ‘Minema’ screen. This sounds small, and so it proves to be – so very intimate that the...

The Red Queen Kills Seven Times (1972) / Effie Gray (2014)

by Martin | July 28, 2020 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

Before he (apparently) disappeared into thin air, Emilio P. Miraglia made a couple of films blending the giallo with the Gothic, 1971's The Night Evelyn Game Out of the Grave, and this, his last film. The giallo and the Gothic are simultaneously very different (the...

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...

The Invisible Life

by Martin | May 25, 2015 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

It was a lovely day, sunshine sparkling on the Thames, Green Park bustling with life. The freshness in the air seemed almost to be trying to dissuade me against seeing a bleak existential drama about death at the ICA, but I was determined - even if, in the event, it...

Blue / Trog (1993 and 1970)

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

In his introduction to Derek Jarman's Blue John Waters, who selected it as one of his favourite British films for a celebration of all things JW at the BFI, recalled how the first time he saw it the cinema had posters up warning punters that Blue was a film that...

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...

In Pictures 2: Rope (1948) /Possessor (2020)

by Martin | August 30, 2021 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

ROPE On the extras on my DVD of Alfred Hitchcock's Rope screenwriter Arthur Laurents nails several of the reasons why this adaptation of Patrick Hamilton's play (based on the Leopold/Loeb case in which a couple of students felt entitled to kill a 14 year old boy...

Santo in the Wax Museum (1963) / Santo Vs. The She-Wolves (1976)

by Martin | August 21, 2020 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

Just when you thought it was safe to go back to the cinema... it IS safe. Oppressively so. I don't know about you but walking into a room full of people in surgical masks doesn't 'make me feel safe' – it makes me feel uneasy. And so I haven't joined the rush to get...

Peeping Tom (1960)

by Martin | July 17, 2022 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

I used to say that Michael Powell's Peeping Tom was my favourite film. That I don't say it now has nothing to do with the quality of the film or my changing perception of it; more, it's down to a realisation that there are too many films, and that I have too many...

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...