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Screen Time

by Martin | April 10, 2021 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

MYSTERIES OF LISBON (2010) Lockdown was a good time to finally sit down, maybe even lie down, and watch those films whose running time demanded an entire day devoted to them, and their extras. The Chilean director Raúl Ruiz, in the extras on the New Wave Films DVD of...

Frankenstein 1970

by Martin | April 20, 2019 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

This begins generically but effectively with a screaming girl being pursued across the (German, it turns out) countryside by a nightmarishly-contorted Frankenstein's monster whose face we never see; this proves, however, to be part of a TV programme being shot in the...

Frightfest Halloween 2018

by Martin | February 24, 2019 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

Yes I know, we are already well into 2019 but let me take you back, BACK to when the self-service checkouts in Poundland were still speaking in the voice of Bela Lugosi ('Have a spooooky day!') In truth I wasn't all that inspired by the films on offer at Frightfest...

Further Dispatches From BFI Flare

by Martin | May 2, 2015 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

Futuro Beach On the face of it this has everything you could possibly want from a Brazilian- German co-production – it begins in Brazil and it ends in Germany – and beneath the surface there’s enough happening to offset a vague sense of one's having seen something...

Death Bed: The Bed That Eats (1977)

by Martin | September 16, 2017 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

Outside the screen at the BFI stands horror film critic and musician Stephen Thrower (author of several enormous books on horror films which I would love to read if only I had the time - and money) next to a cake in the shape of a four-poster bed - though smaller, of...

BFI London Film Festival 2021: Between Feast and Famine

by Martin | January 30, 2022 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

THE FEAST I remember overhearing a punter at the London Film Festival one year asking the guy next to him what he'd seen and he replied: 'A lot of films that could have been better'. My experience this year (last year) was a bit like that. Even before it started I had...

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...

The Revenant

by Martin | May 29, 2016 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

Early reports of this film had audiences scandalised by the sight of star Leonardo di Caprio being raped by a bear. Three times. I suspect that this was hype worked up by the studio's marketing department, but I suppose it depends on whether you think people are more...

Weapons /Bring Her Back

by Martin | January 18, 2026 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

WEAPONS There was a lot of hype around writer-director Zach Cregger's follow-up to the promising Barbarian – I remember noticing a website ranking the characters in Weapons in order of how 'iconic' they are. No doubt it is old-fashioned of me to expect to wait a few...

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...