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Frightfest 2016 Day Three

by Martin | October 23, 2016 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

MAN UNDERGROUND Or do I mean Day Four since I skipped Day Three? Oh what the hell. Nobody's paying me to do this. By this stage (Bank Holiday Monday) 'not really horror' (a term coined by Anton Bitel in a recent article for Sight and Sound online) seemed to be turning...

More Madness: Madeline’s Madeline and Thunder Road (LFF 2018)

by Martin | December 24, 2018 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

MADELINE'S MADELINE The new film from director Josephine Decker (Thou Wast Mild And Lovely) is a gripping and vivid account of some days in the life of the eponymous schizophrenic teenager (an impressive Helena Howard), who has joined a theatrical troupe which seems...

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...

BFI London Film Festival 2014: The Duke Of Burgundy

by Martin | November 16, 2014 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

When nervous maid Cynthia (Sidhe Babett Knudson) turns up at the mansion of entomologist Evelyn (Chiara D'Anna) our first impression – as she harshly calls into question Cynthia's ability to wash knickers - is that Evelyn is an exacting, even cruel, mistress. But...

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...

Bad Luck Banging, Or Loony Porn

by Martin | February 13, 2022 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

Ah, masks! Still de rigeur at the ICA at this point (this was before Plan B kicked in). During the London Film Festival I dared to go in there unmasked, which felt like a transgressive act, but hey, it was a festival and anyway isn't the ICA supposed to welcome...

Under The Skin

by Martin | April 26, 2014 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

I took a half day off work to see this, and thus missed Ann Widdecombe on the Jeremy Vine show talking about 'What It Means To Be Human'. However, this offered a roughly comparable experience. An attractive alien disguised as movie star Scarlett Johanssen drives round...

mother!

by Martin | November 12, 2017 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

The release of Darren Aronofky's latest film was preceded by a director interview by Trevor Johnston in Sight & Sound urging viewers not to read it until they'd seen the film, since (even more than is usually the case) the more you knew about this film in advance...

A Cat In The Brain (1990) and Slugs (1988)

by Martin | July 8, 2018 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

A CAT IN THE BRAIN It may seem an odd thing to say of a film called A Cat In The Brain but - inured as I am to disappointment in such matters (almost counting on it, you might say) - the last thing I expected to see in it was a cat clawing at someone's (living) brain....

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...