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Frightfest 2014: Bad Milo!

by Martin | September 7, 2014 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

Frightfest has relocated from the Empire Leicester Square to the Vue Leicester Square, which seems to be a good thing. No more cramped Discovery Screens, we now have the run of numerous larger screens over several floors. And it's even nearer Burger King, where I sit...

Foxcatcher/Whiplash

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

I may boast of my aversion to the mainstream but do I ever really escape it, or is it like Christopher Marlowe said: ‘Where we are is the mainstream and the mainstream is where we ever are’? (OK, he was talking about Hell but it’s the same idea.) I have been slightly...

The Lady From Shanghai (1947) and The Spooky Bunch (1980)

by Martin | August 25, 2014 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

Orson Welles' Irish accent in The Lady From Shanghai is perfectly emblematic of the film itself: you can't quite believe it yet you can't quite disbelieve it either. Welles' character, a sailor called Michael O'Hara, falls in love with Rita Hayworth's lady of the...

Apples / In The Earth

by Martin | July 17, 2021 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

APPLES Who on earth, returning to the cinema after – well OK, during – a global pandemic would go and see a film that is about the pandemic, even if obliquely? About six people (including me) is the answer, if this afternoon showing is anything to go by. Apples seems...

Koko-Di-Koko-Da / Swallow

by Martin | December 15, 2019 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

KOKO-DI-KOKO-DA (LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 2019) Johannes Nyholm's film starts with a mother, Erin (Ylva Gallon) suffering a bout of food poisoning which leaves her face swollen so that she looks, as her husband Tobias (Leif Edlund Johansson) jests, like Freddy Kruger. The...

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...

The Million Eyes Of Sumuru (1967)

by Martin | February 28, 2016 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

'I have a million eyes, for I am Sumuru', says Shirley Eaton in voiceover at the beginning of this particular disaster. She doesn't really have a million eyes - that's the first disappointment. The notional 'million eyes' belong to her followers. Sumuru leads an...

The Body Stealers (1969)

by Martin | June 11, 2016 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

I seem to remember this showing late at night on ITV back in the 70's, but I never bothered to stay up watching it, and quite rightly as I was surely too young to appreciate how bad it is. Now it's showing on a Saturday morning on Movies4men, at a time when, back in...

Censor / Surge

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

CENSOR Prano Bailey-Bond's Censor makes a link between censorship and (emotional, psychological) repression that's pretty obvious, but the film has a knack of making the obvious work – which has the additional virtue of being thematically appropriate. After all, the...

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...