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.
Death Car On The Freeway (1979)
by Martin | July 18, 2015 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
The critical appeal of the recent Mad Max sequel was so across-the-board that it even screened at arthouse venues like the Curzon Soho - while I was in there waiting for Christian Petzold’s (excellent) German drama Phoenix to start, a trailer for it played. The woman...
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...
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...
Stray Dogs
by Martin | June 13, 2015 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
‘What is this life if, filled with care/We have no time to stand and stare?’, said the Victorian poet W. H. Davies. Good point, and a view clearly shared by Chinese director Tsai-Ming-liang, who transfixes (hopefully) his audience with fixed shots of his characters...
Salvo
by Martin | April 26, 2014 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
Mafia hitman Salvo (Saleh Bakri) kills a guy but instead of despatching his sister Rita (Sara Serraiocco) - a witness to the crime - he chooses to hide her in an abandoned factory and keep her fed and watered. Why? Love? Pity? Or is he caught on the horns of a...
Comings Of Age – Three Attempts From The BFI London Film Festival 2015
by Martin | December 28, 2015 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
DER NACHTMAHR Not German for 'nightmare', ein nachtmahr is more like a thing from a nightmare, so the director - German artist AKIZ – tells us. In the case of his film that thing is a strange creature resembling a cross between Belial from Basket Case and Garfield,...
Three Against Nature
by Martin | June 10, 2018 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
THE SAILOR WHO FELL FROM GRACE WITH THE SEA (1976) 'An insult to any audience' concludes the review of Lewis John Carlino's film The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea (hereafter referred to as Sailor) in my damaged-in-transit Waterstones-freebie edition of the...
Frightfest 2019 Part Two
by Martin | October 19, 2019 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
BLOOD AND FLESH: THE REEL LIFE AND GHASTLY DEATH OF AL ADAMSON The Cineworld discovery screen offered up David Gregory's documentary about Al Adamson, the 60's /70's exploitation director responsible for such films as 1965's Psycho-A-Go-Go and 1971's Blood of Ghastly...
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...
The Entity (1982) / Night Watch (1973)
by Martin | June 29, 2025 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
THE ENTITY It has always struck me that the general tone of life in America is one of hysteria. When I said this once to my cousin, who lives in Texas, she maintained that, rather than hysterics, Americans are 'survivors'. If someone claims to be a survivor merely on...