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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.

New Year’s Evil (1980) / Bloody New Year (1987)

New Year is, as everybody knows, a massive anticlimax. We all get frantically excited about what turns out to be just a glib transition into more of the same. Here are two films (showing in the BFI's Cult strand) which try to give New Year some genuine significance...

Frightfest 2014: R100

What's that you say? Are Japanese films still as bonkers as they used to be? Why yes, and here is the proof. In Hitoshi Matsumoto's beguiling oddity a furniture salesman (Nao Ômori) attempts to escape the drudgery of his existence (wife in coma, young son to raise) by...

Frightfest Halloween 2018

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...

Stray Dogs

‘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...

Don’t Step On It, It Might Be Jake Gyllenhaal: Nightcrawler/Enemy

Lou Bloom (Jake Gyllenhaal), the central figure of Dan Gilroy's Nightcrawler, resembles nothing so much as a cockroach that has unaccountably taken on human form – emerging out of the LA night as a petty thief with aspirations, he soon graduates into a 'nightcrawler',...

Bad Luck Banging, Or Loony Porn

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...

Three Against Nature

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 2024 – Mental Health Issues

The big screen at the relocated FrightFest (Odeon Leicester Square) is almost scarily big now: I couldn't face it. For single ticket buyers like me the seating options weren't promising anyway. So I stuck with the Discovery Screens and found myself in another cinema...

CITIZENFOUR

I hardly ever go to see documentaries because they're about real life, and I can see that for free. But recently, every time I looked at the ICA website, I noticed that they were giving me yet another opportunity to see Laura Poitras' film about Edward Snowden, as its...

Slack Bay (2016) / Zombie Lake (1977)

It was last November that I went to the Cine Lumiere to catch up with the latest offering from Bruno Dumont, showing at the French Film Festival, and it has taken me up until now to process it. In fact that's a lie – I still haven't processed it. In Slack Bay Dumont...