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.
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...
In Pictures
by Martin | May 30, 2021 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
BLOOD AND BLACK LACE (1964) Mario Bava's The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963) is said to be the first giallo, but of Bava's films it is this that feels like the ur-giallo, a template for everything that came after – not just 70's gialli, but 80's slasher films as well....
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...
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...
Eyeball (1975) / Short Night Of Glass Dolls (1971) / Spasmo (1974)
by Martin | August 5, 2020 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
EYEBALL The original Italian title of Umberto Lenzi's Eyeball translates as Red Cats In A Glass Labyrinth, which makes very little sense and is all the more impressive for it. However, there is no doubt that Eyeball is more to the point. This giallo is about a busload...
Frightfest 2022
by Martin | December 18, 2022 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
'Keep On Rollin', says a T-shirt on a little girl outside the Prince Charles Cinema, which I at first imagined was a reference to Jean Rollin, French director of sex vampire films and subject of the documentary Orchestrator of Storms, showing at Frightfest. The image...
45 Years
by Martin | October 24, 2015 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
Tom Courtenay and Charlotte Rampling play Geoff and Kate, a couple in their 70's who seem to think they are happily married until his ex-girlfriend Katya turns up, entombed in ice in a Swiss glacier and apparently unchanged since she fell into a fissure back in 1962....
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...
Crazy About Love: Fingernails, Vincent Must Die, and Tchaikovsky’s Wife
by Martin | March 3, 2024 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
FINGERNAILS Love is lighter than air, sings Stephen Merritt of The Magnetic Fields. It floats away when you let go. Love therefore needs to be grounded: in Greek director Christos Nikou's follow-up to his debut film Apples it is grounded in having your fingernails...
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...