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Frightfest 2015 Day One

by Martin | September 12, 2015 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

The Rotten Link Raulo and Roberta (Luis Ziembrowski and Paula Brasca) are two unlikely siblings: a simple-minded hulk, he looks old enough to be her father while she is a pretty young thing barely out of her teens. But they fit into their isolated Argentinian...

Strongroom (1962)

by Martin | August 31, 2019 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

Vernon Sewell's career in British film started, weirdly enough, with a German film - Morgenrot (1933) a collaboration with Gustav Klimt's illegitimate son (one of them) that premiered in front of Adolf Hitler. Apparently Hitler liked it. His next collaborative...

BFI London Film Festival 2014: Metamorphoses/White God

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

METAMORPHOSES Christophe Honoré's film is based on something I've not read – Ovid's Metamorphoses – but no need to be alarmed: the stories are spelled out very clearly. Indeed, almost too clearly. The set-up is that Europa (Amira Akili) is a schoolgirl learning about...

Barbarous Mexico

by Martin | January 9, 2016 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

Raindance! It’s the London film festival I always forget about, tucked as it is into the gap between Frightfest and the BFI London Film Festival but in 2015 I made it to one lunchtime screening at the Vue Piccadilly. It was busy, chaotic even, in the waiting area...

Microwave Massacre (1983)

by Martin | June 18, 2017 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

It's a truism that when horror goes wrong it can easily turn into comedy – but what happens when a horror comedy goes wrong? Microwave Massacre, available on Arrow Video, provides one possible answer - a vision of Hell made all the more hellish by the awareness that...

Hail Caesar! / High Rise

by Martin | May 1, 2016 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

One of the funnier scenes in the Coen Brothers' 50's Hollywood-set latest has Ralph Fiennes as a fussy English director struggling to incorporate studio-imposed Western star Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich) into his drawing room comedy Merrily We Dance. Before his utter...

O Lucky Man! (1973) etc….

by Martin | August 25, 2024 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

My introduction to Lindsay Anderson was being shown the 1968 film If.... in (judiciously edited) half hour portions at secondary school in the 70's in a lesson called 'Design for Living', a rather random class which was used to dispense whatever we had in the way of...

The Substance / The Driver’s Seat (1974)

by Martin | November 10, 2024 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

THE SUBSTANCE Coralie Fargeat's The Substance is preposterous, which makes perfect sense. We're in the realm of showbiz, after all. Demi Moore is formidable as 'Elizabeth Sparkle', a fading star now fronting an aerobics show who is told by leering, vulgar producer...

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....

Peeping Tom (1960)

by Martin | July 17, 2022 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

I used to say that Michael Powell's Peeping Tom was my favourite film. That I don't say it now has nothing to do with the quality of the film or my changing perception of it; more, it's down to a realisation that there are too many films, and that I have too many...