About Unworldly Views | Unworldly Views

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...

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...

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....

Sins Of The Fleshapoids (1965)/Orphans Of The Cosmos (2008)

by Martin | January 18, 2015 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

I settled down for this Kuchar Brothers double-bill at the BFI with three cushions (Christmas presents for Mum) in carrier bags, a burden bulky enough to suggest that I should have splashed out on another ticket. With an amused gay man on my left and Brian Sewell...

Hereditary

by Martin | August 5, 2018 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

In theory it ought to be possible to respond to a film without taking into account to the critical reaction to it, but once you are aware of that reaction and have seen it pasted on the sides of buses, there's not much you can do about that: it's already in you. But...

Everlasting Love (Amor Eterno)

by Martin | April 26, 2015 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

Showing at BFI Flare, Marçal Forés’ Everlasting Love presents a more plausible woodland cruising ground than did Alain Guiraudie’s overpraised Stranger By The Lake, even if this one does feature teenage cannibals. Forés’ last (and first) film was Animals, which...

Frankenstein 1970

by Martin | April 20, 2019 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments

This begins generically but effectively with a screaming girl being pursued across the (German, it turns out) countryside by a nightmarishly-contorted Frankenstein's monster whose face we never see; this proves, however, to be part of a TV programme being shot in the...

Burial Ground (1981)

by Martin | August 7, 2016 | movies, reviews, Uncategorized | 0 Comments

In the prologue to this plot-free Italian zombie opus, also known as The Nights of Terror, a professor raises the dead from an Etruscan tomb just in time for the arrival of a group of privileged merry-makers down for a weekend at the adjoining country house. With one...

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...