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.
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...
Privilege (1967) / Duck Soup (1933)
by Martin | May 5, 2020 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
PRIVILEGE On this BFI DVD you get a couple of early short films from director Peter Watkins, one of which is 1961's The Forgotten Faces, an urgent, authentic-seeming account of the 1956 people's uprising in Hungary, filmed in Canterbury. Therein lies the moral of much...
Frightfest 2015: Day Two
by Martin | October 4, 2015 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
Tenderness Of The Wolves (1973) Don't you just love a true story? This is the one about serial killer Fritz Haarman, who preyed (sexually and murderously) on young boys and drank their blood in post WWI Germany, and who also provided the inspiration for Fritz Lang's...
Blind
by Martin | May 30, 2015 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
The old Renoir cinema has resurfaced as the Curzon Bloomsbury. It hasn’t got any bigger on top but underneath it’s a rabbit warren, leading me down dark tunnels in search of the ‘Minema’ screen. This sounds small, and so it proves to be – so very intimate that the...
Camille Claudel 1915
by Martin | July 26, 2014 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
This meeting of two arthouse legends – Bruno Dumont, a director who has previously always refused to work with professional actors, and Juliette (Chocolat) Binoche – is heralded by posters screaming BINOCHE CLAUDEL DUMONT, in the manner of ads for an action movie...
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...
Frightfest 2014: Cheerleaders, Show Pieces, and the Babadook
by Martin | September 14, 2014 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
ALL CHEERLEADERS DIE As is well-known, the only way in which girls can achieve any kind of power in that hellish jock-dominated microcosm of American society known as high school is either by means of their bodies or through witchcraft. And witchcraft doesn't work. Or...
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...
Post-Horror: Men / Bergman Island
by Martin | July 30, 2022 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
MEN I see that the Barbican are putting on a summer season of 'post-horror' films. Is that a film you see after a horror film, for light relief perhaps? Well no, apparently – it's just another iteration of our old friend 'elevated horror'. So the films in question...
Pacifiction/Infinity Pool/The Outwaters/Beau Is Afraid
by Martin | July 1, 2023 | movies, reviews | 0 Comments
PACIFICTION Back in 2013 I almost killed myself hurrying from a London Film Festival showing of Denis Coté's Vic And Flo Saw A Bear on the South Bank, to Albert Serra's Story of My Death in Leicester Square. Given the title of Serra's film, it would have been an...