Martyn Conterio
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Film Review: The Eyes of My Mother
★★★★★ It’s exceedingly rare for a filmmaker to present a deeply disturbed individual on the big screen, one who partakes in all sorts of grotesqueness, whose mind is one of deranged abandon and necrophile-longing, and somehow manages to portray not only what is repulsive, reprehensible and extraordinarily transgressive, but to pertain and touch upon a…
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Film Review: A Cure for Wellness
★★★★☆ Gore Verbinski’s new film A Cure for Wellness returns the gothic genre to its roots in melodrama. A grand tale of love and death set in a creepy old castle, it’s primed with the irrational, the repressed, the uncanny and the supernatural. It’s fair to say that Verbinski and co-writer Justin Haythe really have…
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DVD Review: We Are the Flesh
★★★☆☆ “This is no average party.” Damn right. Emiliano Rocha Minter’s We Are the Flesh is a thoroughly tough sell, and will likely find a small audience; those who like their transgressive cinema with an equally extreme arthouse flavour. A promising debut, for sure, but its reach will be very limited. In what looks like…
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Film Review: Prevenge
★★★★☆ Alice Lowe’s Prevenge is not just a very thoughtful movie, with the co-writer and star of Sightseers using a classic revenge-tragedy plot and psychological horror to portray a turbulent period in a woman’s life: it’s also rewardingly nihilistic. Covering depression, grief and pregnancy as body-horror, the end result is a palpably unusual mix of…
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DVD Review: 78/52
★★★★☆ Alexandre O. Philippe’s 78/52 tells us everything we wanted to know about Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, but were afraid to ask. It’s 90 minutes of riveting analysis and forensic insight into a film which truly can boast the distinction of changing genre cinema. 1960 was a seminal year for horror. Along with Hitchcock’s Psycho, audiences…
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Film Review: The Wailing
★★★★★ Na Hong-jin’s The Wailing hits such a spectacular home run that the ball will never be recovered from its landing spot. Not only is the film a compellingly told tale of suspense and terror, but it’s crafted with such precision and sense of timing that one can cry “Masterpiece!” without being shamefaced or wondering…
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#LFF 2016: Chameleon review
★★★★☆ “Treat people the way they should be treated.” Worthy sentiment is turned ambiguous in Jorge Riquelme Serrano’s unsettling class conflict drama. As a member of the jet-setting bourgeoisie and somebody who comes across as a total snob, Paulina (Paulina Urrutia) thinks everybody should know their place. For Paula (Paula Zúñiga), Paulina’s lover, it means…
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Film Review: Under the Shadow
★★★★★ Director Babak Anvari’s Under the Shadow uses the haunted house setup and classical filmmaking techniques expressly for political purposes. Former radical leftist Shedih (Narges Rashidi) is re-educated by the theocratic state in post-revolution Iran. The evil spirits plaguing the flat of this young mum not only represent a mental and physical torture, but the…
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Film Review: 31
★★★★☆ “Shall we do this Whitechapel-style, then?” Doom-Head (Richard Brake) asks, rhetorically, to final girl Charly (Sheri Moon Zombie), in the penultimate scene of 31, the latest offering from Rob Zombie, a director whose films are the very definition of marmite cinema. Some might find Doom-Head’s line dripping in misogyny – given he is about…
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FrightFest 2016: The Similars review
★★★★☆ Like an episode of The Twilight Zone guest-directed by Luis Buñuel, The Similars is richly absurd in premise but also founded on a bedrock of social and political issues. One vital historical reference is the Tlatelolco massacre of 1968, the same year in which the film is set, where the army killed protesters in…