Martyn Conterio
-
FrightFest 2015: ‘Cherry Tree’ review
★☆☆☆☆ David Keating’s silly and unsuccessful folklore horror film, Cherry Tree (2015), suffers from a list of ailments no old crone in a woodland cottage, with her library of esoteric books, magic spells and potions, could ever save or transform into a superior version. She’d look the film straight in the eye and wish it…
-
FrightFest 2015: Our picks of the lineup
Returning to Leicester Square for its sixteenth year as the UK’s leading celebration of horror and fantasy cinema, Film4 FrightFest 2015 is also set to be the biggest yet. With 19 world premières, along with 16 European and 24 UK ones, a wide and varied programme made up of a whopping 76 titles will screen…
-
DVD Review: ‘The Human Centipede 3’
★★☆☆☆ Tom Six’s The Human Centipede 3: (Final Sequence) represents something of a challenge to the star-ratings system. Give it one star or give it five. Heck, give it none! The most notorious film series in recent memory is bulletproof against the accusations and barbs of outraged critics. They can get on their high horses…
-
Film Review: ‘Touch of Evil’
★★★★★ Touch of Evil (1958) proceeds with one of the most celebrated long-takes in screen history. The sequence is a marvel of technical virtuosity and staged action. From the very start, Orson Welles’s grubby and sweaty noir classic has us in its grip with a gloriously devised piece of showmanship emblematic of the director’s audaciously…
-
DVD Review: ‘Black Coal, Thin Ice’
★★★★☆ Diao Yinan’s noir tale Black Coal, Thin Ice (2014) bagged him the Golden Bear award at the 64th Berlin International Film Festival. For his portrayal of a boorish, obsessive cop haunted by an old case, who spends his days in a freezing cold northern town in China pestering a swell-looking babe working in a…
-
Film Review: ‘The First Film’
★★★★☆ Gilbert Adair began the first chapter of Flickers (1995), his deeply personal and often eccentric odyssey into the history of the movies – written to mark the centenary of the Lumière brothers’ public exhibition of short films shot and projected on their Cinematographe device in Paris’s Grand Café Boulevard des Capucines in 1895 –…
-
Film Review: ‘Slow West’
★★★★☆ John Maclean’s Slow West (2015) is prairie poetry. It might be set in the Wild West, where it’s always high noon and desperados with big irons will drop a person cold between swigs of firewater, but in this conceptually smart and quirky take on the western, it’s love and romance that can prove to…
-
Film Review: ‘Accidental Love’
★★☆☆☆ It’s the film David O. Russell walked away from and whose premise the Obama administration made pathetically redundant. After years in limbo, audiences finally get to see Accidental Love (2015), which began shooting in 2008. Dodgy financing arrangements saw the director jump ship, leaving producers to complete filming and the entire edit. Russell –…
-
DVD Review: ‘Wild Tales’
★★★★★ Damián Szifrón’s ribald anthology feature Wild Tales (2014) has managed a Herculean feat. As an anthology film it’s pretty much perfect. Not a single story lets the side down and there is a consistently high level of storytelling. The scope of the film is parochial, centred as it is on the travails of Argentine…
-
Film Review: ‘Freaks’
★★★★☆ The first American picture to be marketed as an unambiguously supernatural horror experience (released on Valentine’s Day, 1931) was Tod Browning’s Dracula starring the iconic Bela Lugosi. Universal were at that time in a financial jam, thanks in part to the economic travails of the Great Depression. They found their saviours in the gothic…