Martyn Conterio

★★★☆☆ The laws of diminishing returns dictate that as a film series goes on, the more rote and tired that series becomes. Unless you’re a Fast & Furious franchise. But that’s only because the makers widened the goal posts and decided on a brand new direction with the reintroduction of Vin Diesel’s Dominic Torretto. A…

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★★★★☆ There are a number of key scenes in Columbian director Franco Lolli’s superb Gente de Bien (2014) – a playful title that means both ‘Decent People’ and ‘Well-off People’ – where it feels like it was written as a sequel to Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948). The setting (Bogotá) and the language (Spanish)…

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★★★★★ Signing a contract with a distributor rather than a studio might appear to be a very modern course of action for a star to take. But Charles Chaplin, the pioneer that he was, did such a thing way back in 1916, when he signed up to make twelve comedy shorts for Mutual Film Corporation.…

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★★★★☆ If bucketloads of dripping gore is what you’re after you may end up feeling shortchanged by What’s Left of Us (2014), a genre piece far more interested in existential vicissitudes and much less in entrails and folk being eaten alive. In writer-director Christoph Behl’s exceptional horror movie, a love triangle provides a majority of…

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★★☆☆☆ You know the drill. A family moves into a large house. It seems perfect. Things are good, for a while. Kids start to complain about strange noises. Parents are spooked. Then it all ends in brutal bloody murder. It might sound like your common-or-garden chiller, but there is much to admire in The House…

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★★★★★ Ridley Scott’s seminal sci-fi Blade Runner (1982) begins with a dazzling yet hellish vision of a metropolis shrouded in smog so thick that the sun has disappeared from the sky. Is it day or is it night? Giant towers of industry belch fire and pyramid-like structures sit like thrones over an urban landscape of…

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★★☆☆☆ At a point in Jon Wright’s Robot Overlords (2014), Robin Smythe – the film’s human Big Bad played by Ben Kingsley – asks “You know what ‘chav’ stands for? Council house and violent.” It’s delivered in an unsure northern accent that straddles the uneasy border between old foes Lancashire and Yorkshire (particularly odd given…

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★★★★☆ David Cronenberg’s second theatrically released picture, Rabid (1977), can be taken very much as a companion piece to his debut, Shivers (1975). While not linked narratively, both are set in Montreal and proffer parasitic creatures and transmitted diseases as the engine of doom. As with his first film, satirical touches further mark his sophomore…

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★★★☆☆ Based on a 2005 short story collection by Australian author Tim Winton, The Turning (2013) arrives in UK cinemas in heavily truncated form; nearly half of the three-hour running time has been lopped off. While by no means a disaster, it does mean that seventeen chapters have been cleaved down to nine. So, while…

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★★★☆☆ Jessabelle (2014) makes a good case that horror movies can succeed without – or rather in spite of – the requirement to scare the viewer. Is that a paradox, a disappointment or even a perversion? Ghost train thrills have their place, but the genre will always be at its best when an air of…

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