Martyn Conterio
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DVD Review: ‘The Haunting of Black Wood’
★★★☆☆ There have been a recent bumper crop of cabin in the woods pictures in recent years: Baghead (2008), Lars von Trier’s Antichrist (2009), Joss Whedon’s The Cabin in the Woods (2012), its excellent no-budget spiritual cousin Resolution (2013) and the Evil Dead (2013) remake. You’d be forgiven for thinking that there was nothing left for this…
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Film Review: Au Revoir Les Enfants
★★★★★ William Faulkner once made the sage point that “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Louis Malle’s Golden Lion winner Au Revoir Les Enfants (1987) is a Second World War-set film very much guided in spirit by the US novelist’s musing on the febrile relationship between memory, time and individual and collective…
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DVD Review: ‘Nurse’
★★★☆☆ Are hopes and expectations dashed or raised by a film called Nurse (2013) starring Paz de la Huerta? It doesn’t suggest a classic, more a titillating horror comedy. Therefore, the whole endeavour edges close to the perilous shores of a joke-concept, and one expected to flounder on the rocks of a weak punchline with…
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DVD Review: ‘Deliver Us From Evil’
★★☆☆☆ If man is five and the devil six, then Fincher’s Se7en (1995). Scott Derrickson’s religious-themed supernatural drama, Deliver Us fom Evil (2014), takes place in a city of endless rain and tenebrous shadows occasionally disturbed by the diamond-dazzle of car headlights, or torches penetrating the dank spaces of tenement buildings and subterranean holes in…
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Blu-ray Review: ‘Six Gothic Tales’
★★★★☆ 1960 was a landmark year for scary movies. Among pioneering offerings by Bava, Franju, Hitchcock and Powell was Roger Corman and The Fall of the House of Usher – the first entry in what became known as the ‘Poe Cycle’. Like horror’s own De Niro and Scorsese, the Hollywood rebel and Vincent Price terrifed a generation with…
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LKFF 2014: ‘A Girl At My Door’ review
★★★★☆ In July Jung’s impressive directorial debut, produced by critically acclaimed film-maker Lee Chang-dong, a city cop relocated to the sticks befriends a moppet with a crummy home life. Starring Bae Doo-na and Kim Sae-ron, A Girl at My Door (2014) is at once a plangent character study and transgressive drama. For the child at the…
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Blu-ray Review: ‘Breaking the Waves’
★★★★★ Lars von Trier’s masterpiece is almost twenty. Starring Emily Watson, in what surely ranks as one of the most remarkable big screen debuts, Breaking the Waves (1996), like most classics, appears to have imprinted into its fabric an essential and resolute splendour. Despite premièring nearly two decades ago the film’s mixture of doom-laden melodrama,…