Anton Bitel Movie Reviews & Previews

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Anton Bitel

Agrees with the Tomatometer 75% of the time.

Biography:: Dr Anton Bitel was born in Australia in 1970, and has lived in the UK since 1989. Now a father of twins, occasional academic and full-time caffeine junkie, he compensates for a general sense of disgruntlement by moping about in darkened cinemas watching other people's joys and sorrows. He seeks elusive thrills from all genres (even romantic comedy), but tends to prefer anything extreme, odd, miserable or tawdry. He is at home with horror, 'arthouse', the avant garde and Oriental cinema. Anton currently freelances for Film4, musicOMH (where he is a staff writer), Eye for Film, Film International and Little White Lies, and was for three years one of the principal contributors to the now semi-defunct Movie Gazette.
Favorites:: Eraserhead Brazil Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter...and Spring Apocalypse Now The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) M. Houlot's Holiday Ichi the Killer Last Year in Marienbad Batman (1966) Synecdoche, New York
Publications:: Daily Mirror [UK] , Eye for Film , Film International , Film4 , Little White Lies , Movie Gazette , MovieScope , musicOMH.com , Sight and Sound
Critics' Group:: London Film Critics Circle, Online Film Critics Society

Total Reviews:: 1561
Total QuickRatings:: 1

Location:: Oxford, UK

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Rating	T-Meter	Title \| Year	Add Date
	——	Older Than America (2010)	" with its pedestrian direction, variable performances and perfunctory dialogue, this is more supernatural soap opera than probing chiller and its bland look... lends the film the undeniable feel of a movie-of-the-week special." — Little White Lies Posted Feb 9, 2012
	82%	Young Adult (2011)	" a cruelly funny portrait of the scars, both physical and psychological, left by high school experience" — MovieScope Posted Jan 30, 2012
	83%	Four Flies on Grey Velvet (4 mosche di velluto grigio) (1971)	" self-conscious and silly, but directed with such manipulative panache that you too will feel as if you are being strung along by a deranged, sadistic puppetmaster... there are images here that will burn themselves right onto your retina." — Little White Lies Posted Jan 26, 2012
	100%	Le Silence de la Mer (1949)	" if the niece's silence gives intimate expression to a whole nation's resistance, Werner too, far from being demonised as a villain, himself becomes a dramatic embodiment of the tensions within occupied France. " — Little White Lies Posted Jan 26, 2012
	77%	The Grey (2012)	" what distinguishes Joe Carnahan's Nietzschean bleakfest is a willingness to stare into death's beady eyes without flinching, and to carry through the stark convictions of its themes to their bitterly chilling end." — Film4 Posted Jan 25, 2012
	96%	The Muppets (2011)	" invites viewers to become a bit like the dreamer Walter and, in (re)discovering and embracing their inner child (not to mention their inner muppet), to join a fantastic, funny family that never grows old, no matter how times may have changed. " — Eye for Film Posted Jan 23, 2012
	93%	Two-Lane Blacktop (1971)	" even if the Driver and co. are just passin' through, they encapsulate a whole generation lost in the rootless, directionless '70s, scorching the viewer's retina with their quest for nothing." — Little White Lies Posted Jan 20, 2012
	93%	50/50 (2011)	" Gordon-Levitt turns depression and despair into comedy of the edgiest kind, while making his character all the more sympathetic for his occasional outbursts of anger and aggression." — MovieScope Posted Jan 18, 2012
	——	Sand Sharks ()	" too self-aware to be as stupid as it appears on the surface, but the 1-D characterisation, moronic dialogue, cheesy creature effects, and performances as consistently broad as the frat house humour, prevent its savviness from ever going very deep." — Little White Lies Posted Jan 10, 2012
	87%	The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011)	" This is a finely honed genre thriller, but it also continues Fincher's preoccupation with the persistence of age-old urges in the modern world." — Sight and Sound Posted Jan 4, 2012
	93%	Mission: Impossible Ghost Protocol (2011)	" If we are watching Hunt caught, like the western world, in an inexorable downward spiral, we may crane our necks to watch the carwreck, but also wonder if this uneven franchise remains roadworthy." — Eye for Film Posted Dec 13, 2011
	68%	Margaret (2011)	" Margaret is - or at least might have been - very much a film of its time, and that time was the mid-Noughties... now the film might easily be viewed as just another rites-of-passage indie - albeit an unusually multi-faceted one." — Eye for Film Posted Dec 10, 2011
	——	The Watermen ()	" anodyne amalgam of angling and anthropophagy " — Sight and Sound Posted Dec 8, 2011
	——	Bad Meat ()	" offers the sort of rarefied cult appeal that can only come with copious amounts of on-screen vomiting, but its story - a minor variant on the standard zombie plot - clunks to a confused stop near its end. " — Sight and Sound Posted Dec 8, 2011
	——	Detective K (2011)	" a delirious riot of odd-couple humour, political conspiracy, monster mayhem, over-the-top action and eighteenth-century detective work (complete with semi-anachronistic appearances of porn magazines, flashlights and even a Rubik's cube)." — Sight and Sound Posted Dec 8, 2011
	——	Poongsan ()	" all at once an engaging thriller, a subdued romance and a bleak allegory of humanity squeezed by the Koreas' entrenched political positions." — Sight and Sound Posted Dec 8, 2011
3/5	83%	Puss in Boots (2011)	" this western-parodying cat-with-too-many-names is closer to Rango than to anything from the Kingdom of Far Far Away. " — Little White Lies Posted Dec 8, 2011
	64%	Another Earth (2011)	" when you think that the film is really about Rhoda and John's slow orbit - their twinned trajectory of regret and redemption - the planetary plot comes crashing back, delivering an ending that is, in its obliquity and openness, exquisitely perfect. " — Film4 Posted Dec 7, 2011
	94%	Hugo (2011)	" The heart-shaped story may be the key that sets Hugo in motion, but this rediscovery of the cin�ma de papa is most memorable for its technical wizardry and astonishing visual trickery." — Film4 Posted Dec 1, 2011
	92%	Take Shelter (2011)	" An intense drama of mental meltdown and domestic apocalypse for an age of anxiety." — Film4 Posted Nov 24, 2011
	——	Underwater Love (Onna No Kappa) ()	" elevated far above your average tits 'n' ass exploitationer. Imaoka's film is too shoddily thrown together, too patchy and uneven, to qualify as any kind of masterpiece - but it might just leave the more adventurous viewers out there tickled pink." — Little White Lies Posted Nov 17, 2011
	——	Cold Sweat (Sudor fr�o) (2012)	" The ensuing intergenerational clash is a highly volatile mix of The Wages of Fear (1953) and 'torture porn' tropes, with an uncomfortable grounding in political reality." — Sight and Sound Posted Nov 16, 2011
	——	Faces in the Crowd (2011)	" the film is barely distinguished from other thrillers with visually impaired protagonists (Blink, Julia's Eyes, etc), and suffers from an over-obvious solution and some overblown melodrama in the final scenes." — Sight and Sound Posted Nov 16, 2011
	31%	The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence) (2011)	" monochrome mise en sc�ne and surrealist flourishes more reminiscent of Eraserhead and Bad Boy Bubby than of anything in conventional horror." — Sight and Sound Posted Nov 16, 2011
	100%	Livide (Livid) ()	" combines a unique spin on the vampire myth with the fairytale surrealism of Lewis Carroll (via Svankmajer's Alice), the danse macabre of Copp�lia (via Argento's Suspiria) and the imagistic poetry of Franju's Eyes Without a Face. " — Sight and Sound Posted Nov 16, 2011
	36%	Immortals (2011)	" a stylised postmodern Theseid, both epic and odd" — Film4 Posted Nov 11, 2011
	89%	The Yellow Sea (2011)	" a gripping existentialist thriller, where jealousy, greed and desperation lead inexorably to a chaos of carnage, and where exile and death cross their borders to merge into an emotionally-charged sequence of final images." — Film4 Posted Nov 10, 2011
	71%	The Awakening ()	" An elegantly constructed masquerade, but its haunting sadness rings true." — Little White Lies Posted Nov 10, 2011
3/5	31%	The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence) (2011)	" A heady blend of the stupid and the sophisticated, the sordid and the surreal. (Uneasily) funny, too." — Little White Lies Posted Nov 3, 2011
	100%	Narayama bushiko (Ballad of Narayama) (1984)	" in this hermetic world... Imamura captures a truly universal, all-encompassing experience, showing the transmission of virtues and vices from one generation to the next in the service of life's tenacious continuity." — Little White Lies Posted Oct 31, 2011
	——	Hors Satan ()	" in the mismatch of its blankly naturalistic style and its unquestionably supernatural events, the film confronts us with the moral openness of our own secularism. " — Eye for Film Posted Oct 31, 2011
3/5	75%	The Adventures of Tintin (2011)	" we miss Indy's rough-edged roguishness in the clean-cut, strait-laced Tintin, whose flatness of character no amount of state-of-the-art stereoscopic imagery can fully conceal." — Little White Lies Posted Oct 27, 2011
	80%	Shame (2011)	" It is so very well made that one can only wish there were a little more to it than the fleshy mechanics of trauma. It is a film to admire greatly, but not truly enjoy - much like Brandon's attitude to the call girl." — Eye for Film Posted Oct 25, 2011
	88%	Footnote (2012)	" breezy comedy gives way to a depiction of calculated cruelty monstrous enough almost to qualify as horror, human enough to count as tragedy and nuanced enough to face viewers with a most unusual kind of dilemma, part intellectual and part moral." — Eye for Film Posted Oct 24, 2011
	67%	Junkhearts ()	" It is a striking audiovisual style which rescues this production from many of the more hackneyed tropes of British social realism and urban grit." — Eye for Film Posted Oct 22, 2011
	——	Ningen Johatsu (A Man Vanishes) (1967)	" Here truth is presented as a series of clashing, circular stories, both multi-faceted and theatricalised, while the film's real subject remains forever hidden." — Little White Lies Posted Oct 21, 2011
	——	Eskalofr�o (Shiver) (2008)	" a well-made coming-of-age thriller that, for at least its first half, will have viewers suitably mystified and unnerved - even if they are somewhat less wild about the d�nouement." — Little White Lies Posted Oct 19, 2011
	88%	Darwin ()	" this alien landscape, shot wide by the Swiss filmmaker with an outsider's eye for the dustily hyperreal, is teeming with strange life and even stranger stories. " — Eye for Film Posted Oct 17, 2011
	——	Christopher Roth ()	" explores the more shadowy, sinister side of the creative process... in the end, the solution comes gift-wrapped in so many layers of ambiguity that you will be still unpacking it long after the film is over." — Little White Lies Posted Oct 10, 2011
	——	Gandu ()	" a vibrant provocation, aimed at showing a side of Bengali life that has never been seen, while all at once mimicking and mocking the punkish rebel spirit of its cause-less protagonist, lost in his own 'complete head fuck'." — Eye for Film Posted Oct 10, 2011
	74%	Like Crazy (2011)	" while this elliptical, bleakly honest account of love's hangover years might not be ideal viewing on a first date, it offers uncomfortably familiar observations for anyone engaged in a relationship that is either long-distance, or just long-term." — Eye for Film Posted Oct 9, 2011
	96%	Pariah (2011)	" at heart Pariah is concerned with rites of passage, although the fact that there are so few films about African-American women, and even fewer about African-American lesbians, ensures that Alike's road to adulthood never feels too well-trodden. " — Eye for Film Posted Oct 7, 2011
	——	Headhunters (Hodejegerne) (2012)	" in this cat-and-mouse thriller, while red herrings might be expected, it is the black comedy that is the real surprise, rescuing Headhunters from both Norwegian dourness and Tinseltown blandness." — Eye for Film Posted Oct 5, 2011
	71%	The Future (2011)	" whimsy both conceals and sugars some rather bitter observations on change and mortality. " — Eye for Film Posted Sep 29, 2011
	60%	Guilty Of Romance (Koi No Tsumi) (2011)	" Sono uses seemingly incompatible materials to construct a patchwork film as grotesquely hybrid as the corpses at its centre. It may be overlong and not a little bloated, but its sleaze both conceals and embodies moments of great sublimity." — Film4 Posted Sep 28, 2011
	——	Bernie (2012)	" The film may be a love letter to Linklater's native East Texas, but behind all the sunny smiles, country courtesy and good nature hides the dark story of a criminal undertaking - because, no matter which way you dress it, a corpse is still a corpse." — Eye for Film Posted Sep 27, 2011
4.5/5	100%	K�rkarlen (Korkarlen) (The Phantom Carriage) (Thy Soul Shall Bear Witness) (1920)	" Sj�str�m's film is not just an early horror, but an argument for the moral validity of cinema itself." — Eye for Film Posted Sep 26, 2011
	85%	Tucker & Dale vs Evil (2011)	" In a way this is a one-joke movie, but Labine and Tudyk enact it with perfect timing, considerable rapport and a great deal of charm, while leaving viewers to wonder whether perhaps all hinterland massacres have been rooted in mere misunderstanding." — Film4 Posted Sep 21, 2011
	64%	Cannibal Holocaust (1979)	" Cannibal Holocaust is certainly unpleasant, uncomfortable, even offensive - which is to say that it is uncompromisingly true to its genre - but that is not to undermine its fierce, probing intelligence. " — Little White Lies Posted Sep 20, 2011

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