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 , Grolsch Film Works , Little White Lies , Movie Gazette , MovieScope , musicOMH.com , Sight and Sound
Critics' Group:: London Film Critics Circle, Online Film Critics Society

Total Reviews:: 1763
Total QuickRatings:: 1

Location:: Oxford, UK

Listing Of All Reviews & Articles

Showing 1 - 50 of 1763

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Rating	T-Meter	Title \| Year	Add Date
	22%	No One Lives (2013)	" a Stockholm syndrome romance whose bizarre erotic progress plays out in the idioms of bloody bondage and extreme interdependence.... but we never get a coherent account of who these characters are or why they behave as they do. " — Grolsch Film Works Posted May 9, 2013
	100%	A Hijacking (2013)	" the considerable tensions of A Hijacking derive not from melodrama, heroics or triumphalism, but rather from the very lack of these. " — Film4 Posted May 8, 2013
	47%	The Lords of Salem (2013)	" Caveat emptor, but there are bad-trip rewards aplenty for the Zombie faithful." — Little White Lies Posted Apr 25, 2013
	74%	Simon Killer (2013)	" Alienation, anomie, angst, affectlessness, electropop - Antonio Campos' coolly undemonstrative second feature brings into gradual focus an American (sociopath) in Paris." — Film4 Posted Apr 3, 2013
	28%	G.I. Joe: Retaliation (2013)	" in case you are unable to keep up with the ADHD approach to mayhem, all the money shots are replayed over the closing credits. " — Film4 Posted Mar 26, 2013
	68%	Trance (2013)	" Trance delivers its thrills & seductions, twists & turns, psychological sublimations & sexual deviations, with utter confidence - yet, even as it takes us for a ride, it lets us know that this is exactly what it is doing, and defies us to get off" — Grolsch Film Works Posted Mar 22, 2013
	84%	Dragon (2012)	" a mannered mix of detective story, morality tale, family tragedy and Buddhist allegory, all wrapped in virtuoso visuals and some very tricksy action choreography... The story may be familiar, but wuxia has never quite looked like this before." — Grolsch Film Works Posted Mar 22, 2013
4/5	89%	Compliance (2012)	" Zobel's morality thriller offers uncomfortable commentary on the sport that can so easily be had at the expense of those on the lower rungs of the social ladder." — Little White Lies Posted Mar 21, 2013
	52%	Jack the Giant Slayer (2013)	" Set somewhere between heaven and earth, Singer's slick but safe adventure occupies the middle ground of family matinee entertainment." — Film4 Posted Mar 20, 2013
	69%	The Croods (2013)	" Postmodernism goes premodern in this fun animated family adventure that fills its late Ice Age setting with anachronistic details, while tracing a father-daughter relationship that could come from any time." — Film4 Posted Mar 20, 2013
	79%	Reality (2013)	" As gaudy and glitzy as the superficialities it lampoons, Mateo Garrone's Reality is a Fellini-esque fantasia without the counterweight of Fellini's thematic complexity." — Film4 Posted Mar 20, 2013
	——	The Fallow Field ()	" [this] genuine high point for ultra-low budget British horror... may be an utterly crazy tale, full of unbelievable incident, but turn it over in your mind and there is a harrowing subtext lying beneath its surface, just waiting to be unearthed. " — MovieScope Posted Mar 18, 2013
4/5	90%	Beyond The Hills (2013)	" A slowly, quietly riveting passion play for a nation grappling with secularism and modernity." — Little White Lies Posted Mar 14, 2013
	62%	Evil Dead (2013)	" Evil Dead suffers the curse of its own mediocrity: while it is really not bad, it would linger longer in the viewer's mind if it were better - or indeed worse. As it is, the fun ride is over and forgotten as soon as its brisk 90 minutes have elapsed." — Eye for Film Posted Mar 14, 2013
	——	Choco ()	" Chocó retreats from the harshness of her reality into faith, idyllic jungle daydreams, and fiery castration fantasies." — Eye for Film Posted Mar 13, 2013
	83%	The Revolutionary (2013)	" documents the most dramatic moments in China's revolution under Mao Zedong from the perspective of a close insider who was also a westerner and outsider... a tale of ideological fervour and subsequent disillusion " — Sight and Sound Posted Mar 13, 2013
	——	Poor Folk ()	" wryly traces a demi-monde of impoverished ethnic Chinese expats from Burma who, despite their high ambitions for a better, more affluent life abroad, can never get far from the frontier of their 'bumpkin' homeland" — Sight and Sound Posted Mar 13, 2013
	——	Lobos de Arga (Party of Wolves) (Game of Werewolves) ()	" At the heart of Attack Of The Werewolves there may be modern compunctions about Spain's 20th-century heritage, and urban anxieties about countryside atavism, but Moreno's film is too busy pursuing comedy to get much weighed down by any of this." — Eye for Film Posted Mar 10, 2013
	54%	The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2013)	" Nair carefully manipulates the viewers' prejudices & forces us to take sides in a conflict more complicated than it first appears, all to make us ultimately step back and look at the 'whole story' of East-West relations in their broader context." — Sight and Sound Posted Mar 6, 2013
	——	Material ()	" comedy itself is also one of the film's dividing lines of Islamic identity, as Cassim and Ebrahim negotiate (and redefine) together how many ha's it takes to pass from what is 'halal' (permissible) to what is 'halaam' (sinful)." — Sight and Sound Posted Mar 6, 2013
	——	111 Girls ()	" the film's satire borders on farce - [even as its] opening (and oft repeated) line "You're late again" begins to take on a deadly serious symbolism for a people who have been ignored too long. " — Sight and Sound Posted Mar 6, 2013
	64%	Headshot (2012)	" If the titular headshot leaves Tul with inverted vision, the film too turns the characteristics of genre upside-down, defamiliarising everything - an effect that is helped considerably by Ratanaruang's way with moody stylisation." — Little White Lies Posted Mar 5, 2013
	82%	Autoreiji: Biyondo (Outrage Beyond) (2011)	" It is almost as though Kitano is saying that nothing can stop him from defeating the rivals, successors and pretenders who, in his absence, have tried to move in on his (generic) turf" — Little White Lies Posted Mar 5, 2013
	——	Rabitto horâ 3D (Tormented) (2013)	" with dizzying camerawork and lighting from master cinematographer Chris Doyle (working for his first time in the 3D format), it's a psychedelic meta-J-horror that is part ghost story, part Freudian merry-go-round, and utterly in your face." — Little White Lies Posted Mar 5, 2013
	——	The Casebook Of Eddie Brewer ()	" Blending 'found' with 'objective' footage, Brummy banality with Gothic horror, and reason-defying goings-on with a running meta-commentary from the partisan players, [it is] a singular curiosity. " — Eye for Film Posted Feb 25, 2013
	——	Mai Mai Miracle (Maimai Shinko to sennen no mahô) (2009)	" like My Neighbour Totoro (1988), Mai Mai Miracle sets joyous scenes of pre-adolescent adventure against more serious themes of loss and death, and shows a nation half-unearthing, half-inventing its past in order to work through present problems." — Film4 Posted Feb 25, 2013
	——	Yôkame no semi (Rebirth) ()	" In Rebirth, the unknown country of the past becomes, when viewed clearly and without prejudice, a model for a different, better future." — Film4 Posted Feb 25, 2013
	——	Zero no shôten (Zero Focus) (2009)	" evokes Imamura's A Man Vanishes (1967), while adding Hitchcockian clifftop suspense, a giallo-esque killer-in-red, and a feminist preoccupation with the silent sacrifices and sufferings of women in the creation of the modern Japanese state." — Film4 Posted Feb 25, 2013
	——	Baburu e go!! Taimu mashin wa doramu-shiki (Bubble Fiction: Boom or Bust ) (2007)	" There is little subtlety in the madcap time-travel comedy, but Baba's film affords a view of the massive recessionary changes undergone by Japan in a mere two decades, while dreaming of a future return to the nation's former affluence." — Film4 Posted Feb 25, 2013
	——	The Youth of Kamiya Etsuko (Kamiya Etsuko no seishun) ()	" its staid camerawork, stately pacing ("we have all the time in the world", Etsuko's husband Nagayo says), elegiac tone and thematic focus on the passing seasons all hark back to the bygone (yet timeless) style of the late master Ozu" — Film4 Posted Feb 25, 2013
2/5	65%	Mama (2013)	" Mothers, moths, myths - all seemingly thrown together by someone on meths." — Little White Lies Posted Feb 21, 2013
3/5	71%	Crawl (2013)	" Great individual scenes do not quite add up to a great film." — Little White Lies Posted Feb 21, 2013
	70%	Jianyu (Reign of Assassins) (2010)	" the film uses its wire-fu trappings to allegorise Buddhist notions of self-transformation in a world of illusions. Throw in some inventive chopsocky tempered by romance, and you have a fatalistic wuxia about the martial pursuit of a "normal life"." — Eye for Film Posted Feb 15, 2013
	52%	This is 40 (2012)	" Middle-aged, middle-class and, if we're frank, a little middling and 'medium soft', the uneven This Is 40 indulges its flabby excess of subplots, but is redeemed by some genuine belly laughs." — Film4 Posted Feb 14, 2013
	73%	Chained (2012)	" In this claustrophobic cabbie horror, Jennifer Lynch makes us captive passengers as she traces a chain of domestic abuse to its bitter Oedipal end." — Film4 Posted Feb 1, 2013
	64%	Antiviral (2013)	" Growing gradually sicker and messier along with its conflicted protagonist, Antiviral is, in all its icily unpleasant ickiness, indeed perfect somehow." — Sight and Sound Posted Feb 1, 2013
	92%	Django (1966)	" Sergio Corbucci's Django is trapped between two states (literally Texas and Mexico, more metaphorically life and death) even as he brings a new (a)morality and sadism to a gunslinging figure of old America." — Little White Lies Posted Jan 15, 2013
	68%	American Mary (2013)	" pulls off the trick of getting us simultaneously to root for the sideshow attractions & to shrink from the gatekeepers of supposed decency - while, caught somewhere in between, Mary herself becomes a Frankenstein's monster of self-realisation." — Film4 Posted Jan 12, 2013
	——	Dark Nature (2010)	" messy - and not just because of the odd splash of gore. Screenwriter Eddie Harrison certainly overdetermines events, but Dark Nature is never thrilling or scary enough for its disparate parts to add up to anything appealingly uncanny. " — Eye for Film Posted Jan 6, 2013
	61%	Jack Reacher (2012)	" ...merely wants us to accept Reacher wholesale as an old-fashioned avatar of Eighties maverickdom, and to recruit us to a potential franchise of Reacher's investigative overreaching." — Eye for Film Posted Dec 25, 2012
	49%	The Man With the Iron Fists (2012)	" an affectionate recreation of Shaw Brothers kung fu, but for all its inventive weaponry & varied fighting methods, its heady mêlée of sex & gore, its grand gestures and nostalgic stylings, it is also entirely lacking in any real substance of its own." — Little White Lies Posted Dec 6, 2012
	27%	Life Just Is ()	" Writer/director Alex Barrett's feature debut settles for rites-of-passage ensemble drama in a Bergman mould, but its stilted, awkward dialogue hardly improves upon the audible lines of the film-within-a-film critiqued in that opening scene. " — Little White Lies Posted Dec 6, 2012
	75%	Dwae-ji-ui wang (The King of Pigs) ()	" relentlessly depressing but compelling & complex, The King of Pigs bears witness to a hidden legacy of oppression, violence & despair from which there can be no easy escape, & which reflects the hierarchies that continue to stratify Korean society. " — Sight and Sound Posted Nov 30, 2012
	——	Padak ()	" an allegory of both thinking outside the box and changing the prevalent ecosystem within, Padak is undoubtedly harrowing and may well put younger viewers off eating fish for life" — Sight and Sound Posted Nov 30, 2012
	60%	Deranged (2012)	" virus thriller Deranged (Yeon-ga-si) tries hard to break free of its Contagion shackles by giving its infection a truly bizarre origin & symptomatology... [but] ends up being both preposterously silly and numbingly repetitive." — Sight and Sound Posted Nov 30, 2012
	——	The Grand Heist (Baramgwa Hamjje Sarajida) ()	" The Grand Heist maintains its tone of madcap rambunctiousness, while allowing its thieves to be, or at least to become, true Korean patriots with a grand political cause and an East-meets-West sensibility (the latter shared with the film itself)." — Sight and Sound Posted Nov 30, 2012
	70%	The Thieves (2012)	" it's all very slickly realised... but the sheer number of mood swings, double crosses and narrative twists eventually becomes exhausting, while making it impossible to engage with the protean players or to care much who eventually comes up diamonds." — Sight and Sound Posted Nov 30, 2012
	100%	Masquerade (2012)	" a somewhat sentimental tale of royal intrigue and romance; a crash course on the claustrophobic, often bizarre details of courtly life; and a showcase for the acting talents of Korean superstar Lee Byung-hun, in dual roles. " — Sight and Sound Posted Nov 30, 2012
3/5	86%	Ninja Scroll (1996)	" It may be a tale of sound and fury, signifying nothing - but all that demon-whupping sure is fun." — Little White Lies Posted Nov 22, 2012

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