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Anton Bitel
Tomatometer-approved critic
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.
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
Movie Gazette,
Sight & Sound,
Film4,
musicOMH.com,
SciFiNow,
Eye for Film,
Little White Lies,
Projected Figures,
ScreenAnarchy,
Film International,
Rue Morgue Magazine,
VODzilla.co,
TheHorrorShow,
FilmLand Empire,
Grolsch Film Works,
Vérité,
Film Divider,
New Empress Magazine,
Cinetalk,
MovieScope,
Scene 360,
Daily Info,
Dirty Movies,
Through the Trees,
Movies on Weekends,
BFI,
Klassiki,
Signal Horizon,
Whitlock and Pope
Oxford, UK
Movies reviews only
| Rating | T-Meter | Title | Year | Review |
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Violett (2023) |
Steven J. Milhaljevich’s Australian gothic psychodrama brings dysfunction, delusion and denial to a home on the edge of a small town - Projected Figures
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| Posted Nov 30, 2023
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The Shift (2023) |
The choice is yours whether to see Brock Heasley’s feature debut as up-and-down romance, vehicular death dream, multiverse sci-fi or heavy-handed theodicean parable. - Projected Figures
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| Posted Nov 29, 2023
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Fixation (2022) |
Mercedes Bryce Morgan’s disorienting psychodrama restages the traumas of a young woman in trouble who just wants to dance - Projected Figures
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| Posted Nov 25, 2023
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Godzilla Minus One (2023) |
Takashi Yamazaki’s kaiju prequel sees the ruins of postwar Japan exposed to a monstrous restaging of wartime trauma. - SciFiNow
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| Posted Nov 23, 2023
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Haunted Ulster Live (2023) |
Dominic O’Neill’s feature debut purports to be a live television broadcast from a haunted house over Halloween in 1998 - Projected Figures
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| Posted Nov 22, 2023
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A-Town Boyz (2023) |
Eunice Lau’s documentary follows an alienated second generation of Asian-Americans doing crimes and making rhymes - Projected Figures
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| Posted Nov 20, 2023
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Tremors II: Aftershocks (1996) |
This is a charming, knowingly silly comedy creature feature - Little White Lies
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| Posted Nov 17, 2023
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Typhoon Club (1985) |
The typhoon that these schoolmates use an excuse not to go home also serves as an objective correlative for their raging, potentially dangerous emotions, as death makes its first encroachment on their not-so-innocent lives. - Little White Lies
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| Posted Nov 17, 2023
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Showdown at the Grand (2023) |
Writer/director Orson Oblowitz has lovingly crafted a feature presentation as meta-cinematic as it is nostalgic, conjuring a dying breed of scuzzy old-school cinephilia in an age of digital uniformity. - Little White Lies
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| Posted Nov 17, 2023
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Royal Tramp (1992) |
Wei is a mercurial antihero and venal timeserver whose picaresque presence always places him at the centre of key events — and Chow... imbues this slippery rogue with a real charm. - Little White Lies
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| Posted Nov 17, 2023
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Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999) |
what might sound like an ordinary gangster picture is in fact a rich amalgam of crisscrossing genres, where East meets West and culture itself follows more than one Way. - Little White Lies
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| Posted Nov 17, 2023
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Walk Up (2022) |
Hong Sang-soo’s 34th feature confines an ageing Hong-like director to a single multi-storey building while ringing time’s changes - Projected Figures
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| Posted Nov 15, 2023
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A Wild Roomer (2022) |
Lee Jeong-hong’s hangout feature debut offers a slacker’s guide to the provisional nature of home and domestic life - Projected Figures
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| Posted Nov 10, 2023
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Dream Scenario (2023) |
As Paul is raised up and ruined by his own entirely unearned viral success, Borgli offers a surreal, ultimately sad satire of 21st-century online exposure. - Sight & Sound
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| Posted Nov 09, 2023
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Greenhouse (2022) |
Lee Sol-hui’s bleak feature debut is a tense, tragic thriller of mental illness, dissolving family and homelessness - Projected Figures
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| Posted Nov 09, 2023
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Soulmate (2023) |
Portrait of an artist (as a young woman): Min Yong-keun's meticulous, melancholic rite of passage looks back to art and adolescence, fleeting youth and lasting friendship - Projected Figures
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| Posted Nov 09, 2023
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A Forgotten Man (2022) |
Laurent Nègre’s postwar tragedy shows a former Swiss ambassador to Nazi Berlin slipping out of an otherwise unchanging history - Projected Figures
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| Posted Nov 06, 2023
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I Haven't Done Anything (2022) |
Park Sang-min’s screenlife satire makes the medium its message on the emptiness of celebrity and the malleability of reality. - Projected Figures
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| Posted Nov 06, 2023
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Altered Perceptions (2023) |
Jorge Ameer’s apocalyptic sci-fi satire shows an America, manipulated by politicians and media alike, unable to see the wood for the trees - Projected Figures
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| Posted Nov 05, 2023
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Phantom (2023) |
Lee Hae-young’s elegant Occupation-era thriller offers an alluring combination of film noir, whodunnit and resistance action/adventure. - Projected Figures
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| Posted Nov 05, 2023
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Mastemah (2022) |
operating at the cliff edge where dreams meet reality, science meets religion, and schizophrenia meet possession, it is a hallucinatory trip into one woman’s fragmenting psyche – or is it into demonic apocalypse? - Projected Figures
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| Posted Nov 02, 2023
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SCALA!!! Or, the Incredibly Strange Rise and Fall of the World's Wildest Cinema and How it Influenced a Mixed-Up Generation of Weirdos and Misfits (2023) |
a vibrant, suitably punkish doc, full of crazy anecdotes and pulsing to a bombastic score from Barry Adamson (himself a regular Scala attendee). - BFI
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| Posted Nov 01, 2023
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Doctor Jekyll (2023) |
Joe Stephenson’s campy gothic adaptation is equally class- and self-conscious, transitioning from social drama to possession horror - SciFiNow
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| Posted Oct 31, 2023
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Vase de noces (One Man and His Pig) (Wedding Trough) (The Pig Fucking Movie) (1974) |
Thierry Zéno’s monochrome experiment is a perverse barnyard allegory of humanity’s relationship with the bestial and the divine - Projected Figures
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| Posted Oct 29, 2023
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The Last Video Store (2023) |
Cody Kennedy & Tim Rutherford’s nostalgic feature debut brings the creatures and characters of bargain-basement VHS schlock to comic life - Projected Figures
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| Posted Oct 29, 2023
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Superposition (2022) |
In Karoline Lyngbye’s SF-tinged domestic drama, a dysfunctional family finds itself in a remote lakeside cabin or two - Projected Figures
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| Posted Oct 29, 2023
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Eldritch, USA (2023) |
Ryan Smith and Tyler Foreman’s horror comedy musical knowingly revives the same old fraternal frictions across multiple genres - Projected Figures
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| Posted Oct 28, 2023
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The Theory of Everything (2023) |
Timm Kröger's melodramatic, melancholic mystery finds noirish intrigue and tragic romance in an anomaly at the edge of postwar quantum physics - Projected Figures
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| Posted Oct 27, 2023
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The Invisible Fight (2023) |
Rainer Sarnet’s hard-rocking, genre-crossing kung fu comedy sends a holy fool on an (un)orthodox spiritual journey in occupied Estonia - Projected Figures
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| Posted Oct 27, 2023
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Starve Acre (2023) |
this 1970s-set folk horror, unnervingly scored by Matthew Herbert, unearths something primeval and toxic at the very roots of a once, and perhaps again, happy family. - Sight & Sound
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| Posted Oct 23, 2023
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How to Kill Monsters (2023) |
Stewart Sparke’s horror comedy is both the beginning and the end of all Lovecraftian interdimensional siege pictures - Projected Figures
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| Posted Oct 23, 2023
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Werewolf Santa (2023) |
Airell Anthony Hayles’ cryptozoological Christmas cracker finds hybrid handheld horror comedy in a fraught family - Projected Figures
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| Posted Oct 23, 2023
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Faceless After Dark (2023) |
Send in the clowns: Raymond Wood’s revenge slasher smartly subverts the gendered norms of Hollywood horror - Projected Figures
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| Posted Oct 23, 2023
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A Year in a Field (2023) |
Christopher Morris’ static yet activist film essay positions a Cornish standing stone as marker of the anthropocene’s beginning and end - Projected Figures
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| Posted Oct 23, 2023
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The Ghost Station (2022) |
an inescapably derivative work, as haunted as its characters by the influence of the past... What it does nail, though, is the inanity of modern, hit-hungry online journalism, which can prove no less viral than a ghostly curse. - Whitlock and Pope
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| Posted Oct 23, 2023
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Door (1988) |
This is man, woman and chainsaw, sexed-up and stylised, exposing a Japanese housewife’s indoor appetites and anxieties. - Little White Lies
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| Posted Oct 18, 2023
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Messiah of Evil (1975) |
co-writers/co-directors Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz confound life and art, reality and dreams, sanity and madness in their surreal vision of conservative America succumbing to – or biting back against – the encroaching counterculture. - Little White Lies
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| Posted Oct 18, 2023
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Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (1992) |
The ensuing pandemonium, lacking the bite of the previous two films, just goes through the mythic motions. Also, while Bradley is probably the best performer here, it’s tempting fate to have him utter the line: “I cannot act in your world.” - Little White Lies
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| Posted Oct 18, 2023
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Meatcleaver Massacre (1977) |
Improbably blending pagan folklore with a post-Manson mindset, this is a bad trip through the paranoia of 1970s Los Angeles, where monsters and madness cohabit. It’s cheap, scuzzy and bonkers, with its own psychedelic vibe. - Little White Lies
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| Posted Oct 18, 2023
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Delicatessen (1991) |
All at once nightmarish cannibal horror and romantic comedy, good-natured fairytale, and hyper-stylised allegory of French wartime collaboration and resistance, this collective debut from Marc Caro & Jean-Pierre Jeunet is dizzyingly difficult to pin down - Little White Lies
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| Posted Oct 18, 2023
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The Others (2001) |
With its dark old house, its persistent past and its invasive hauntings, Alejandro Amenábar’s fifth feature offers all the trappings of a classic gothic, while turning the screw with a very unusual perspective on these supernatural goings-on. - Little White Lies
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| Posted Oct 18, 2023
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Mob Land (2023) |
Nicholas Maggio’s melancholic neo noir reveals recession, crime and moral hopelessness in a smalltown America of lost dreams - Projected Figures
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| Posted Oct 15, 2023
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Booger (2023) |
W(h)erecat: Mary Dauterman’s surreally transformative feature debut tracks a quietly grief-numbed woman who has lost that loving feline - Projected Figures
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| Posted Oct 15, 2023
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Mid-Century (2022) |
Sonja O’Hara’s unhinged, allegorical ghost story disinters the past’s subjugation of women from a haunted house’s foundations - Projected Figures
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| Posted Oct 13, 2023
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The Beast (2023) |
Bertrand Bonello's Marienbad-like metempsychotic melodrama rehearses the same doomed romance across three timelines - Projected Figures
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| Posted Oct 08, 2023
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birth/rebirth (2023) |
Laura Moss’ sci-fi horror experiments with the outer limits, both biological and ethical, of birth, death and motherhood - Projected Figures
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| Posted Oct 08, 2023
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Vincent Must Die (2023) |
Stéphan Castang’s genre-fied, apocalyptic feature debut captures modernity’s individual aggressions and mob mentality - Projected Figures
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| Posted Oct 07, 2023
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Red Rooms (2023) |
Pascal Plante’s courtroom drama/cyberthriller cross-examines the identity and motives of a woman obsessively observing a horrific murder trial - Projected Figures
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| Posted Oct 07, 2023
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When Evil Lurks (2023) |
Demián Rugna’s post- and pre-apocalyptic chiller imagines the demonic dissolution of the family in a godless world - Projected Figures
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| Posted Oct 06, 2023
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Tiger Stripes (2023) |
In Amanda Nell Eu’s vibrant feature debut, menarche is also monstrous metamorphosis into a wilder, freer femininity - Projected Figures
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| Posted Oct 05, 2023
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