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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.
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,
D Movies,
Through the Trees,
Movies on Weekends,
BFI,
Klassiki,
Signal Horizon,
Whitlock and Pope
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
Oxford, UK
Movies reviews only
| Rating | T-Meter | Title | Year | Review |
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Oddity (2024) |
genuinely creepy, with an atmosphere of constant tension and dread... it is also beautifully stylised and darkly comic - and when it rings its bell, those who like their genre inventive, mannered and eccentric will come running. - Projected Figures
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| Posted Aug 05, 2024
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Hell Hole (2024) |
The Poser/Adams family’s latest excursion mines gonzo depths to unearth monstrousness and maternity within the male members of a fracking crew. - SciFiNow
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| Posted Jul 30, 2024
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A Samurai in Time (2024) |
In Junichi Yasuda’s bittersweetly good-natured meta-jidaegeki, a real 19th-century swordsman repeatedly relives (and re-dies) his lost past on films sets - Projected Figures
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| Posted Jul 30, 2024
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Infinite Summer (2024) |
Miguel Llansó's sci-fi singularity follows a teen girl's first steps into a transhumanist menagerie of young adulthood - Projected Figures
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| Posted Jul 28, 2024
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The Dead Thing (2024) |
In Elric Kane’s erotic ghost(ing) story, an alienated young woman finds her kindred spirit in a promiscuous lost soul. - SciFiNow
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| Posted Jul 27, 2024
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Dark Match (2024) |
Lowell Dean’s Eighties-set action horror has a sidelined pro fighter wrestling with a Satanic cult, her own demons and intersectional discrimination - SciFiNow
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| Posted Jul 22, 2024
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Carnage for Christmas (2024) |
Alice Maio Mackay’s queered Santa slasher exposes bigotry and prejudice as a small Australian town’s historical legacy - SciFiNow
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| Posted Jul 22, 2024
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Bookworm (2024) |
Ant Timpson’s charming family picture sets an estranged father and daughter on a quest for a cryptid cat, and for reconciliation - SciFiNow
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| Posted Jul 19, 2024
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Longlegs (2024) |
...as all these characters are being forced to play to someone else’s mean-spirited script, domestic nests are cuckooed, no one is a free agent, and ultimately Perkins himself is the master manipulator and the real devil.
- SciFiNow
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| Posted Jul 08, 2024
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MaXXXine (2024) |
a witty, gory, coke-fuelled exposé of the Hollywood machine at its most cynically exploitative, where implicit in the rise of every star is an eventual fall. - Sight & Sound
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| Posted Jul 04, 2024
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Kill (2023) |
In Kill, the train takes the viewer for a bumpy ride along parallel tracks of heroism and villainy. It is ecstatically violent, both celebrating and interrogating its own killing spree, as it races towards its final destination. - Little White Lies
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| Posted Jul 04, 2024
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Intermedium (2023) |
Erik Bloomquist’s LGBTQ-friendly musical rom-com ghost story sees adolescence itself as unfinished business - Projected Figures
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| Posted Jul 02, 2024
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The Moor (2023) |
Chris Cronin’s cold-case mystery/folk horror sees two people seeking the right location to bury their grief, guilt and gall - Projected Figures
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| Posted Jul 02, 2024
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Swimming Home (2024) |
Justin Anderson’s feature debut finds broader metaphor and myth in a lost family’s dysfunction on the Greek coastline - Projected Figures
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| Posted Jul 01, 2024
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The Shallow Tale of a Writer Who Decided to Write About a Serial Killer (2024) |
Tolga Karaçelik’s wry writer’s block-buster hilariously mixes its metaphors about marriage and murder - Projected Figures
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| Posted Jun 30, 2024
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The Last Keeper (2024) |
Tom Opre’s partisan documentary finds history, ecology and politics in the hunting grounds of Scotland’s highlands and islands - Projected Figures
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| Posted Jun 29, 2024
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Delicate Arch (2024) |
Matthew Warren’s metacinematic, psychonautic feature debut frames its characters in a trippy existentialist trap - Projected Figures
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| Posted Jun 29, 2024
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A Quiet Place: Day One (2024) |
Michael Sarnoski’s mid-apocalyptic prequel brings a new dawn, and an unusual heroine, to Krasinski’s sci-fi horror. Best of the series. - SciFiNow
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| Posted Jun 27, 2024
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Somnium (2024) |
In Racheal Cain’s psychological horror, both an experimental mind-control system and the Hollywood machine serve as parallel traps for young dreamers - Projected Figures
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| Posted Jun 22, 2024
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Agent Trouble (1987) |
This mystery thriller is cynical, stylised and (in every sense) funny, as ageing characters take a bus excursion into their own mortality. - Little White Lies
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| Posted Jun 20, 2024
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Kill the Referee (1984) |
This vicious siege/chase thriller... also constantly traces the romance between Maurice and Martine, and is full of eccentric character comedy, letting Mocky score with the kind of tonal madness that was his forte. - Little White Lies
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| Posted Jun 20, 2024
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Bandits of Orgosolo (1961) |
“I don’t have a choice anymore,” says Michele near the film’s end — and that sense of inevitability is what gives De Seca’s anthropological observations such a tragic trajectory. - Little White Lies
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| Posted Jun 20, 2024
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Sympathy for the Underdog (1971) |
this may be a yakuza film, but it plays more like noir, not least thanks to Takeo Yamashita’s hard jazz score, the flashbacks told in stylised photomontages, and the brooding fatalism that pervades everything - Little White Lies
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| Posted Jun 20, 2024
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The Lawnmower Man (1992) |
While ultimately the villain, Jobe is also a victim, and his retreat into the virtual world is entirely understandable. - Little White Lies
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| Posted Jun 20, 2024
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The Small Back Room (1949) |
"this monochrome release from Powell and Pressburger is a much more subdued affair — but that diminished scale suits a film about a kind of stiff-upper-lip domestic heroism which was understated, unseen and largely unsung during the war years. - Little White Lies
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| Posted Jun 20, 2024
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The Exorcism (2024) |
In blurring the line between horror films and filmmaking, ...writer-director Joshua John Miller is once more, as in his previous The Final Girls (2015), offering a sophisticated, metacinematic take on genre - Sight & Sound
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| Posted Jun 20, 2024
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Sorcery (2023) |
Come for the witchcraft, stay for the anticolonialism. - Little White Lies
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| Posted Jun 14, 2024
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Hunters on a White Field (2024) |
Sarah Gyllenstierna’s feature debut follows a trio of men on a tragico-absurdist hunt for their lost machismo - Projected Figures
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| Posted Jun 12, 2024
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She Loved Blossoms More (2024) |
Yannis Veslemes’ lysergic sort-of sci-fi sends three Athenian brothers on a mythic, closeted trip into inner grief and guilt - Projected Figures
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| Posted Jun 10, 2024
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A Desert (2024) |
Joshua Erkman’s metacinematic feature debut is an elegiac neo-noir located where photography, pornography and geology cross paths - Projected Figures
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| Posted Jun 10, 2024
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The Watchers (2024) |
Ishana Night Shyamalan’s psychodramatic, metacinematic folk horror is a paranoid panopticon of doubles and divided selves - SciFiNow
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| Posted Jun 10, 2024
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The Weekend (2024) |
Daniel Oriahi's family feature serves up a mixed dish of soap, satire and slaughter in its Meet the Parents scenario - Projected Figures
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| Posted Jun 10, 2024
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#AMFAD: All My Friends Are Dead (2024) |
Sin-icism: Marcus Dunstan’s sarky, savvy slasher sees the past catching up with some festival-bound, terminally online co-eds - Projected Figures
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| Posted Jun 09, 2024
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Beacon (2024) |
Roxy Shih’s paranoid psychodrama lets a shipwrecked young woman and an older male lighthouse keeper lose their bearings together in the mythic darkness - Projected Figures
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| Posted Jun 09, 2024
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The Devil's Bath (2024) |
Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz’s harrowing historical horror highlights a diabolical loophole in female repression - Projected Figures
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| Posted Jun 09, 2024
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Vulcanizadora (2024) |
Joel Potrykus’ resonant drama follows two mismatched men on a pyrotechnic journey into the woods, despair and maybe hell - Projected Figures
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| Posted Jun 09, 2024
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The A-Frame (2024) |
Calvin Lee Reeder’s sci-fi fuses cancer drama and Cronenbergian body horror into a misshapen genre hybrid - Projected Figures
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| Posted Jun 08, 2024
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The Damned (2024) |
Thordur Palsson’s period chiller has Nordic myth, cabin-fever psychology and Carpenter-esque horror all fishing the same cold waters - Projected Figures
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| Posted Jun 07, 2024
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The International Assassin (1976) |
Like Hong Kong’s answer to Fred Zinneman’s The Day of the Jackal (1973), only much more complicated, this makes up for flat characterisation and misfiring comedy with an elaborate narrative and unexpected twists. - Little White Lies
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| Posted May 30, 2024
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Luminous Woman (1987) |
Shinji Sômai directs his film like one of the operas that Yoshino sings, painting events as baroque, stylised melodrama, and transforming Tokyo into a hell of high and low entertainment. - Little White Lies
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| Posted May 30, 2024
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Shinobi no Mono (Ninja, a Band of Assassins) (Those That Are Unseen) (1962) |
lays out the tropes, techniques and weapons that would characterise all subsequent ninja films - Little White Lies
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| Posted May 28, 2024
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The Long Good Friday (1980) |
John Mackenzie’s gangster film offers a panorama of Britain’s shifting place in the world during the Seventies. - Little White Lies
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| Posted May 28, 2024
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Crimson Peak (2015) |
This is headily sumptuous, seductive filmmaking, beautiful and grotesque, with the best-realised ghosts since del Toro’s own The Devil’s Backbone (2001). - Little White Lies
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| Posted May 28, 2024
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Mansion of the Doomed (1976) |
this suburban gothic comes with its own fairytale feel, not least because it plays like a reimagining of Georges Franju’s surgical fantasia Eyes Without A Face (1960), updated and inverted. - Little White Lies
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| Posted May 28, 2024
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Handling the Undead (2024) |
Slow zombies: Thea Hvistendahl’s haunting feature traces its living characters’ journey through grief as a close encounter with genre - Projected Figures
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| Posted May 28, 2024
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Darkness of Man (2024) |
James Cullen Bressack’s LA-set thriller sends an ageing man of action on a noirish collision course with his own mortality - Projected Figures
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| Posted May 25, 2024
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The Valiant Ones (1975) |
King Hu's Ming-era wuxia epic all at once celebrates valour while questioning its place in a corrupted world of illusion - Projected Figures
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| Posted May 25, 2024
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Realm of Shadows (2024) |
In Jimmy Drain’s Satan-thology, recurrent themes, locations & cast limn an eternal, polarised struggle in search of elusive closure - Projected Figures
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| Posted May 23, 2024
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Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024) |
George Miller’s mid-franchise, post-apocalyptic prequel sets a young woman racing down parallel paths of revenge and reconstruction - Projected Figures
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| Posted May 22, 2024
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Sasquatch Sunset (2024) |
David and Nathan Zellner’s bittersweet elegy for the Anthropocene era finds the best and worst of humanity in its cryptid characters’ destiny of decline - Projected Figures
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| Posted May 20, 2024
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