Anton Bitel

Oxford

The horror. Feckless freelance film critic & neurotic apanthrope @ofcs @londoncritics 🍅 @koreanfilmfest @antbit.bsky.social @[email protected]

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Articles

Final Recovery (2025)

2 weeks ago | projectedfigures.com | Anton Bitel

Harley Wallen’s Final Recovery opens with a primal scene.
Six Home Releases From March 2024

3 weeks ago | projectedfigures.com | Anton Bitel

Six Home Releases From March 2024 first published by Little White Lies, 13 March, 2024, as entry 186 in my Cinema Psychotronicum columnIncludes capsules of: Fear City, One Percenter, , Dark Water, Bodyguard Kiba, City of the Living DeadMartin Scorsese, Woody Allen and Spike Lee always get cited as cinema’s great chroniclers of New York, but one should never forget Abel Ferrara, who thrives at the Scorsese end of the city’s mean streets, but goes down sleazier alleyways for his art.
Freaky Tales (2025)

4 weeks ago | projectedfigures.com | Anton Bitel

“I’m just a movie guy, I don’t know much about sports,” says old video store clerk Hank of the coming basketball game between local lovable losers the Warriors and LA’s all-star the Lakers, where the outcome seems a foregone conclusion (“we definitely cannot beat LA”).
One to One: John & Yoko review: New York state of mind

1 month ago | bfi.org.uk | Samuel Thomas Davies |Ben Nicholson |Simran Hans |Anton Bitel

Using the couple’s own tape recordings and a patchwork of archive clips, Kevin Macdonald takes an intriguing show-don’t-tell approach to the first 18 months of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s move to New York in late 1971. 11 April 2025When John Lennon and Yoko Ono left the stately pile of Tittenhurst Park outside Ascot to move into a modest tworoom apartment on Bank Street in New York’s West Village, they installed a TV at the foot of the bed, got in, and never turned it off.
The Return review: Homer sweet Homer

1 month ago | bfi.org.uk | Ben Nicholson |Samuel Thomas Davies |Simran Hans |Anton Bitel

Uberto Pasolini trades a fantastic voyage for an intense portrait of a marriage as the long-suffering Odysseus, played by Ralph Fiennes, returns from the Trojan War. 11 April 2025Uberto Pasolini’s reworking of The Odyssey shuns spectacle to craft a potent, grown-up character study that mines the emotional core of Homer’s epic.
Holy Cow review: play your curds right

1 month ago | bfi.org.uk | Simran HansReviews |Simran Hans |Anton Bitel |Nick Davis

In France’s Jura region, a laddish 18-year-old becomes the family breadwinner when his father suddenly dies. While working on a local dairy farm, he devises a plan to win a cheesemaking competition with a cash prize of €30,000, learning important romantic and culinary lessons in the process. In rural France, on a sweltering summer’s day, a middle-aged woman dunks her bare arms into a vat of scalding milk.
A Minecraft Movie review: a fanciful block-buster

1 month ago | bfi.org.uk | Anton Bitel |Nick Davis |Adam Nayman |Tara Judah

Jared Hess’s A Minecraft Movie is a big (and not just in budget), brash and brazen family film – so don’t by fooled by the apparent modesty of its title’s indefinite article. It is the middle word that does the heavy lifting in the first feature film to be based on Mojang Studios’ Minecraft, the best-selling video game of all time.
The Reign of Queen Ginnarra (aka Crown of Shadows) (2025)

1 month ago | projectedfigures.com | Anton Bitel

Lawrie Brewster’s The Reign of Queen Ginnarra begins with a ballad about said queen, and a text quote from H.P. Lovecraft, so that when the ballad’s lyrics describe Ginnarra as “prophet of the Old Ones, mistress of the dark”, we know that her fantasy realm is directly linked to the imaginative worlds of the late horror author.
Super Happy Fun Clown (2025)

1 month ago | projectedfigures.com | Anton Bitel

Super Happy Fun Clown had its world première at Panic Fest, 1 Apr 2025 Those reared on the various versions of Stephen King’s It , on Jon Watt’s Clown (2014) and on Damien Leone’s Terrifier 1, 2 and 3 might naturally suppose that a film with the heavily ironised title Super Happy Fun Clown will be exploiting a certain coulrophobia, but in fact the film begins with text highlighting a different kind of pathological fear: “Atychophobia: the fear of being unsuccessful.” “We know who you are,...
Alejandro Jodorowsky by William Egginton

1 month ago | the-tls.co.uk | Anton Bitel

Welcome to the TLSWinner of the 2024 Niche Market Newspaper of the Year Award and proudly niche since 1902.