Anton Bitel

Oxford

The horror. Feckless freelance film critic & neurotic apanthrope BlueSky: @antbit.projectedfigures.com Mastodon: @[email protected] Anywhere but here...

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Articles

10 great shark attack films

1 week ago | bfi.org.uk | Jez Stewart |Rory Doherty |Anton Bitel

Released in the summer of 1975, 50 years ago, Steven Spielberg’s Jaws made audiences around the globe afraid to go back into the water. Although its rapacious great white shark appears only briefly on screen, Spielberg masterfully builds suspense through the interplay between what’s seen above the surface and what lurks below. Scenes of carefree tourists swimming are juxtaposed with ominous shots of their dangling legs beneath the waves, all intensified by John Williams’ famous menacing score.
Projected Figures

1 week ago | projectedfigures.com | Anton Bitel

Open Wide has its world première at Chattanooga Film Festival, 22 June 2025From its title, you might imagine that Open Wide is concerned with dentistry – and indeed the first sound we hear is of someone breathing deeply, as though inhaling laughing gas, even if what we see is a two-holed view from a mask of a living room with a male figure walking around.
10 great British animated feature films

2 weeks ago | bfi.org.uk | Jez Stewart |Rory Doherty |Anton Bitel |Stephen G. Dalton

As Chicken Run turns 25, we place Aardman’s classic within a history of British animated feature films. They don’t come along very often, but when they do they can be very special. 12 June 2025A quarter of a century after its release, Chicken Run (2000) remains the highest-grossing stop-motion film of all time.
The Degenerate: The Life and Films of Andy Milligan (2025)

2 weeks ago | projectedfigures.com | Anton Bitel

The Degenerate: The Life and Films of Andy Milligan had its world première at Tribeca 2025, 11 June“it was absolutely, just awful, it was just terrible,” says marketing consultant and distributor Samuel S. Sherman some way into Josh Johnson and Grayson Tyler Johnson’s documentary The Degenerate: The Life and Films of Andy Milligan, adding, “If the sound is bad, and the acting is bad, and the people are almost non-actors, every one of them, and it doesn’t look professional, then I draw the line.
Projected Figures

2 weeks ago | projectedfigures.com | Anton Bitel

Jonathan Zawada’s Tall Tales opens with a lighthouse on a rocky islet. As the camera slowly spins around the lighthouse in a shot that could only be achieved by CGI, the light atop the structure also rotates, illuminating the surrounding sea with a bright shaft that resembles a film projector’s beam – indeed, at one point, faces appear in the stream of light.
Riefenstahl (2024)

2 weeks ago | projectedfigures.com | Anton Bitel

There is a scene in Andres Veiel’s documentary where Leni Riefenstahl is shown, post-war, watching footage on a monitor from her 1938 film Olympia – all at once a highly aestheticised celebration of peak bodily perfection and a piece of Nazi propaganda – and commenting on her meticulous process of editing the film. In a sense, that is what she also did with her life.
Lemonade Blessing (2025)

3 weeks ago | projectedfigures.com | Anton Bitel

Lemonade Blessing had its world première at Tribeca 2025, 5 JuneLemonade Blessing opens with a clashing dialectic. We can hear Mary Santucci (Jeanine Serralles) and her husband Pete (Todd Geargart) arguing at increasing volume, while their little son John (Nicholas Crocco), downstairs in the den, tries to drown out the sound first by turning his video game up, and then by literally blocking his ears.
10 great films set in Las Vegas

3 weeks ago | bfi.org.uk | Rory Doherty |Anton Bitel |Stephen G. Dalton |Barry Levitt

Is Las Vegas an anomaly in a country of anomalies, or the most perfectly distilled expression of America’s contradictions? A city built in the desert, consuming ungodly amounts of power and water in order to look garishly dreamlike, facilitating a nighttime industry of hotels, gambling, casinos, alcohol and sex work (not to mention a substantial amount of marriages and annulments), it has made a fleet of executives extraordinarily wealthy for nigh on a century.
Come and See (Idi i smotri) (1985) introduction

3 weeks ago | projectedfigures.com | Anton Bitel

Come and See (Idi i smotri) screened on 1st and 4th June at the Ultimate Picture Palace in Oxford. This is the text of my introduction to those screenings. Ladies and gentlemen, roll up, roll up! My name is Anton Bitel, I am a freelance film critic and I specialise in horror cinema – so you might be wondering how and why I have come to be introducing a late Soviet-era arthouse film about a young man’s coming of age in German-occupied Byelorussia during the Second World War.
Dangerous Animals review - why sharks? They’re cinematic!

3 weeks ago | lwlies.com | Anton Bitel

About Little White Lies Little White Lies was established in 2005 as a bi-monthly print magazine committed to championing great movies and the talented people who make them. Combining cutting-edge design, illustration and journalism, we’ve been described as being “at the vanguard of the independent publishing movement.” Our reviews feature a unique tripartite ranking system that captures the different aspects of the movie-going experience. We believe in Truth & Movies.