Reviews by Anton Bitel

Order by: Date, A–Z

• 
  One Nite In Mongkok (2004)

  Triad tensions in Hong Kong bring a hired assassin from the mainland.
• 
  Odd Man Out (1947)

  Review preview for Odd Man Out

  Even if almost all of Johnny's journey into darkness takes place on foot, only his first steps are truly pedestrian.

  An injured IRA man goes on the run in the forbidding back streets of Belfast.
• 
  Onibaba (1964)

  Review preview for Onibaba

  A stark portrayal of lust, jealousy and raw hunger.

  An impoverished mother turns to murder as a method of survival at a time of civil war.
• 
  On The Ice (2008)

  Review preview for On The Ice

  Sikumi is certainly stark, and yet there is room even in this cold, austere backdrop for the warmth of the human spirit.

  An Inuit hunter inadvertantly witnesses a murder.
• 
  Our Children (2012)

  Review preview for Our Children

  Joachim LaFosse's film builds, inexorably, to an ending that we know from the start is coming.

  A couple's relationship becomes strained under pressure from one of their adoptive parents.
• 
  Outside Satan (2011)

  Review preview for Outside Satan

  A jarringly odd mix of dull and disturbing that comes with its own quasi-religious frisson for a jaded age.

  Enigmatic drama about the relationship between a woman and a mysterious outsider on Northern France's Opal Coast.
• 
  The Ordeal (2004)

  Review preview for The Ordeal

  A blackly twisted alternative for anyone fed up with the standard Christmas movie fare.

  A passing crooner is kidnapped by a loony in the woods.
• 
  Outpost (2008)

  Review preview for Outpost

  In short, Outpost is exactly what a horror film should be.

  A group of soldiers find themselves facing an ancient and seemingly unstoppable enemy.
• 
  P2 (2007)

  Review preview for P2

  All the pieces are in place for a great thriller – and then, just like your typical Yuletide get-together, it all falls a little flat.

  A workaholic woman gets stalked in parking garage on Christmas Eve.
• 
  Padre Padrone (1977)

  Review preview for Padre Padrone

  Padre Padrone is a film of careful balances, setting raw nature against refined culture, offering family drama that grips from start to finish without once resorting to sentimentality.

  Surviving an abusive childhood in Sardinia with sheep.
• 
  Pale Flower (1964)

  Review preview for Pale Flower

  Rarely has the vacuum of values left by dramatic social upheaval been captured with such subtlety.

  An ex con is seduced by the allure of a thrill-seeking female gambler, while returning to his old gang to settle a score.
• 
  Paranoia Agent: The Complete Series Box Set (2004)

  Review preview for Paranoia Agent: The Complete Series Box Set

  If your experience of Japanese anime has so far been confined to bubblegum tweenies and manga mechas, then Kon's altogether more adult animation will come as a real revelation.

  A surreal investigation of a closed society's dark psychic underbelly.
• 
  The Parking Lot Movie (2010)

  Review preview for The Parking Lot Movie

  More a portrait than a narrative film, it may place viewers in park for its relatively brief duration rather than drive them in any particular direction, but Eckman's subjects are so wittily articulate that the film just offers one quotable zinger after a

  A documentary about parking lot attendants, their feelings about their job, and their theories about other aspects of life.
• 
  Passenger Side (2009)

  Review preview for Passenger Side

  Bissonette handles the gradually shifting points of view with such deftness and subtlety that many viewers may find themselves genuinely wrong-footed.

  When a man gets a call from his estranged addicted brother on the morning of his birthday it leads to an odyssey through the LA suburbs.
• 
  Patchwork (2015)

  Review preview for Patchwork

  An always engaging, often intriguing and highly comical story of the monstrous feminine.

  Waking to find themselves Frankensteined together in one body after a night out, three young women set aside their differences to seek revenge.
• 
  The Peddler (2009)

  Review preview for The Peddler

  We are reintroduced, through the most improbably modest of routes, to the extraordinary power that cinema can have to galvanise a community and bring it together.

  A documentary about a self-taught filmmaker visiting a small town in search of a cast and crew for his latest b-movie.
• 
  The Perfect Sleep (2009)

  Review preview for The Perfect Sleep

  An overwrought, eccentric folly, surely never to be repeated, but truly amazing to behold.

  An assassin returns to a city of his past to try to rescue a lost love.
• 
  Permanent Vacation (1980)

  Review preview for Permanent Vacation

  Jarmusch's script shows a sophistication beyond the budding filmmaker's years.

  Jarmusch's low-budget debut traces a bored hipster's picaresque journey through New York.
• 
  The Piano Tuner Of Earthquakes (2005)

  Review preview for The Piano Tuner Of Earthquakes

  Like Jan Svankmajer, the Quays blend live action and animation to create a surreal hermetic vision that is as beautifully seductive as it is chillingly inaccessible. T

  Meglomaniac doctor brings together a piano tuner and a dead opera singer for his grand operatic masterpiece.
• 
  Pink Saris (2010)

  Review preview for Pink Saris

  Sampat is a subject so complex and compelling, so fearless and flawed, that in the end the documentary itself is drawn into her irresistible orbit no less than she dominates all the people and situations around her.

  Low-caste women in Uttar Pradesh fight back against social injustice in this documentary.
• Porco Rosso (1992)

  Anime adventures of a flying pig, Italian Fascists, pirates and an American contract killer between the wars in Europe.
• 
  Le Portrait De Petit Cossette (2004)

  Review preview for Le Portrait De Petit Cossette

  Despite scenes of brutal murder and demonic torture, the film is imbued with a tone of surprising innocence.

  Creepy anime on the madness of artists and treachery of images.
• 
  The Portuguese Nun (2009)

  Review preview for The Portuguese Nun

  Green's film, like Verde's, will no doubt seem boring to some, overly intellectual to others, while still others will find it deeply affecting.

  An actress rediscovers herself on a film shoot in Portugal.
• 
  Postal (2007)

  Review preview for Postal

  Boll should be defended, even admired, for his willingness to swim against the political tide - but that alone, unfortunately, is not enough to make Postal worth watching.

  An adaptation of the computer game about a state employee who snaps and goes on a killing spree.
• 
  Pandorum (2009)

  Review preview for Pandorum

  Alvart has found a way to allegorise the survival (or otherwise) of humanity itself in an environment not unlike our own.

  Two astronauts wake up on a broken-down spaceship with no idea how they got there. What's worse is that they discover they're not alone...
• 
  Pariah (2011)

  Review preview for Pariah

  Pariah is not apologetic or even coy about the high school senior's lesbianism, nor is it graphic or titillating in presenting it.

  A teenager juggles conflicting identities and endures heartbreak in a desperate search for sexual expression.
• 
  Persepolis (2007)

  Review preview for Persepolis

  Seen purely in aesthetic terms, Persepolis is an object of rare beauty, with no obvious precedents or parallels in the history of anime.

  A girl's eye view of the Islamic Revolution in Iran.
• 
  The Phantom Carriage (1921)

  Review preview for The Phantom Carriage

  Sjöström's film is not just an early horror, but an argument for the moral validity of cinema itself.

  A ghostly morality tale about a spirit doomed to drive a ghostly chariot.
• 
  Poseidon (2006)

  Review preview for Poseidon

  A handful of the passengers may eventually get out of the ship alive, but in this massive overhaul of The Poseidon Adventure (1972), nothing, it seems, can save them from Mark Protosevich's sinking script.

  Another cruise liner, another wet day at the office, another remake
• 
  Princess Mononoke (1997)

  Review preview for Princess Mononoke

  In this way, Miyazaki avoids any simplistic 'message', preferring to present a more complicated dialectic on the environmental difficulties that continue to 'curse' us to this day.

  A prince becomes caught up in a battle between a mining town and a forest.
• 
  Prince Of Darkness (1987)

  Review preview for Prince Of Darkness

  With its well-paced build-up, its ominous soundtrack, and Carpenter's trademark handling of tension, Prince Of Darkness certainly earns its place on the margins of the horror canon.

  I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by Satan.
• 
  The Producers (2005)

  Review preview for The Producers

  Despite the odd moment when its extravagant routines spill out onto the streets of New York, for the most part the film feels trapped within its stage origins.

  Mel Brooks comes full circle as his film-turned-Broadway-musical is turned back into a film.
• 
  Proof (2005)

  Review preview for Proof

  Offers a convincing demonstration of the theorem that good writing and sensitive performances can equal an engaging and nuanced piece of cinema.

  The mathematics of personal relationships, confused by an equation of madness.
• 
  A Prophet (2009)

  Review preview for A Prophet

  An unlikely, but highly effective, marriage of arthouse and mainstream sensibilities.

  An illiterate teenager struggles when he is sent to jail, but after embarking on a series of "missions" for a gang leader, he begins to hatch plans of his own.
• 
  The Proposition (2005)

  Review preview for The Proposition

  Cave's screenplay is full of rich incidents, impossible moral choices and, most of all, complex characters, brought to grimy life by the excellent ensemble cast.

  In the 1880s, an Australian outlaw is offered a pardon if he tracks down and kills his psychotic elder brother.
• 
  Psychobitch (2019)

  Review preview for Psychobitch

  One of the things that makes Psychobitch stand out is how flawed both its principals are.

  A self-declared 'class outsider' becomes the study buddy of the most perfect boy in school.
• 
  The Princess And The Frog (2009)

  Review preview for The Princess And The Frog

  The revolution in MouseLand, though tantalisingly glimpsed, proves to be short-lived.

  A retelling of the classic fairytale set in Jazz Age New Orleans.
• 
  Prometheus (2012)

  Review preview for Prometheus

  This big-screen epic is immersive less for its binocular vistas than for their impossibly grand scale

  Exploration to the dark reaches of space, to discover the origins of mankind. It doesn't go well.
• 
  Protégé (2007)

  Review preview for Protégé

  It is difficult to shake the feeling that Yee's latest film is a collection of interesting research data, with a plot stitched together from other, superior films, and tacked on, apparently, as an afterthought.

  A drug lord unwittingly grooms an undercover cop to be his successor.
• 
  Puffball (2007)

  Review preview for Puffball

  Its conception seems stunted from the outset by an inability to engage.

  Isolated in a remote farmhouse, a pregnant woman begins to feel threatened by her envious neighbours.
• 
  Pulse (2001)

  Review preview for Pulse

  The combination of subtlety and indeterminacy makes for an uncanny treat.

  Facing the apocalypse, as a secret website devotes itself to the terrible isolation of ghosts and the parable of techno terror.
• 
  Punishment Park (1971)

  Review preview for Punishment Park

  Punishment Park is an extraordinary film - provocative, incendiary and deeply depressing.

  Psuedo documentary in which a film crew follow a group of US draft dodgers and rebels as they are given the choice between jail and a three-day endurance test in the park of the title.
• 
  Rats And Cats (2008)

  Review preview for Rats And Cats

  It has all the cringe-making laughs one might expect from a comedy of celebrity, but Rats And Cats also achieves a surprising subtlety.

  Black comedy about the ugly side of showbiz.
• 
  Reality (2012)

  Review preview for Reality

  A strictly one-note parable.

  A fishmonger's fantasies of appearing on Big Brother threaten to ruin his life and that of his family.
• 
  Red Eye (2005)

  Review preview for Red Eye

  Slick, taut and diverting enough, but also characterless, forgettable and inescapably bland.

  Killer on a plane.
• 
  Reeker (2005)

  Review preview for Reeker

  Reeker is slyly funny and certainly macabre (if not exactly scary).

  The humour is dark and the effects gruesome in this terror motel Eighties-style gorefest.
• 
  Reign Of Assassins (2010)

  Review preview for Reign Of Assassins

  In this saga of split bodies and double lives, it seems that everyone yearns for change.

  An assassin who has renounced her deadly trade finds the past is catching up with her.
• 
  Religulous (2008)

  Review preview for Religulous

  A scabrous, at times shocking assault on the more idiotic aspects of religion, and the dangers that they pose in a society capable for the first time of bringing about its own destructive Apocalypse.

  Comedian Bill Maher champions scepticism in an age of rising religious fundamentalism.
• 
  Renaissance (2006)

  Review preview for Renaissance

  Renaissance is blessed with a script that not only feels like genuine noir rather than a hastily written pastiche, but also is not subordinated to all the visual razzle-dazzle.

  Ground-breaking animated film noir in which a hard-boiled detective hunts a kidnapped dame.
• 
  Revanche (2008)

  Review preview for Revanche

  Here justice moves slowly, and in mysterious ways.

  An accidental shooting leads to a search for revenge.