Occasional academic, harried parent and sleepless zombie, Anton Bitel gets his film thrills from horror, the Asian New (and Old) Wave, 'arthouse', and anything miserable, odd or just plain unpleasant - even if he spends considerable time worrying that cinema may never again meet the high standards set by David Lynch's Eraserhead (1977).
Anton has also written for Sight & Sound, Film4, Little White Lies, Film International, Total Film, MusicOMH, Movie Gazette and Daily Information. He is a member of the Online Film Critics Society.
We have 545 reviews by Anton Bitel in the database:
read them
here.
A bittersweet vision of America barrelling down a two-lane road to nowhere.
Amid the dust storms and economic depression of Dustbowl Era Oklahoma, Eugene Evans finds his family farm on the brink of foreclosure. His last bet to save the farm is the bounty on the head of fugitive bank robber Allison Wells.
Looted is all at once a localised crime drama, a tale of a difficult yet loving father-son relationship, an exploration of escapism's price, and a social realist anatomisation of a community.
Rob spends his days stealing cars with his gang in a town on the English coast... but at night he returns home to his terminally ill dad.
A lonely man seeks emotional refuge in the organising and documenting of family moments using low-grade impersonators. When his fake sister becomes inspired to follow his method, their relationship struggles between the forged and genuine.
On the one hand, a parable of corporate greed and exploitation, and of society's treatment of the disabled or "deficient", and on the other a story of the way we all reinvent ourselves precisely through story
Family survivalist adventure in post-apocalyptic Turkey.
In an effort to create a safer, healthier, and more productive society, a legally imposed curfew and mandated sleeping schedule forces all citizens to keep the same hours. Except Saul Capgras...
All its genre elements are the neat packaging for some grim state-of-the-nation commentary, showing an aspect of Iranian society that is seldom explored on film.
Both a portrait of marginalised lives in urban Vietnam, and a "Taoist" fable.
A young man who slaughters chickens for a living finds his trouble brewing when three strange gangsters come to hide in the abandoned building where he is living, bringing violence and a young prostitute with them.
