A one-line spoiler-free review of all three old movies I watched in the cinema in August 2024

I’ve never really been a movies person, they last too long and I always want the bar/toilet after 20 mins like at gigs, which stresses me out. But I got myself a BFI and a Picturehouse membership and as often as possible I try to find the weirdest most difficult ‘Martin’ thing to watch. But I’ve treated it like watching TV/gigs/football rather than sacred art. Boring? I’ll leave. Need a wee/drink? Do that. Occasionally you miss the vital two minutes of a movie but then so what? There’s another one along soon. It’s been fantastic. You can find all the one-line spoiler-free reviews here.

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Stanley Kubrick and Blade Runner (The Final Cut) (1982 and 2007), Ridley Scott – The BFI putting these on one after the other was peak Belam-bait, to the extent I almost expected a tap on the shoulder from some intelligence service who had set it up as they knew it would lure me in to town.

What to say? I will never understand the ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey even if I live to be as old as David Bowman appears by the end of the movie, and the final director’s cut of Blade Runner is still baffling incoherent at key moments, but they both look and sound as good as ever on the big screen. Predictably, two of my personal favourite films of all time.

Keir Dullea and Rutger Hauer

Incidentally, in 2009 I wrote a piece about which bits of Stanley Kubrick’s movie had accurately predicted the future and which bits had dated, and it turns out 15 years later my blog post has aged worse than the film.

It Came from Outer Space – IN 3D! (1953), Jack Arnold – Another one that I would have seen either late night or early evening on BBC2 or Channel 4 back in the day but I am a total sucker for any time they put these on in the original 3D – see Creature From The Black Lagoon passim – and what a lovely hot mess of atomic age cold war paranoia mixed with small town fear of the outsider it is. The invasion of the strange aliens is deftly echoed in the local concern that Richard Carlson’s flashy big city astronomer has seduced Barbara Rush’s rural school teacher with his fancy telescope.

Aaaaaaaaaarrrrrggghhhh!

Read more of my one-line spoiler-free reviews of everything I’ve watched in the cinema.