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Anton Bitel

Anton Bitel's reviews only count toward the Tomatometer® when published at Tomatometer-approved publication(s).
Biography:

Dr Anton Bitel was born in Australia in 1970, and has lived in the UK since 1989. Now a father of twins, occasional academic and full-time caffeine junkie, he compensates for a general sense of disgruntlement by moping about in darkened cinemas watching other people's joys and sorrows. He seeks elusive thrills from all genres (even romantic comedy), but tends to prefer anything extreme, odd, miserable or tawdry. He is at home with horror, 'arthouse', the avant garde and Oriental cinema. Anton currently freelances for Film4, musicOMH (where he is a staff writer), Eye for Film, Film International and Little White Lies, and was for three years one of the principal contributors to the now semi-defunct Movie Gazette.

Favorites:

Eraserhead Brazil Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter...and Spring Apocalypse Now The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) M. Houlot's Holiday Ichi the Killer Last Year in Marienbad Batman (1966) Synecdoche, New York

Location:

Oxford, UK

Reviews

Movies TV Shows
Return to Silent Hill (2026) 18% 4/5 EDIT “Return to Silent Hill is, without question, both a franchise film and a reboot of an adaptation of a game already filled with filmic tropes, but it is also the most sophisticated in the series.” – SciFiNow Jan 26, 2026 Full Review Avatar: Fire and Ash (2025) 66% 3/5 EDIT “Avatar: Fire and Ash ends with certain loose narrative threads, but also at a point where, should it fail to achieve the box-office billions of its predecessors, there is sufficient closure for the saga to stop.” – SciFiNow Dec 16, 2025 Full Review Animalia (2023) 100% 4/5 EDIT “This debut feature from co-writer/director Sofia Alaoui is a mystery – enigmatic and abstract.” – Little White Lies Dec 12, 2025 Full Review Silent Night, Deadly Night (2025) 77% 4/5 EDIT “A strange love story between two good people who do very bad things.” – SciFiNow Dec 8, 2025 Full Review Sisu: Road to Revenge (2025) 95% 4/5 EDIT “In what is essentially a long, barrelling chase movie, the action is relentless, and has little respect for the limits of physiological suffering let alone physical laws. ” – Little White Lies Nov 24, 2025 Full Review The Ice Tower (2025) 80% 5/5 EDIT “The Ice Tower is as fragile and delicate as a snowflake, as disorientating and mysterious as adolescence, and as dark as a winter’s night.” – Little White Lies Nov 24, 2025 Full Review A Minecraft Movie (2025) 48% EDIT “Along the way there is cubist eye candy and colourful adventure for children, some blue innuendo for adults, and Jack Black’s absurdist singing for everyone.” – Sight & Sound Nov 5, 2025 Full Review Bulk (2025) 83% EDIT “Bulk is not just home-made filmmaking, but also creates, like Paul King’s Bunny and the Bull (2009), Bill Watterson’s Dave Made A Maze (2017) and Wes Terray’s Precarious (2020), a whole world, indeed worlds largely from a single domestic location. ” – Sight & Sound Nov 4, 2025 Full Review Above the Knee (2024) 4/5 EDIT “It is a thrilling insider view into one man’s damaged, deranged drives -- and his desire, ironically, for integrity, even if, in order to attain it, he must deceive, delude, and destroy a perfectly good part of himself.” – SciFiNow Nov 3, 2025 Full Review Black Phone 2 (2025) 72% 3/5 EDIT “For all her ​‘woo-woo’ powers, Gwen remains a refreshingly foul-mouthed teenager, and this time around, her and Finney’s storylines dovetail more neatly and compellingly. ” – Little White Lies Oct 17, 2025 Full Review Odyssey (2025) 93% 4/5 EDIT “Odyssey is an odd if always engaging film about the devil’s business, be it housing rentals or profit-driven murder, where ultimately, even as the latest tech is embraced, there will always be no school like the old school.” – SciFiNow Sep 15, 2025 Full Review 213 Bones (2025) 3/5 EDIT “More interesting as a dissection of a fractured Twin Peaks-like lumbertown community before the Internet, before smartphones, and before the arrival of self-aware, self-reflexive irony in horror.” – SciFiNow Sep 15, 2025 Full Review Blockhead (2025) 4/5 EDIT “This sophisticated poioumenon is concerned precisely with plagiarism, appropriation and theft, and the way that these crimes of, and against, art can be transformed into random acts of great idiosyncrasy and originality.” – SciFiNow Sep 15, 2025 Full Review Cognaitive (2025) 4/5 EDIT “May turn even the most dedicated computer geek into a Luddite technophobe.” – SciFiNow Sep 15, 2025 Full Review The Home (2025) 29% 3/5 EDIT “Fortunately there is an ecstatically hyperviolent climax, hitting hard like a raging storm, which will make even the most jaded horror fan feel young again.” – SciFiNow Sep 15, 2025 Full Review Your Host (2025) 71% 4/5 EDIT “Your Host really is derivative of James Wan’s Saw (2004). Yet where the puppet master in Wan’s film “never killed anyone, he finds ways for them to kill themselves”, Barry is not afraid to get his hands a little dirty.” – SciFiNow Sep 15, 2025 Full Review Appofeniacs (2025) 91% 4/5 EDIT “Energetic, funny and weird, Appofeniacs is a cautionary tale of where our new age of digital fakery might be headed. ” – SciFiNow Sep 15, 2025 Full Review In a Cold Vein (2025) 4/5 EDIT “The key reference point here is the Coen brothers’ debut Blood SImple (1984), but this low-budget chase in the dark travels back and forth along its own low-key trajectory.” – SciFiNow Sep 15, 2025 Full Review The Red Mask (2025) 4/5 EDIT “It is at once a home invasion slasher with all the subtlety of an axe to the chest or a pitchfork to the head, and a convoluted postmodern poioumenon tracking its own composition from numerous namechecked sources. ” – SciFiNow Sep 15, 2025 Full Review Blood Shine (2025) 4/5 EDIT “Blood Shine is a thoughtful, thoroughly discombobulating horror which feels like a breath of fresh air, or perhaps like the coming of a new dawn. ” – SciFiNow Sep 15, 2025 Full Review Pig Hill (2025) 4/5 EDIT “It is a horror film about horror films. It is also a tense thriller that goes to some very dark places, and even finds some sympathy for its devil.” – SciFiNow Sep 15, 2025 Full Review Bone Lake (2024) 84% 4/5 EDIT “There is always, underlying these sweaty, sexy tropes, the insidious threat of a more visceral danger.” – SciFiNow Sep 15, 2025 Full Review Together (2025) 89% 4/5 EDIT “This hyperbolic romance ultimately works not just because of its participants' considerable commitment to their parts, but also, as in any successful relationship, thanks to their persistent good sense of humour.” – SciFiNow Aug 15, 2025 Full Review Weapons (2025) 93% 5/5 EDIT “Utterly thrilling and freakily surreal from beginning to end.” – SciFiNow Aug 6, 2025 Full Review The Serpent's Skin (2025) 100% 4/5 EDIT “Mackay and her regular co-writer Benjamin Pahl Robinson pepper the narrative with contemporary political slogans to ensure that their protagonist’s supernatural superheroics are always grounded in real-world struggles. ” – SciFiNow Aug 1, 2025 Full Review
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