Category: Features

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Features Live Action Movies

Cottontail
(コットンテール)

Director – Patrick Dickinson – 2023 – UK, Japan – Cert. 12a – 94m

****

A Japanese widower comes to England to scatter his late wife’s ashes at Lake Windermere – out in UK cinemas on Friday, February 14th

Kenzaburo (Lily Franky from Shoplifters, 2018; After the Storm, 2016; Like Father, Like Son, 2013, all Hirokazu Kore-eda), on occasion abbreviated to Ken, seems somehow lost as he wanders around Tokyo, looking out over a cityscape of roofs, travelling in passenger train carriages, wandering round a food market in search of octopus for he and his wife’s anniversary meal. 

He wistfully observes a live specimen in a tank. It’s not yet in season and the prices are ridiculous, so he shoplifts a packet, taking it to the restaurant where he and his wife Akiko had their first date all those years ago. She (Yuri Tsunematsu from Wife of a Spy, 2020; Before We Vanish, 2017, both Kiyoshi Kurosawa) comes in young as ever, as is he (Kosei Kudo), that pendant on her neck. He ignores the question from the present day chef (Hiroshi Okawa) as to how she’s doing.

Back at his flat, his panicking, besuited son Toshi (Ryo Nishikido) gets him ready for the funeral.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Bridget Jones
Mad about the Boy

Director – Michael Morris – 2025 – UK – Cert. 15 – 124m

*****

Following the death of her husband, Bridget must carry on raising her kids even as she restarts her career and attempts to find love, sex and romance once again – out in UK cinemas on Thursday, February 13th

The character of Bridget Jones first burst onto cinema screens in Bridget Jones’s Diary (Sharon Maguire, 2001) in what turned out to be a hugely successful adaptation of a hugely successful publishing phenomenon. The book spawned three more volumes, and the film spawned adaptations of them. For reasons best known to the producers, they skipped the third published book Bridget Jones: Mad about the Boy to film the fourth one, Bridget Jones’ Baby, as the third movie.

The reason may be that Mad about the Boy is set following the death of the heroine’s beloved husband, a top human rights lawyer, making her not the single woman of the first film, but a widow navigating not just life, with all its ups and downs, but grief, which doesn’t sound like a great premise for a comedy. The script, co-written like its three predecessors by author Helen Felding, doesn’t shirk this difficult subject either.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Qualia
(Qualia,
クオリア)

Director – Ryo Ushimaru – 2023 – Japan – 96m

*****

A bizarre drama plays out among a group of people running a chicken farm – plays UK cinemas in the Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme 2025 which runs from Friday, 7th February to Monday, 31st March

Wheelchair-bound Satomi (Maya Kudamatsu) likes to hunt. So sister-in-law Yuko (Kokone Sasaki) takes her out game shooting. Yuko is a people pleaser: she likes to help. Disability nothwithstanding, Satomi is the type that likes to order people around. She has Yuko wrapped around her little finger to the extent that she can get Yuko to phone the air con repair man on his annual leave, insist he come and fix the system while he’s on holiday and even absolve Satomi of any involvement during the phone call. Yuko is, to say the least, compliant, while Satomi is a bully.

Yuko’s small holding, battery chicken farmer husband Ryosuke (Kenta Kiguchi) delivers freshly laid eggs to the egg station every morning, where he pretends not to know his mistress Saki (Ruka Ishikawa), instead confining their relationship to a hidden away hotel room later in the day. Here, she shows him her positive pregnancy test.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

September 5

Director – Tim Fehlbaum – 2024 – US, Germany – Cert. 15 – 95m

****1/2

A dramatisation of the events of September 5, 1972 when broadcast TV sports journalists found themselves covering the terrorist kidnapping of Israeli athletes in the Olympic village – out in UK cinemas on Thursday, February 6th

There have been movies about the terrorist incident at the 1972 Olympics before: the documentary One Day in September (Kevin McDonald, 1999) and the drama about its aftermath Munich (Steven Spielberg, 2005). Like the latter, September 5 is a drama. What marks it out as different, however, is that it tells the story from the point of view of broadcast journalists working out of a studio.

In this respect, its feeling for capturing the processes of live US network television renders it not entirely dissimilar to recent release Saturday Night (Jason Reitman, 2024), yet in many ways, it couldn’t be more different. Saturday Night is about the birth of a legendary US comedy show; September 5 starts in an arguably similar area of entertainment (live sports coverage) before swiftly moving into the wider, more problematic area of live broadcast news coverage. The coverage of the incident around which September 5 is based forever changed the face of broadcast television media.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Schindler’s List

Director – Steven Spielberg – 1993 – US – Cert. 15 – 195m

*****

World War Two allows failed Czech industrialist Schindler to come into his own as he saves Jews from Aushwitz by employing them as slave labour in his factories– out in UK cinemas on Friday, February 18th 1994

Unsuccessful Czech businessman Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson) comes into his own during the war years as a supplier of pots and pans to the German Army. Although a badge-wearing Party member, he is neither well- nor ill-disposed towards Jews, simply an honest businessman seizing the opportunities presented by their persecution under Nazi rule. As the Jews are ghettoised in Krakow, he realises that here are investors with capital to burn for whom it is illegal to invest in business under their own names – in other words, surefire financiers; here are workers required to work all hours of the day for virtually nothing, keeping down a businessman’s cost.

He hires brilliant, ghettoised, Jewish accountant Itzhak Stern (Ben Kingsley) to run his enterprise. Under the command of ruthless commandant Amon Goeth (an astonishing turn from an unknown Ralph Fiennes which catapaulted the actor to overnight stardom) the ghettos are cleared, and the Jews moved into Plasnow concentration camp, but Schindler continues undeterred until the transportation of inmates to the Auschwitz death camp, against which he compiles Schindler’s List of 1 100 Jews necessary to run his factory, saving them from extermination.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Bring Them Down

Director – Chris Andrews – 2024 – Ireland – Cert. 15 – 105m

**

A feud between two neighbouring, Irish sheep farmers is made worse by toxic masculinity on both sides– out in UK and Ireland cinemas on Friday, February 7th

Two women in a car are being driven down an isolated country road. The older one, Peggy (Susan Lynch), is in the passenger seat talking to the unseen driver about why she’s finally leaving his father. The younger one Catherine (Nora-Jane Noone) sits horrified in the back seat as the driver reacts to the conversation by going faster and faster. The older one repeatedly and with increasing urgency shouts at the driver, “Mikey, slow down.” Eventually, there is a crash. Catherine’s face is disfigured. Peggy doesn’t survive.

The car crash opening is hardly new to the movies, gracing films as diverse as thrillers Dead Calm (Philip Noyce, 1989) and The Descent (Neil Marshall, 2005), and children’s drama Fly Away Home (Carroll Ballard, 1996). The scene is used differently here, with the crash caused by wilfully bad driving, in turn caused by the driver’s emotional immaturity, which signals the intention of the piece, most of the narrative of which takes place some years later.… Read the rest

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Animation Features Movies Music

The Colors Within
Kimi no Iro,
きみの色,
lit. Your Color)

Director – Naoko Yamada – 2024 – Japan – Cert. PG – 101m

*****

A Catholic schoolgirl with synaesthesia inadvertently forms a rock band who find themselves playing a gig at her school – out in UK cinemas on Friday, January 31st

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.

That’s the Serenity Prayer, and it opens this remarkable story of a schoolgirl in a boarding school as she prays it to a statue of Mary in the school chapel. A scene of her as a small girl attending the dance class, and scenes of her seeing other pupils in the corridor, are rendered in vivid, blinding colour where bright white light constantly threatens to engulf the pastel shades in which the girl sees. For more on synaesthesia, see A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things (Mark Cousins, 2024).

If you were to land in the middle of this film with no context, for a frame, or a scene (drawn animation parlance for a single shot), you could be forgiven for thinking there was something wrong with the print, or the colour balance. I am immediately reminded of the reviewer who said of Black Narcissus (Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, 1947) that the film was so visually perfect that it could be shown out of focus and upside down and the audience would still be enraptured by its kinetic abstract colour properties.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Hard Truths

Director – Mike Leigh – 2024 – UK – Cert. 12a – 97m

*****

A woman with a chip on her shoulder makes her own and her extended family’s lives a misery, as she does with everyone with whom she comes into contact – expertly crafted slice of Brit Misery Porn is out in UK cinemas on Friday, January 31st

While her plumber husband Curtley (David Webber) and his assistant Virgil (Jonathan Livingstone) are out all day working, which seems to consist of removing plumbing fixtures and fittings from unoccupied houses, Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) stays at home berating their 22-year-old, videogame-playing son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett) for being unemployed and lacking in ambition.

It’s as if the world has it in for Pansy, and she takes it out on anything and everything. Without realising what she is doing, she turns the family home into a place of misery, making her son and husband’s lives a living hell through no fault of their own.

She couldn’t be more different from her sassy and outgoing sister Chantelle (Michelle Austin), who despite being abandoned by her husband has made a go of life, passing on her ‘can do’ spirit to her two moderately successful daughters Kayla (Ani Nelson) and Aleisha (Sophia Brown).… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Saturday Night

Director – Jason Reitman – 2024 – US – Cert. 15 – 109m

***

A journey through the behind the scenes chaos of the 90 minutes prior to the broadcast of NBC’s first ever Saturday Night Live show – out in UK cinemas on Friday, January 31st

In the mid-1970s, US TV network NBC made a monumental change to its scheduled programming. For the best part of a decade, it had broadcast reruns of The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson on Saturdays and Sundays, and wanted something new which would capture the 19-34-year-old audience demographic, developing a replacement show with young, independent producer Lorne Michaels, the first episode of which was broadcast live on October 11, 1975. The show, which is still running on NBC today, became something of an institution in the US, kickstarting the careers of numerous comedy stars and writers who would go on to achieve considerable success in US film and TV.

Saturday Night is an attempt to put on the screen the chaos of that first night’s preparation, in which no-one quite knows if the show’s broadcast is going to go ahead, or whether the network will flip a switch and play the Carson rerun tape it has lined up in case Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle) can’t get his show together.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Old Fox
(Lao Hu Li,
老狐狸)

Director – Hsaio Ya-chuan – 2023 – Taiwan – Cert. – 112m

*****

In 1990, against the backdrop of burgeoning share prices, a young boy starts taking car rides from his father’s landlord – is Taiwan’s entry for 2025 Best International Feature – was out in US cinemas on Friday, January 18th 2024

11-year-old Jie (Bae Run-yin) lives with his widowed dad (Liu Kuan-ting), the Maitre d’ at a posh, local restaurant, in their small, cramped apartment above Li’s cafe. Every week, Miss Lin (Eugenie Liu), who the boy calls Miss Pretty, calls by to collect the rent, which both Li (Ban Tie-tsiang) and Jie’s dad regularly pay. Li plans to better himself, and his friend The Major (Kao Ying-hsuan) helps him out by investing cash in stocks and shares and earning Li massive returns.

Jie’s dad is involved in no such scheme, but Jie yearns for a bigger home and with his savings has told the boy they should be able to afford to buy their own place in about three years. But rapidly rising share prices, dragging property prices up along with them, kill his three-year dream.

His dad is a resourceful sort who sews all Jie’s clothes.… Read the rest