Category: Features

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Features Live Action Movies Music

Sinners

Director – Ryan Coogler – 2025 – US – Cert. 15 – 138m

*****

In 1932, a young blues guitarist finds himself out of his depth when two brothers open a juke joint which comes unexpectedly under siege from supernatural forces – out in UK cinemas on Friday, April 18th

It’s a strange thing, but Warner Bros., which has a reputation for tough guy movies from its hard-edged gangster movies of the 1930s, has never made a movie about the blues. If that seems something of a stretch as an assumption, humour me here. The blues came out of the hardships of the Afro-American experience – white racism and the slave trade, poverty and hardship, and there was something raw about it, much as with those early gangster movies that shaped the Studio’s identity.

The idea of Warner Bros. making a movie about the black experience and the blues (or, indeed, building an entire genre around that idea) seems so obvious that it’s a wonder the Studio never did it before. Perhaps it’s significant that Warner Bros. were the Studio that made Elvis (Baz Luhrmann, 2023), which touches on such material.

Warner Bros. also has the first talking picture, The Jazz Singer (Alan Crosland, 1927), hardwired into its DNA.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Shark Skin Man
and Peach Hip Girl
(Samehada Otoko
to Momojiri Onna,
鮫肌男と桃尻女)

Director – Katsuhito Ishii – 1998 – Japan – Cert. 15 – 108m

*****

Arresting and highly inventive thriller is out as a standalone Blu-ray release in the UK from Monday, April 14th 2025, also on digital, having previously appeared as the first disc of the three disc release Katsuhito Ishii Collection from Third Window Films just over a year ago (when the following piece was written for All the Anime).

Deriving its odd title from a literal translation of the leads’ surnames, Katsuhito Ishii’s highly original gangster movie from 1998 is based on a familiar plot: a man runs off with the mob’s money, and a lady companion. Or, as pioneering French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard once put it: all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun.

Shark Skin Man and Peach Hip Girl has much the same strengths as Godard when he’s on form. Ishii demonstrates a similar flair for taking actors or actresses and having them do what they do on camera so that it’s completely absorbing to watch: look no further than the extraordinary title sequence which starts about five minutes in and consists of little more than names and images of all the major cast members against a white background with overlaid black line animation images.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

This is England

Director – Shane Meadows – 2006 – UK – Cert. 18 – 101m

A young, pre-teenage lad falls in with a gang of skinheads in Post-Falklands War, Thatcherite Britain – originally published in Third Way in 2007, to coincide with the film’s UK release date

The above one line synopsis, although accurate, doesn’t even begin to convey the piece’s considerable strengths. (Note: Meadows would subsequently develop this into a series of TV dramas in the UK using many of the same cast and characters: This is England ‘86, This is England ‘88 and This is England ‘90 in 2010, 2011 and 2015 respectively.)

Meadows is a unique and powerful voice, a teenage school dropout who kicked off his career in features with 1996’s 60-minute feature Small Time and went on to greater things TwentyFourSeven (1997) and critical favourite A Room For Romeo Brass (1999). His highest profile effort is the less impressive Once Upon A Time In The Midlands (2002), which suffers from trying to make an epic with an all-star British cast. Meadows is not about big movies (not yet, anyway) – he began shooting movies with mates as actors and has an uncanny ability to draw incredible performances out of actors and non-actors alike, based as much on the people concerned as on their acting ability.… Read the rest

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Animation Features Movies

Boonie Bears
Future Reborn
(Xiong Chu Mo
Chong Qi Wei Lai,
熊出没·重启未来)

Directors – Lin Yongchang, Qu Caijia – 2025 – China – Cert. PG – 107m

**

Park Ranger Vick unwittingly releases pink spores into the atmosphere, reducing the earth to a toxic wasteland, then he and the bears time travel forward 100 years to sort it out– in a dubbed format for family audiences – out in UK cinemas on Friday, April 18th

One hundred years in the future, cities (and a cute rabbit that gets less than a minute of screen time) have been subsumed by toxic spores. This is because of one man. Flashback into the present and Park Ranger Vick (voice in the English language dub: Chris Boike), familiar from previous Boonie Bears outings, holding a cute baby, seeing the child’s beautiful mother approach them and then coming down to Earth when her tourist husband turns up behind him.

The disappointed Vick guides his charges to snow-covered mountain Crystal Peak, where a combination of awkward customers and Vick’s slipping on a banana skin causes a noise which triggers a deadly avalanche. And a wormhole opening in the sky, from which falls a boy with jetpack shoes. He perches on a high branch, marvelling as a butterfly alights on his glove.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Babe

Director – Chris Noonan – 1995 – Australia – Cert. PG (2025), U (1995) – 92m

The story of a sheep that thinks it’s a dog – back in cinemas 30 years later on Friday, April 11th 2025, with a higher BBFC classification rating. The below is my review from What’s On in London in 1995, where I badgered my editor to make it the Film of the Week.

The very different worlds of Gloucestershire-born children’s author Dick King-Smith and Australian production company Kennedy Miller (Mad Max, George Miller, 1979; The Year My Voice Broke, John Duigan, 1987; Dead Calm, Phillip Noyce, 1989) might appear to have little in common. Then along comes Babe, a Kennedy-Miller adaptation of King-Smith’s hilarious fable The Sheep-Pig in which Farmer Hogget’s sole piglet Babe decides to become a sheepdog. Although the book is a very fine (and highly recommended) example of the children’s book, it’s hardly groundbreaking – we’ve read tales about talking animals before. For that matter, too, we’ve seen films with talking animals before – many of the better ones made by Disney.

What we haven’t seen before is this conceit pulled off flawlessly in live action.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

The Return

Director – Uberto Pasolini – 2024 – Italy, Greece, UK, France – Cert. 15 – 116m

**

Odysseus returns home to his island kingdom of Ithaca ten years after the Trojan War to find faithful wife Penelope fending off insistent suitors who threaten to kill son Telemachus – out in UK cinemas on Friday, April 11th

A young man (Charlie Plummer) stares out on clear blue Mediterranean waters crashing against the shore’s rocks. In an interior, an older woman (Juliette Binoche) weaves at her shuttle. On a beach, unobserved, the flotsam and jetsam of a shipwreck wash up, as does the unconscious body of a man (Ralph Fiennes). In the local village, a man threatens the young man with a knife.

Under pressure to marry one of the men in the village – her husband Odysseus, the island’s king, never having returned from the Trojan War – Penelope (for the woman played here by Binoche is she) claims she will do so once she has finished weaving her grandfather’s shroud. She is accused of having been weaving it for months.

The Fiennes character is rescued from the sea by a boat, only for crew members to throw him back into the sea.… Read the rest

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Animation Features Movies

The Most Precious
of Cargoes
(La Plus Précieuse
des Marchandises)

Director – Michel Hazanavicius – 2024 – France – Cert. 12a – 81m

*****

In Winter in a forest, a poor woodcutter’s wife rescues an abandoned baby thrown from a passing train and, despite her husband’s misgivings, raises the girl as her own – out in UK and Ireland cinemas on Friday, April 4th

Once upon a time… In the woods through which many trains pass… In a war… Yes, that war… In Winter, when everything is under snow… The wife (voice: Dominique Blanc from La Reine Margot, Patrice Chéreau, 1994; Indochine, Régis Wargnier, 1992) of a poor woodcutter, unable to have children, is outside and prays to the Gods of the Trains. Whether they hear her and look upon her kindly, or whether they even exist, it’s impossible to say. Following her prayer, however, she hears the sound of a baby crying. How did the baby get there? Well, unbeknownst to the woman, a man in a goods wagon threw it out of a passing train. She locates the baby girl, takes it home, feeds it. It’s the child she never had.

Her husband, the woodcutter (voice: Grégory Gadebois from Everything Went Fine, François Ozon, 2021; Redoubtable, Michel Hazanavicius, 2017), on returning home, discovers the baby and is furious.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Novocaine
(2025)

Directors – Dan Berk, Robert Olsen – 2025 – US – Cert. 15 – 110m

*****

An assistant bank manager who is medically unable to feel pain pursues the bank robbers who have kidnapped his brand new and first ever girlfriend – out in UK cinemas on Friday, March 28th

(There have been several other movies with this title. Apart from having the same title, this one appears to be completely original.)

San Diego, California. Driving to work in gridlock, Nathan Caine (Jack Quaid) is the type to annoy fellow motorists by obsessively maintaining the correct space in front of his vehicle when no-one else is doing so. At work, he’s the assistant bank manager. He’s a genuinely nice guy who genuinely cares from people, such as long-standing customer Earl (Lou Beatty Jr.) who Nate helps through an unpleasant foreclosure on his workshop by doing things on a schedule that will help ease the man’s pain.

Also, there’s this new teller Sherry (Amber Midthunder) at the bank who Nate rather likes but can’t bring himself to talk to. In fact, despite her obvious attentions, he goes out of his way to avoid talking to her.

Somehow, she talks him into a lunch date where she has cherry pie and he… doesn’t.… Read the rest

Categories
Art Documentary Features Live Action Movies

War Paint
Women at War

The Crying Game. Between a Rock and a Hard Place 2017 by Marcelle Hanselaar

Director – Margy Kinmonth – 2025 – UK – Cert. 12a – 89m

*****

A look at the output of various women artists who have documented and dissected war, and what they can tell us – out in UK cinemas on Friday, March 28th

Although being promoted, reasonably enough, with an image from World War Two of women working with barrage balloons, right from the start in narration over its opening titles this breaks the mould for anyone expecting it to cover any one specific historical or geographical war. “I’m going to talk to women all round the world”, says director Kinmonth in regard to the concept of war as a catalyst for creativity. “What do women see that men don’t?” Quite apart from her gender, she is well-placed to tackle such a subject having recently made two documentaries on the subject of war artists: Eric Ravilious: Drawn to War (2022), War Art with Eddie Redmayne (2015), and many more before that on the subject of art in assorted social contexts.

The film is a compendium of interviews with living female artists or, in the cases of artists who’ve passed on, their descendants or proponents. Some of the names are familiar, such as Lee Miller, Maggi Hambling or Dame Rachel Whiteread, others much less so.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies

The First
Slam Dunk

All images: © I.T. PLANNING, INC. © 2022 THE FIRST SLAM DUNK Film Partners

Director – Takehiko Inoue – 2022 – Japan – Cert. 12a tbc – 124m

*****

A high school basketball team sets out to defeat the seemingly unstoppable league champions – on 4K UHD + Blu-ray Collector’s Edition, Steelbook, Blu-ray, and DVD on 24th March

The coastal town of Shohoku. 11-year-old Ryota Miyagi (voice: Miyuri Shimabukuro) lives in the shadow of his 14-year-old, elder brother and school basketball star Sota (voice: Gakuto Kajiwara). One evening, Sota takes his younger sibling out for a practice at the local court, playing as hard as he can to push Ryota, which makes the youngster want to push himself harder still. Sota then alienates Ryota by going on a fishing trip with his peer group rather than respond to Ryota’s demand to extend their practice session. When his elder brother is tragically killed at sea, Ryota must both step into both the role of man of the house and prove himself in the school basketball team.

By the time Ryota is 17 (voice: Shugo Nakamura), he is one of the players on the Shohoku school basketball team which itself faces challenges: specifically, if it is to win the national championships, it must defeat the the seemingly unstoppable reigning champions the Sannoh school basketball club and their star player Masashi Kawata (voice: Mitsuaki Kanuka), Ryota’s opposite number (both wear their team’s no.… Read the rest