Category: Live Action

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

I, the Song

Director – Dechen Roder – 2024 – Bhutan, Norway, Italy, France – 112m

*****

A woman fired from her teacher’s job for appearing in an online sex video she claims is of someone else sets out to find her doppelgänger and clear her name – winner of Best Director in the Critics’ Picks Competition of the 28th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival; plays Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle at 7.30 pm, Tuesday, July 15th 2025 as part of GemArts Masala Festival

This starts off deceptively with singing children’s voices, cutting into accompanying images of a school play with the children costumed as various types of flowers. The camera moves slowly to the back of the school hall where watching teacher Nima (Tandin Bidha) is told she is urgently needed in the office of the principal (Kezang Dorjee aka Kazee), where she finds herself being fired because of the video, now widely seen online, in which she appears. She protests that the person in the video isn’t her, but the principal says he can’t have her seen on school premises with so many parents about today.

She phones her boyfriend Penjor (Dorji Wangdi), who is in the middle of a gig hosting traditional Bhutanese folk plays.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

The Shrouds

Director – David Cronenberg – 2024 – Canada, France – Cert. 15 – 120m

*****

An entrepreneur who has created graveyard corpse-viewing technology to cope with his late wife’s death by cancer finds his inner world disrupted when his creation is vandalised and hacked – out in UK cinemas on Friday, July 4th

She (Diane Kruger from The 355, Simon Kinberg, 2022; Disorder, Alice Winocour, 2015; Inglorious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino, 2009; Joyeux Noel, Christian Carion, 2005; Troy, Wolfgang Petersen, 2004) lies dead on a slab suspended on air in an underground cave. He (Vincent Cassel from A Dangerous Method, 2011; Eastern Promises, 2007, both David Cronenberg; Default, Choi Kook-Hee, 2018; Trance, Danny Boyle, 2013; Black Swan, Darren Aronofsky, 2010; Mesrine, Jean-François Richet, 2008; La Haine, Matthieu Kassovitz, 1995) screams. He is Karsh, an entrepreneur who has set up the first in a projected series of high-tech cemeteries. Thanks to his proprietary technology GraveTech, clients can install the body of their loved one in a shroud, a wraparound artefact resembling clothing fitted with cameras which record images of the deceased’s decaying body in real time, accessible for viewing by the client whenever they wish.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Jurassic World Rebirth

Director – Gareth Edwards – 2025 – US – Cert. – 134m

***

A group of mercenary hunters and a traumatised family find themselves on an equatorial island populated by mutant dinosaurs – out in UK cinemas on Wednesday, July 2nd

The difficult seventh movie, made on a shorter production schedule than its predecessors – according to the production notes – and probably made too quickly for its own good. First there were three Jurassic Park movies, then there were three Jurassic World movies, and now there’s a seventh Jurassic. What to call it? Jurassic Beyond? Jurassic Outside? Jurassic Environment? Jurassic Habitat? Jurassic Equator? Jurassic Island? Jurassic Laboratory? Jurassic Lab? Jurassic Experiment? Jurassic Mutation? (Those took me a mere five minutes.) No: unable to think of a word to replace Park or World, this one is saddled with the marketing-led Jurassic World Rebirth. Which no doubt will do the job, but when Michael Crichton coined Jurassic Park for his novel’s title and Spielberg ran with it, no-one outside of palaeontologists and dinosaur-geeks (I number myself among the latter) knew what ‘Jurassic’ was. It didn’t matter: it was Spielberg and dinosaurs, that sold it, and the film more than lived up to the lure and the promise.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Ran
(乱)

Director – Akira Kurosawa – 1985 – Japan – Cert. 15 – 162m

*****

Back out in cinemas this Friday to commemorate its 40th anniversary.

—

Jeremy Clarke on Akira Kurosawa’s live action epic.

Ran is Akira Kurosawa’s remarkable 1985 free adaptation of King Lear.

More than any other Japanese film director, Akira Kurosawa (1910-1998) is responsible for bringing that country’s movies to the attention of international audiences. His first big exposure abroad came with the jidaigeki or period drama Rashomon (1950) which dramatised the story of a rape victim from different, successive character viewpoints. Entered in the 1951 Venice Film Festival without his knowledge, Rashomon unexpectedly picked up the prestigious Golden Lion award.

Subsequent international successes included Seven Samurai (1954) and Yojimbo (The Bodyguard) (1961). By the nineteen eighties, his productions had grown less frequent and more lavish with Kagemusha (The Shadow Warrior) (1980) and Ran (1985) requiring budgetary input from outside Japan.

Kurosawa’s influence abroad has been consolidated by various remakes of his films, with other countries adapting the Japanese elements to their own cultures. Many of his biggest international successes being period pieces have leant themselves to obvious translation into Westerns where gun-slinging cowboys were easily substituted for sword-wielding samurai.… Read the rest

Categories
Documentary Features Live Action Movies

The Road to Patagonia

Directed by Matty Hannon
Certificate 15
90 minutes
Released 27 June

In his mid-20s, former ecology student and keen surfer Matty Hannon returns to Melbourne, Australia. For five years, from age 21 to 26, he has lived alongside one of Indonesia’s Sumatran Island tribes, a utopia where people live in harmony with nature, assigning spirit gods to rivers and mountains. And then there are the waves.

Melbourne hits him with culture shock; a culture that refers to its people as consumers, where national success is measured in terms of how much they buy. Depression is common. Hannon records his response in this documentary as he gets out, takes a tent to Alaska, then… on his motorbike… travels down the West Coast of the Americas to Patagonia… [read the rest in the Issue 4 – 2025 edition of Reform]

[Read my longer review for this site here.]

Subscribe to Reform

Trailer:

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

From Hilde, With Love
(In Liebe, Eure Hilde)

Director – Andreas Dresen – 2024 – Germany – Cert. 15 – 125m

***

A young, pregnant German woman involved with a group of radicals trying to undermine the Nazi regime is arrested and put on trial with a possible death sentence – out in UK cinemas accompanied by the Kate Bush short Little Shrew (Snowflake) on Friday, June 27th

Its opening, pre-credits moments of a German mother and bespectacled, pregnant adult daughter picking strawberries in the garden belies what is to follow, but that sense of calm doesn’t last long as two barely seen black cars pull up in the lane. The pregnant woman packs a suitcase before the two men accompany her out to the car. How long will it take, she asks. That depends on you, comes the reply.

In the lift, the big, burly man asks after her pregnancy. It seems his wife, too, is expecting. When she is questioned in the interrogation room, she is asked about her husband’s radio equipment, on the table in front of her in a suitcase. She makes up stories about her innocence and ignorance, but they (including, when we finally see him, the man from the lift) run rings round her.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Red Path
(Les Enfants Rouges,
الذراري الحمر)

Director – Lotfi Achour – 2024 – Tunisia, France, Belgium, Poland, Saudi Arabia, Qatar – Cert. 15 – 100m

*****

When paradise is suddenly taken away from him, a young innocent must come to terms with stark and brutal forces of corruption and death – searing drama is out in UK cinemas on Friday, June 20th

** SPOILER ALERT**

Two boys are herding a flock of sheep cross-country. The older one (Wided Dabebi), who tells the younger not to be scared, but to watch out for mines, knows his way around. The younger one Achraf (Ali Helali) hasn’t told his mother he’s doing this, because he knows she would have forbidden him from coming.

They are navigating the slopes of Tunisia’s Mighila Mountain, which is fabulously beautiful. They find a perfect place to give the sheep a rest, and the older one shows the younger a good spot – they climb to the top of a ridge, with a stunning, panoramic view of the local landscape, and bask on the rock in the sunshine. Life is good. In fact, it is paradise. After some time, they head back down to the watering hole they left earlier, plunge their heads in the cool water.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Live Action Movies

Elio

Directors – Adrian Molina, Madeline Sharafian, Domee Shi – 2025 – US – Cert. PG – 99m

****

An alien-obsessed orphan, whose aunt tracks space debris for NASA, makes contact with aliens – latest Disney / Pixar romp is out in UK cinemas on Friday, June 20th

Young lad Elio Solis (voice: Yonas Kibreab) has never got over the death of his parents, and lives with his aunt Olga (voice: Zoe Soldana) with whom he doesn’t really get on, even though she puts him before the advancement of her career at NASA, where she has forgone aspiring to astronaut training and works tracking space debris. One day, she is having a meal in the large work canteen with him when he vanishes, sneaking in to an exhibit about the cosmos to hear a Carl Sagan monologue about the possibility of extra-terrestrial life.

Following this incident, Elio decides that all his problems would be solved if only aliens would abduct him, and goes out of his way to make this happen, drawing a big “Abduct me” message / diagram on the beach and lying in the middle of it so he can be clearly seen from the sky, not to mention sending ham radio messages to the stars with his woefully inadequate radio transmitter.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Hidden
(Caché)

Director – Michael Haneke – 2005 – Austria, France, Germany – Cert.15 – 117m

***1/2

Covertly delivered VHS videotapes suggest to an upper middle class family that they are being watched, and begin to tease out guilt for an incident in the husband’s past – the closing film of Complicit: A Michael Haneke Retrospective, in UK cinemas from Friday, June 20th

A lengthy, locked-off camera shot of a street. A woman (Juliette Binoche) leaves the house through a full body height metal gate that seems to serve a security function, although the street seems largely quiet and unremarkable. Then the image starts to rewind in the manner of a videotape; what we are watching is a recording in the videotape player of a couple Georges and Anne Laurent (Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche), who are discussing its contents. The tape has been left outside their front door for reasons that are not immediately obvious and by person or persons unknown.

This opening shot is mirrored by another static shot at the end taken from outside the school of their son Pierrot (Lester Makedonsky) as pupils leave, in which… well, you’ll have to see for yourself, and director Haneke doesn’t make it easy to see what it is he wants you to see, so you’ll have to work at it… and even then, you may miss it.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Funny Games
(1997)

Director – Michael Haneke – 1997 – Austria – Cert.18 – 103m

*****

Two young men turn up at a family’s holiday home to humiliate and torture them via a series of controlling exchanges (or games) – plays in Complicit: A Michael Haneke Retrospective, in UK cinemas from Saturday, June 21st

Review originally published in Shivers around the time of the film’s 1997 London Film Festival premiere

With Hollywood currently rediscovering the profitability of slick, fun horror movies in the blockbusting wake of Scream (Wes Craven, 1996), Europe proves itself well capable of delivering work at the other end of the spectrum. Funny Games is the latest brainchild of Austrian-born Michael Haneke (Benny’s Video, 1992).

Like Scream, Funny Games never misses a trick on the technical level. Unlike Scream, its intention is not a non-stop, mass-consumption, vicarious thrill-laden roller coaster ride (which Funny Games certainly isn’t) but a rigorous and unrelenting, one way descent into madness, fear and despair depicting violence, mutilation, torture and – above all – amoral manipulation of one’s fellow human beings – as truly horrific.

To dismiss Funny Games as either moral lecture or morality play would do it great disservice. Never afraid to plumb the most violent depths of human depravity to make its points, it sidesteps the usual blinkered, narrow‑minded arguments about both the portrayal of violence in the media and its place in modern life.… Read the rest