Category: Live Action

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Animation Features Live Action Movies

Diplo,
The Mighty Dinosaur
(Smok Diplodok,
original title:
Diplodocus)

Director – Wojtek Wawszczyk – 2024 – Poland, Czechia – 84m

****

A young diplodocus must save the comic book in which he lives from being erased by the artist who created it – out in UK cinemas on Friday, September 19th

Animation. A bookworm (English voice: Wayne Greyson; Polish voice: Tadeusz Baranowski) appears, a “respected devourer of picture stories”. His function is not exactly that of a Greek chorus, more like a comic interlude who occasionally wanders into the narrative as light relief, to leaven the whole. Not that this likeable romp, is any need of leavening, but it’s a nice touch which nicely sets the tone for the whole piece. It’s about characters in a comic book whose very existence is threatened by the originating artist’s run-in with his commercially driven but artistically clueless lady publisher.

Beyond a vast, bubbling, primeval swamp in a crater, an inventive and adventurous, male diplodocus child (English voice: Julian Wanderer; Polish voice: Mikołaj Wachowski), Diplodocus as the credits calls him, nicks snails off a frog to use as climbing suckers. A butterfly flies past. Diplodocus gets sent to his room by his essentially conservative parents (English voices: Alyson Leigh Rosenfeld, Marc Thompson; Polish voices: Monica Pikuła, Grzegorz Pawlak) for wanting a life of adventure.… Read the rest

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Happyend
(HAPPYEND) 

Director – Neo Sora – 2024 – Japan – Cert. 12A – 113m

***

Two schoolboys play a prank on their despotic principal, who turns it into an excuse to introduce a high tech surveillance system – out in UK and Irish cinemas on Friday, September 19th

In a future dystopian Kobe, Japan, that looks remarkably like the present day Kobe, Japan, a group of highschoolers fail to get past the tough, power-dressed, Chinese lady bouncer to a club because they’re underage. A couple of the boys, Yuta (Hayato Kurihara) and Kou (Yukito Hidaka), wandering down a nearby back alley, notice a man in a dark vest taking a crate of beer into the building, strip off their white shirts to reveal similar dark vests underneath, and use crates of beer to gain back door access. Inside, the DJ is electrifying, the beat is strong and the gig is everything they had hoped. There is a police raid, but Kou can’t get Yuta to leave. Somehow, they and the DJ end up being the only ones there, and he gives them a talisman as a mark of respect and tells them to come back for the second set, which is better. But they don’t chance their luck.… Read the rest

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Animation Features Live Action Movies

Can I Get a Witness

Director – Ann Marie Fleming – 2024 – Canada – Cert. 12a – 100m

The subject matter *****

The film itself *

Can I fast-forward through the boring bits? Dystopian SF outing with good intentions may be the least watchable film of the year – out in UK cinemas on Friday, September 19th

Here’s a movie about one of the most important subjects there is which manages to turn itself into mind-numbingly tedious narrative. It’s hard to imagine more of a missed opportunity.

It’s the first day on the job for gifted sketch artist Kiah (Keira Jang), and before her experienced co-worker comes to pick her up, she’s already having misgivings. She doesn’t want to wear the old-fashioned dress her mother Ellie (Sandra Oh) has picked out for her (her mum bigs the item up as ‘vintage’). Her mum, meanwhile, takes delivery of a mysterious (and apparently equally vintage) fridge, plus a bottle of champagne (which she puts straight in the fridge), along with a mysterious wooden box for which she signs the obligatory paperwork without hesitation (she used to work getting people to sign these herself, so she knows the contents backwards).

Kiah is still getting herself ready when her co-worker turns up co-worker Daniel (Joel Oulette) turns up, so while he’s waiting, Ellie treats him to a piece of her special pie, which he finds delicious.… Read the rest

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Islands
(2025)

Director – Jan-Ole Gerster – 2025 – Germany – Cert. 15 – 123m

****1/2

A British ex-pat tennis coach working for a hotel on a sun-drenched island in the Canaries gets more than he bargained for when he befriends the couple whose young son he is coaching – out in UK cinemas on Friday, September 12th, and on BFI Player from Monday, October 27th

Tom (Sam Riley) wakes up in the desert and walks back to his car. He often nods off – at one point he is woken by a tap on his car window by the local police chief Jorge (Pep Ambròs) in a scene reminiscent of the one in Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), one of the differences being that he’s a local and he and the cop not only know each other, but are friends. (Another is that in Psycho, the motorist is a woman and the cop a man, which brings a whole other dynamic into play.) Jorge fines him for a traffic violation, but apologises for the fact, and the two men’s friendship is able to accommodate that.

The desert, or beach, is a very specific location: Fuerteventura, one of the Canary Islands. And Tom has manoeuvred his life into a very nice routine, thank you very much, as he sees it.… Read the rest

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The White Ribbon
(Das Weiße Band)

Director – Michael Haneke – 2009 – Austria, Germany – Cert. 15 – 144m

*****

Reviewed for Third Way magazine to coincide with UK release date 13/11/2009.

Plays in Complicit: A Michael Haneke Retrospective, in UK cinemas from Friday, June 6th and on BFI Player from Thursday, September 11th 2025.

Haneke’s first period drama for the big screen is set in 1913-14 in a Northern German Protestant village where strange accidents befall the community. A doctor (Rainer Bock), out riding a regular route, is brought down and injured by a wire between two trees. The wife of a farm labourer is killed when factory floorboards give way beneath her. Children are abducted. A baby’s window is left open in Midwinter. A building burns. But who is – or are – responsible?

The film sets out its cast of characters in terms of the social hierarchy. The landowning classes are represented by the local Baron (Ulrich Tukur), his wife (Ursina Lardi) and their child; the professional classes by a widowed doctor, the midwife (Susanne Lothar) “who has made herself useful to him”, the Baron’s steward (Josef Bierbichler), the village Pastor (Burghart Klaussner) and the local teacher (Christian Friedel) – also as an old man the narrator (Ernst Jacobi) – who is courting the nanny of the Baron’s son; the working classes by numerous agricultural labourers who generally feature less prominently in the story.… Read the rest

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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 and on BFI Player from Thursday, September 11th 2025

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

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The Piano Teacher
(La Pianiste)

Director – Michael Haneke – 2001 – Austria, France – Cert. 18 – 131m

*****

A masochistic piano teacher with an abusive mother embarks on an affair with a young male student – the opening film of Complicit: A Michael Haneke Retrospective, in UK cinemas from Friday, June 6th and on BFI Player from Thursday, September 11th 2025

Warning: NSFW.

This is at once representative of Haneke’s wider body of work and very different from it.

Representative because he is one of those directors whose personal use of cinematic vocabulary has been so honed over his years of making movies that he is able to clearly and precisely articulate problematic, controversial and taboo ideas and subject matter that few directors would be able to handle without descending into exploitation or commercialism. He is a director steeped in cinema, fascinated by how the process of making a movie constructs the narrative or other viewing and listening experience, and how that is perceived and understood by audiences.

Different because although Haneke generally writes as well and directs his own films, they are mostly original pieces whereas this one is an adaptation of a book, The Piano Teacher / Die Klavierspielerin by Elfriede Jelinek.… Read the rest

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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 and on BFI Player from Thursday, September 11th 2025

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.… Read the rest

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On Swift Horses

Director – Daniel Minahan – 2024 – US – Cert. 15 – 119m

*****

A husband’s dreams are undermined in 1950s America by the separate lives and desires of his secretly racetrack-gambling wife and his reappearing, disappearing drifter-gambler brother – out in UK cinemas on Friday, September 5th

Lee Walker (Will Poulter from Warfare, Alex Garland, 2025; Detroit, Kathryn Bigelow, 2017; The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Michael Apted, 2010; Son of Rambow, Garth Jennings, 2007) returns home to the US from the Korean War to his adored wife Muriel (Daisy Edgar-Jones from Twisters, Lee Isaac Chung, 2024; Where the Crawdads Sing, Olivia Newman, 2022) who lives in the isolated house she inherited from her mother in the calm prairie lands up North. Their relationship is deeply carnal. And yet, something changes in that relationship dynamic the night Lee’s brother Julius (Jacob Elordi from Frankenstein, Guillermo del Toro, 2025; Priscilla, Sofia Coppola, 2023; Saltburn, Emerald Fennell, 2023) turns up, and she is instantly attracted to him. Of course, that can’t be, because she is with Lee.

Part of the attraction is that Julius, a drifter who turns up unannounced, is also an inveterate card sharp and gambler.… Read the rest

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Paul & Paulette
Take a Bath

Director – Jethro Massey – 2024 – France – Cert. 15 – 109m

****

A young American photographer in Paris runs into a girl obsessed with the darker side of French history – out in UK cinemas on Friday, September 5th

Opening with sepia-toned engravings then photos depicting the last couple of centuries of Paris, this switches to an image of a girl walking and kneeling and a male “Once there was a girl” fairytale voiceover about a girl who would immerse herself in history, who was drawn both to the stars and the gutter, who liked Bad Things. Immediately, it’s juxtaposed with a female “Once there was a boy” voiceover about a boy who came to Paris with a camera around his neck. He photographs the girl. She confronts him. He points out that before her execution (on which site the girl has been kneeling, as if awaiting execution) Marie-Antoinette would have had her hair cut so as not to impede the blade. The girl has long, black hair.

In voiceover, she talks about how a spoon’s meaning changes once you know that Marilyn Monroe ate ice cream with it on the last day of her life. They visit a church which appears to contain the site of Marie-Antoinette’s cell.… Read the rest