Category: Live Action

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Features Live Action Movies

The Million Ryo Pot
aka
Tange Sazen
And The Pot
Worth A Million Ryo
(Tange Sazen
Yowa:
Hyakuman Ryo
No Tsubo,
丹下左膳余話
百萬両の壺)

Director – Sadao Yamanaka –1935 – Japan – 92m (longest available version)

***1/2

Period drama in which various characters palm a worthless pot off on others only to later discover it’s extremely valuable – plays UK cinemas in the Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme 2023 between Friday, 3rd February and Friday, 31st March

A gorgeous restoration by Nikkatsu, this populist potboiler from 1935 is an excuse to show off the talents of chambara star Denjiro Okochi as the eponymous ronin Tange Sazen, who at one point cheerfully admits himself to be a freeloader off of archery club hostess and geisha house owner Ofuji (Kiyozo).

The equally eponymous pot, however, is in the film from the start, as after he has passed it off to his brother Genzaburo (Kunitaro Sawamura) who has married the daughter of a swordsman in Edo, a regional Yagyu Lord is informed that the pot’s glaze conceals a map to the whereabouts of a treasure chest containing a million ryo hidden by one of his ancestors shortly. Unaware of its considerable value, the latter’s wife Hagino (Hanai Ranko) is embarrassed by this piece of worthless junk and wants her husband to throw it in the shed, so she doesn’t have to look at it.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Women Talking

Director – Sarah Polley – 2022 – US – Cert. 15 – 104m

*****

Should we stay or should we go? Following an incident of mass sexual abuse in an isolated religious community, its women debate the question, stay and fight – or leave? – out in UK cinemas on Friday, February 10th

Here’s a film that defies the rule that, by rights, a bunch of people talking to one another in one location ought to make for tedious cinema. (Such outings usually work very well on the stage, a medium about a bunch of people talking in one location.) Yet Sarah Polley’s adaptation of the novel Women Talking proves electrifying. It’s based on a novel by Canadian author Miriam Toews which is in turn based on horrifying real life events (although the book is “an imagined response to real events”, rather than an attempt to actually conjure or describe those events).

Between 2005 and 2009, in an isolated Mennonite community in Bolivia, over a hundred girls and women were raped in their sleep. Their discoveries were initially dismissed by the community’s menfolk until it came to light that a small group of men had sprayed the interiors of the victims’ houses with animal anaesthetic to render them and their families unconscious.… Read the rest

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Animation Features Live Action Movies

Sensei,
Would You
Sit Beside Me?
(Sensei,
Watashi
No Tonari
Ni Suwatte
Itadakemasenka?,
先生、
私
の隣に座って
いただけませんか？)

Director – Takahiro Horie – 2021 – Japan – 119m

****1/2

Believing her manga artist husband is having an affair with their publisher, a manga artist wifedraws a new manga in which she embarks on an affair with her driving instructor – plays UK cinemas in the Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme 2023 between Friday, 3rd February and Friday, 31st March

When another story assignment for their editor Chika (Nao aka Nao Honda) comes to an end for wife and husband manga artists Sawako (Haru Kuroki) and Toshio Hayakawa (Tasuku Emoto), Sawako lets Toshio drive Chika to the station, listening to them talk after shutting the door behind them because she’s convinced (correctly) that the pair are having an affair. Shortly afterwards, she gets a phone call telling her that her mother (Jun Fubuki) is ill, and the urban couple drive to her home in the countryside to be there for her as she recuperates. She is walking around on a single crutch but seems in good shape.

That is, however, more than can be said for this married couple’s relationship. To keep up appearances, they share a bedroom at her mother’s place, something they haven’t done at home for years.… Read the rest

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Animation Features Live Action Movies

It Comes
(Kuru,
来る)

Director – Tetsuya Nakashima – 2018 – Japan – 133m

****

A monster relentlessly pursues its victims until one day it comes to take them away forever – plays UK cinemas in the Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme 2023 between Friday, 3rd February and Friday, 31st March

This is basically a monster film in which the monster is a bogeyman or evil spirit who after taunting potential victims – usually children – for a long time, then turns up and abducts them from this world into its own. You never see the monster: it’s all conveyed by preparation, suggestion and effect, and the characters’ actions and reactions.

And although the monster is apparently intent on abducting the child, various adult characters who appear to be significant protagonists suddenly get abducted by it. While it’s nowhere near the same league, in this respect, the film resembles Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) i.e. a significant character is despatched part-way through leaving another character to step into their shoes for the remainder.

The monster as such never physically appears (or, at least, we in the audience never actually see it) – its appearance is often presaged by following peculiar occult instructions, e.g. laying out multiple bowls of water on a corridor floor, or breaking all the mirrors in the house, accompanied by frenzied editing of quasi-abstract footage including camera-less animation (the sort of thing Len Lye and Norman McLaren used to make in the 1930s at the UK’s GPO Film Unit).… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Saint Omer
(Saint-Omer)

Director – Alice Diop – 2022 – France – Cert. 12a – 122m

*****

Researching a proposed book, an academic visits Saint Omer to attend the trial of a woman who murdered her own 15-month old baby – out in UK cinemas on Friday, February 3rd

Holding her baby, a woman walks into the sea.

University lecturer Rama (Kayije Kagame) plans to write a book based around a court case at the Saint Omer criminal court. Her head is full of memories of her mother, with whom her relationship could, at times, be tense. She takes the train to the town, which is in the Northernmost part of France, near the border with Belgium. The Senegalese defendant Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda) – the woman seen at the start of the film – is accused of the murder of her 15-month old child Elise.

In her defence, Coly, who has confessed to the murders, claims to have been cursed, that she herself therefore isn’t the party responsible for the killing. Her courtroom testimony unpacks her relationship with her separated parents: she lived with her mother but never really got on with her since they had little in common, while her father paid for her school tuition as he wanted her to study law.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

The Whale

Director – Darren Aronofsky – 2022 – US – Cert. 15 – 117m

***

An obese man nearing his death must confront people from his past as well as incidental visits from the present– out in UK cinemas on Friday, February 3rd

A dysfunctional body, a dysfunctional family, a dysfunctional world. Charlie (Brendan Fraser) has so abused his body that his obesity is on the verge of killing him. He is bereaved of his gay partner for whom he left his wife and eight-year old daughter and earns his living as an online English language tutor for high school students. His nurse friend and unpaid carer Liz (Hong Chau) visits him at regular intervals, but can’t get him to go to hospital since he doesn’t have a healthcare plan and anyway resents pouring money into the healthcare system.

The healthcare element will look a little weird to anyone living in the UK with its “free at the point of need” National Health Service.

His other visitors in the course of the film are his estranged teenage daughter Ellie (Sadie Sink), his wife Mary (Samantha Morton), a suited missionary (Ty Simpkins) and fast food delivery boy (Sathya Sridharan), the latter mostly heard at the door and only finally glimpsed towards the end.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

The Fabelmans

Director – Steven Spielberg – 2022 – US – Cert. 12a – 151m

*****

The life and times of a young boy and amateur US movie maker whose extended family harbours an unexpected secret – out in UK cinemas on Friday, January 27th

Throughout his career, Spielberg has continued to surprise. He’s made big blockbusters which seem, very often, to be about the intimacies of family relationships. Perhaps it was inevitable that, sooner or later, he would make something like The Fabelmans.

Orson Welles once said that Hollywood was the best train set a boy could have to play with. Presented with a train set, young Sammy Fabelman (Mateo Zoryan Francis-DeFord) plays with it by staging train crashes, about which behaviour his brilliant, scientific nerd father Burt (Paul Dano) is less than pleased.

However, his mother Mitzy (Michelle Williams), after some thought, realises that her son need to see the trains crash over and over again, so secretly allows him to stage a crash and film it with the family’s Super 8 home movie camera to enable his required repeat viewing. This kindles within the boy a desire to make his own movies, and soon he’s enlisting his family, friends and neighbours in these enterprises.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

The Wandering Earth II
(Liulang Diqiu 2,
流浪地球 2)

Director – Frant Gwo – 2023 – China – Cert. 12a – 173m

***

Sequel – or rather prequel – wants to explain how it was that the Earth became the Wandering Earth, but instead throws convoluted plot, big budget effects and action set-pieces at us while not really explaining anything – out in UK cinemas on Friday, January 27th

Gwo’s mega-expensive, blockbuster franchise is back for a second instalment, this time at three rather than two hours in length. Surprisingly, II isn’t so much a sequel to The Wandering Earth as a prequel which attempts to explain its predecessor by exploring many of the events which take place leading up to it, including the attempt by the United Earth Government (UEG) to launch the Wandering Earth Project, the complex system of jet engines constructed around the Equator like a belt round a large man’s belly to enable the ecologically-damaged Planet Earth to be piloted through space in an attempt to find a new home for the human race.

As if aware that three hours of interpersonal drama and action sequences based around this might prove too much for even the franchise’s most ardent fans, Gwo and his screenwriters build in a second plot involving Tu Yuheng (Chinese megastar Andy Lau) whose wife and small daughter are killed in a road accident.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

The Wandering Earth
(Liulang Diqiu,
流浪地球)

Director – Frant Gwo – 2019 – China – Cert. 15 – 125m

**

An ecological disaster of a deep-frozen, future Planet Earth is powered through space by jets on its surface in search of an alternate living space for the endangered human race – on Netflix UK, with sequel now in cinemas

The child Liu Qi (Guo Hexuan) looks through a telescope at Jupiter with his dad Liu Peiqiang (Wu Jing from The Battle At Lake Changjin, Chen Kaige, Dante Lam, Tsui Hark, 2021) while his grandpa Han Ziang (Ng Man-tat) sits on a nearby chair. After dad leaves for the International Space Station (ISS), grandpa will be his guardian because grandpa will get dad’s place in the Underground City.

The sun will engulf the Earth in a hundred years. But the United Earth Government (UEG) has a solution: human migration to another location in space thanks to the Wandering Earth Project. Originally, all humanity was to shelter in the underground cities following the ecological disaster that turned the Earth’s surface into an uninhabitable, frozen wasteland.

17 years later, Liu Qi (Qu Chuxiao) has grown into a typically rebellious young man. Leaving a note for his grandpa guardian, he and his younger, school student sister Han Duoduo (Zhao Jinmei) depart the Underground City via a dubious deal for fake ID passes and the thermal suits necessary to survive the intense surface cold.… Read the rest

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Animation Live Action Movies

Japan Foundation Tour 2023

This year’s Japan Foundation (JPF) Touring Programme, which runs throughout February and March and is celebrating its 20th edition, contains three manga-related live-action films and one anime. With screening venues spread widely over the UK, it covers the following two dozen UK cities: Aberystwyth, Belfast, Birmingham, Bristol, Cambridge, Cardiff, Chester, Colchester, Coventry, Derby, Dundee, Edinburgh, Exeter, Kendal, Leicester, Lewes, London, Manchester, Newcastle upon Tyne, Norwich, Nottingham, Plymouth, Sheffield and York.

The JPF has a programme that uses a selection of mainly recent releases along with one or two older classics to show present-day Japanese cinema in a wider context. Hence the title of this year’s theme: Always Evolving: Japanese Cinema Then, Now, and for the Future.

The four manga-related titles are: BL Metamorphosis, Sensei, Would You Sit Beside Me?, My Broken Mariko and Blue Thermal (pictured), the only animated feature in this year’s programme.

[Read the full article at All The Anime].

This year’s programme also features several free talks on Zoom.