Category: Live Action

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Weapons

Director – Zach Cregger – 2025 – US – Cert. 18 – 128m

****

One night, all but one of the children in one class in the town school disappear into the dark, leaving the townsfolk baffled as to what happened to them… – Fortean-sounding mystery is out in UK cinemas on Friday, August 8th

One night at 2.17am, the 17 other kids in Alex’s class got up out of their beds, went downstairs, opened their front doors, and ran out into the night. As a child relates the incident, we observe it in flashback. The kids run with arms half outstretched at an angle, as if playing at being aeroplanes in the school playground. If you’ve seen the film’s poster, this strange angle of the arms is also apparent. As it also is in the film’s trailer, which starts with this flashback. But what is in the mind of these kids? Where are they going? To what purpose?

For that matter, why the title Weapons? I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that you’ll know the answer once you’ve seen the film.

Thus begins one of the most intriguing cinematic mysteries of recent years. To unpack his prologue, writer-director Cregger opts for an astute, six-part, character-based structure.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Zodiac

Director – David Fincher – 2007 – US – Cert. 15 – 158m

Two cops, a crime reporter and a geek working on the same paper attempt to solve the identity of San Francisco’s 1970s Zodiac Killer – engrossing crime thriller / character study is now out on 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray

Fincher’s feature filmography is a fascinating hit-and-miss affair, debuting with the middling Alien3 (1992) then covering gems Se7en (1995, make sure you see a silvered print), Fight Club (1999) and The Social Network (2010) plus lesser outings The Game (1997), Panic Room (2002) and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008). Zodiac concerning a serial killer, you’d be forgiven for pigeonholing it as similar to Se7en – but in fact it’s something rather different. Se7en is a fictional thriller concerning cops hunting a serial murderer – or, you might argue, the murderer himself – whose killings are inspired by the Seven Deadly Sins and an exercise in avant-garde visual style.

Zodiac is based on the unsolved case of the real life Zodiac Killer who terrorised San Francisco in the seventies. It spans decades, focusing on the four men attempting to solve the case. Attempting to stay true to the facts, it avoids a wrapped up, neat ending, presenting instead the contradictory evidence and leaving you to draw your own conclusions – or make your own guess as to the killer’s identity.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Late Shift
(Heldin)

Director – Petra Blondina Volpe – 2025 – Switzerland – Cert. 12a – 92m

****1/2

An experienced and competent nurse in a hospital in the Western world endures a particularly gruelling night shift – out in UK cinemas on Friday, August 1st

There’s a moment of calm at the start of Late Shift… Scrubs going through a laundry system… Floria Lind (Leonie Benesch from September 5, Tim Fehlbaum, 2024; The Teachers’ Lounge, Ilker Çatak, 2023; The White Ribbon, Michael Haneke, 2009) on the night bus to her shift… She and a colleague making small talk whilst changing at the lockers… (The film ends similarly, with a reverse of this bookend, peace after the night shift is over.) And then, they’re on shift.

As soon as Mrs. Lind comes into the ward, the chaos starts. She helps a male colleague (bilingual in German and, for the patient, French) lift the demented Mrs Kuhn (Margherita Schoch) out of her wheelchair so Floria can change the lady’s underwear (and, quite literally, clean her shit off the floor). This evening, it’s Floria, one other nurse (Sonja Riesen), and Amelie (Selma Jamal Aldin), an inexperienced med student. Handing over, a colleague runs through by name the patients on the ward this shift and their various medical needs.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

The Naked Gun
(2025)

Director – Akiva Schaffer – 2025 – US – Cert. 15 – 85m

*****

Frank Drebin, the bumbling, self-confident, incompetent, cop and son of Frank Drebin, the bumbling, self-confident, incompetent cop sets out to solve a case involving a self-driving car and a P.L.O.T. Device – reboot of the classic comedy franchise is out in UK cinemas on Friday, August 1st

Sequels and reboots are often questionable, and can so easily be made for all the wrong reasons. The Naked Gun franchise started out as the six-episode, L.A. police procedural TV series spoof Police Squad! (1982) which spawned three features under The Naked Gun moniker (1988, 1991, 1994). The TV series is both extremely funny and groundbreaking in its use of the format. The three movies cleverly translated the humour to the big screen, and had the good sense to quit while still ahead. Both the TV series and the movies were well received at the time and are fondly remembered today.

The humour derives from a combination of ridiculous gags and non-comedy actors playing it straight. At the centre of the franchise was Lt. Frank Drebin, who despite a general cluelessness possesses a determination to follow through that means he always gets his man.… Read the rest

Categories
Documentary Features Live Action Movies

2000 Meters to Andriivka

Director – Mstyslav Chernov – 2025 – Ukraine – Cert. 15 – 107m

****

A small Ukrainian Army unit advances through a narrow strip of war-scarred forest to recapture a village from the occupying Russians – documentary from the makers of 20 Days in Mariupol is out in UK and Irish cinemas on Friday, August 1st

Set in the 2023 Ukrainain offensive to take back land occupied by the Russians in the East of Ukraine, this covers the advance of a small, Ukrainian army unit, the 3rd Assault Brigade, on the country’s Russian-occupied village of Adriivka, located on the outskirts of the town of Bahkmut. Given that the latter is two hours away from Kharkiv, the hometown of director Mstyslav Chernov (20 Days in Mariupol, 2023), the location has a clear personal significance for him. He and his Associated Press colleague Alex Babenko take their camera with the unit on their mission.

The soldiers are all equipped with helmet cams, giving the filmmakers additional material to play with. Such technology is unimaginable as recently as 25 years ago. One might argue that war has changed little, that it’s still much the same, horrible phenomenon it always has been. The advent of the cam, however, means that an audience can watch the viewpoint of a war participant up close and personal.… Read the rest

Categories
Documentary Features Live Action Movies

The Road to Patagonia

Director – Matty Hannon – 2022 – Australia – Cert. 15 – 90m

****

A keen surfer and former ecology student from Australia sets out on a motorbike journey from Alaska down the West coast of the Americas to Patagonia – out on digital on Monday, July 28th

The family of Australian moving picture diarist Matty Hannon moved around a lot during his childhood. He left home as soon as he could, and studied ecology at university, where he became fascinated by the book Shamans of Mentawai about tribes living in Indonesia’s Sumatran Islands. A keen surfer, he went out to one of the islands, rode the incredible waves, embraced a simple lifestyle and felt he’d arrived in a utopia where people lived in harmony with nature, assigning spirit gods to rivers and mountains. He began to wonder if by concentrating on data in his studies, he’d been missing something. He stayed five years, from age 21-26.

On his return to Melbourne, he was hit by culture shock. Everything was commodified. He sat at a computer for work. He was now in a culture that referred to its people as consumers, where national success was measured in terms of how much they bought.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Gazer

Director – Ryan J. Sloan – 2024 – US – Cert. 15 – 114m

***

A single-parent mum, unable to make sense of the passing of time, struggles to get by and find the money to get out of town with her child – largely incomprehensible yet strangely compelling, urban, neo-noir thriller is out in UK cinemas on Friday, July 25th

This narrative impresses and frustrates the viewer in pretty much equal measure. There are rotten films out there on which you really don’t want to waste your time, and for all its faults, Gazer isn’t one of those (although there are times, particularly in its first hour, when it comes close). And then there are (arguably) visionary films where you can sense the makers – usually the director(s), writer(s) or performer(s) – struggling to express (a) unique viewpoint(s), and Gazer, a first-time feature by former New York electrician Sloan, who co-wrote and directs, and Canadian musician / actress Ariella Mastroianni, who co-wrote and stars, most definitely fits into that category – albeit not always entirely successfully.

The film possesses a distinctive look, which I imagine is largely down to Brazilian-Portuguese cameraperson Matheus Bastos, who shot it on 16mm.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

I, the Song
(Dzongkha, 
མོ་གི་གསང་བའི་ཞབས་ཁྲ)

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

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, France – 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