boiler room Archives - Jeremy C. Processing

Director – Tsai Yin-chuan – 2025 – Taiwan – 133m

****1/2

Teachers In a care home attempt to break the cycle of violence among their charges – premieres in the Critics’ Picks Competition of the 29th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival

This is one of those films that takes place in several different times in the characters lives, including when they are children, teenagers and adults. That means that you need more than one actor to play each character at different times in their lives, and if you’re going to attempt that, you’d better get your casting right, so that when you see the second actor playing an older or younger version of the character, you instantly recognise that character.

I wanted to rate this compelling film as five stars, but it has severe problems in this area – it’s really hard working out which character is which in the various different times in which events take place. Studying the end credits helped somewhat in this regard, but that information really ought to be expressed more clearly within the film narrative itself. (To see an example of a film that tackles this multiple character casting brilliantly, see Moonlight (Barry Jenkins, 2018).… Read the rest

Kontinental ’25 (Kontinental ’25)

Director – Radu Jude – 2025 – Romania – Cert. 15 – 109m

****

Although operating within the bounds of the law, a bailiff is smitten with guilt and remorse for the effect of her job on a ‘client’– out in UK cinemas on Friday, October 31st

Carrying large bags, he scavenges at the bases of tree trunks in the woodlands, swearing profusely when his foot goes a foot in to the stream when he tries to fill his water bottle. In a bizarre nod to the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993) – or more likely those briefly seen in The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick, 2011), he rests beside a dimetrodon sculpture then smokes a cigarette by a dilophosaurus. He rides a ski lift, passes a father and small son on their bikes on a footbridge, downs his packed lunch with vodka on a river bridge. He hangs around cafes asking for either work or five lei. He says “fuck you” after the woman offering him an early Sunday morning cleaning job has left. He gets hassled by a robot dog. He returns to his boiler room home.

While he sleeps, the bailiff Mrs Orsolya Ionescu (Eszter Tompa) knocks on his door, gendarmes in tow, to evict him, Ion (Gabriel Spahiu).… Read the rest