Tag: Cate Blanchett

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Features Live Action Movies

Rumours
(2024)

Director – Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, Galen Johnson – 2024 – Germany, Canada – Cert. 15 – 109m

****1/2

The G7 leaders meet at a summit only to find themselves trapped in the woods following an apocalyptic event – out in UK cinemas on Friday, December 6th

Every so often, the leaders of the world’s leading liberal democracies – the G7 – gather for summits to deal with the impending global crisis. On this occasion, it’s a bright, sunshiny day. Prior to getting down to business, they are toured through some local woods and shown the remains of one of the Bog People in a deep pit, their corpses perfectly preserved, apart from their bones which have disappeared, thanks to the properties of the bog land environment in which they were buried thousands of years ago. One corpse which they are shown has had his penis cut off and hung ornamentally round his neck. British PM Cardosa Dewindt (Nicky Amuka-Bird) is understandably somewhat taken aback by this.

The seven have their picture taken by the side of the pit, posing with spades. Then it’s on to the gazebo in a large clearing to sit down and discuss the matter in hand.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Rumours
(2024)

Directed by Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, Galen Johnson
Certificate 15
109 minutes
Released 6 December

Jesus spoke of ‘wars and rumours of wars’, and told us to give our leaders their due. He also spoke of the End of the Age. In our post-Christian 21st century, half the world supposedly runs under democracy, government by the people. Capitalism is driving corporate and individual financial greed towards burning up the planet – or at least its human population – through climate change. It does not look good.

The leaders of the G7 nations, the seven richest nations on the planet, meet regularly to try and hammer out statements to help the world deal with this impending crisis. There is a widespread feeling among their citizens that the resulting diplomatic agreements achieve nothing, and disaster inevitably looms.

Read the rest at Reform magazine.

Read my longer, alternative review for this site.

Trailer:

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Borderlands

Director – Eli Roth – 2024 – US – Cert. 12a – 102m

*

A ragtag collective of misfits must outwit their pursuers on a hostile planet– videogame adaptation is out in UK cinemas on Friday, August 9th

Intergalactic bounty hunter Lilith (an orange-haired Cate Blanchett) is hired by the universe’s most powerful industrialist Atlas (Edgar

Ramírez) to find his missing teenage daughter Tiny Tina, last seen on Lilith’s home planet Pandora, famed for an ancient civilisation of the Eridians and their much sought after vault which can only be opened by a member of that race. The planet is a renowned hell-hole, and while Lilith knows her way around there, she has no intention of going back.

Atlas, however, makes her an offer she can’t refuse, so it is that Lilith finds her way to Pandora where she is soon united with Tiny Tina (Ariana Greenblatt) who turns out to have a love of using children’s cuddly toys as explosive missiles. Tina is accompanied by a soldier on the lam (Kevin Hart) and a sympathetic if none-too-bright muscleman (Florian Munteanu). Her entourage soon expands to include an irritating motormouth robot (voice: Jack Black) programmed by an unknown client to protect Tina and a cynical scientist (Jamie Lee Curtis).… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Shayda

Director – Noora Niasari – 2023 – Australia – Cert. 15 – 117m

*****

An Iranian mother and her young daughter, holed up in a women’s refuge in Australia, live in fear of the girl’s estranged father who wants to take them both back to Iran – out in UK cinemas on Friday, August 2nd

A woman is with a mum and her little girl in a shopping mall. The woman tells the little girl to remember the counters, because if daddy brings her here, she must find them and tell the security man nearby who she is. The girl’s mother reminds her that daddy said he’d take her on a plane. The woman tells the mother, she’s done the right thing.

Shayda (Zar Amir Ebrahimi from Holy Spider, Ali Abassi, 2022) and her young daughter Mona (Selina Zahednia) are separated from Shayda’s husband. The other woman is Joyce (Leah Purcell), who runs a woman’s refuge house catering for residents from a variety of ethnic groups. Shayda and Mona, for example, are Iranian. Shayda’s photo album tells the story of her life. In the mid-1980s, she graduated and got married in Iran; in the early 1990s, the couple moved to Brisbane, Australia.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Shayda

Muslim limbo

Shayda
Directed by Noora Niasari
Certificate 15, 117 minutes
Released 19 July

An Iranian woman, Shayda (Zar Amir Ebrahimi from Holy Spider, Ali Abassi, 2022), is staying with her young daughter Mona (Selina Zahednia) in a woman’s refuge house in Brisbane run by Joyce (Leah Purcell). Shayda’s husband Hossain (Osamah Sami) came to Australia with her before they separated and has been granted visiting rights for Mona. Even though Hossain talks of taking Mona on a plane back to Iran, if Shayda wants full custody, Joyce recommends she allows Hossain the allotted time alone with his daughter in the local shopping mall.

Outside of these handovers, Shayda rarely leaves the women’s refuge… [Read the full review at Reform]

Read my longer review for this site – coming soon.

Trailer:

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Animation Features Movies

Guillermo del Toro’s
Pinocchio

Directors – Guillermo del Toro, Mark Gustafson – 2022 – US – Cert. PG – 114m

*****

Created as a puppet by a bereaved, religious woodcarver father, a little wooden boy must make his way in a world of ruthless show business, Fascism and war – stop-frame puppet movie is out on Netflix on Friday, December 9th

Co-helmed by Will Vinton alumnus Gustafson, del Toro’s Carlo Collodi adaptation sees him return to the theme of the Catholic Church collaborating with Fascism that he previously explored in Pan’s Labyrinth (2006). The story roughly follows the familiar template of Disney’s Pinocchio (1940), even down to punctuating the action with songs, but with the loosely defined place and time of a fairytale shifted to a very specific Italy before (briefly) and during World War II, with Pleasure Island replaced by a boys’ military training camp. The emphasis has shifted, too, from the notion of the narrator cricket character as conscience to coming to terms with mortality, although the idea that just because things appear to be fun they may not necessarily be good is knocking around in there too.

A narrator who will later identify himself as Sebastian J. Cricket (voice: Ewan McGregor) introduces us to churchgoing woodcarver Gepetto (voice: David Bradley), who is working on a statue of Jesus Christ crucified for the local church, raising dutiful son Carlo (voice: Gregory Mann), an equally religious child with a true sense of wonder at the world around him, including planes in the sky.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Nightmare Alley
(2021)

Director – Guillermo del Toro – 2021 – US – Cert. 15 – 150m

****

A former carny gets deep into trouble using mind-reading trickery on a wealthy mark – out in cinemas on Friday, January 21st. Also available on Digital Wednesday, March 16th and on Blu-ray and DVD on Monday, March 21st

After burning a body in an isolated farmhouse, Stanton Carlisle (Bradley Cooper) gets work with travelling carnival showman Clem (Willem Dafoe) via midget The Major (Mark Povinelli) and strongman Bruno (Ron Perlman). He soon ingratiates himself with mind reader Zeena (Toni Collette) who lets him into some of the secrets of her trade, but romantically he’s more interested in Molly (Rooney Mara) with whom, despite opposition from her unofficial guardian Bruno, he runs away intent on working a lucrative act on a wealthier audience to make larger amounts of money.

One night, during a residency at a hotel, Stanton and Molly’s show is interrupted by a woman (Cate Blanchett) trying to expose him as a fraud. Successfully navigating her heckling, he convinces Judge Kimball (Peter MacNeill) that he is in contact with the Judge’s dead son. Going against Molly’s advice not to do “spook shows”, and offering to cut in the woman, psychoanalyst Dr.… Read the rest