Tag: contemporary

One Battle After Another

Director – Paul Thomas Anderson – 2025 – US – Cert. 12A – 161m

*****

Over a decade after they disappeared into a safe town with new identities, a father and now-teenage daughter are tracked down by their army officer nemesis… – one of the most extraordinary Warner Bros. action movies you’ve ever seen is out in UK cinemas on Friday, September 26th

Radical, black revolutionary Perfidia Beverley Hills (Teyana Taylor) is on the verge of leading the forces of underground far-left organisation the French 75 in an attack on a Californian immigration centre to free those imprisoned when a bedraggled man pulling a trailer, looking to all intents and purposes like a refugee, turns up. Pat Calhoun (Leonardo DiCaprio) tells Perfidia he has all the explosives she could possibly need, and sets about using them with her blessing, putting on an impressive show of pyrotechnics to prove his credentials. Inside the centre, Perfidia locates its commanding officer Col. Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn) to sexually humiliate him at gunpoint. Surprisingly, this personal violation only serves to turn the white soldier on.

With Pat and the pregnant Perfidia now a couple, she carries on her high octane, physically demanding revolutionary activities, belly fully swollen, as if there were no child.… Read the rest

Tags “What time is it?, across rooftops, action movie, adaptation, alert, all hell breaks loose, archetype, army officer, assassination, at gunpoint, attack, Baktan Crossteen, bank robbery, Benicio Del Toro, black revolutionary, California, can’t remember the answer, captured, Chase Infiniti, Christmas Adventurers, comedy of errors, commanding officer Colonel, conceals significant information, concert, contemporary, convent, couple, dereliction of motherhood, device, explosives, far-left, far-left organisation, fathers and daughters, forces, free the captives, hidden below the horizon, high school, high school concert, immigrant escape route, immigration centre, immigration raids, interracial relationship, karate sensei, Leonardo DiCaprio, loo break, mobile phone, motherhood, nemesis, new identity, Olympian, One Battle After Another, operative, organisation, Paul Thomas Anderson, payphone, Perfidia., pre-written, pregnant, present day, protocols, pyrotechnics, question and answer session, radical, radical order of weed-growing nuns, raise the child, Regina Hall, revolutionary, revolutionary war hero., right-wing, rolling road, safe city, Sean Penn, sexual humiliation, sexual humiliation at gunpoint, sexual violation, single parent, Sisters of the Brave Beaver, speech, substance abuse, teen, teenager, Teyana Taylor, the French 75, the next ridge, Thomas Pynchon, Tony Goldwyn, tough guy, trackable, tracked down, trailer, underground, US, US White Christian Nationalism, Vineland, Warner Bros., Warner Bros. tough guy, White Christian Suprematist group, witness protection programme

Features Live Action Movies

Monsoon

Director – Hong Khaou – 2019 – UK – Cert. 12a – 85m

****1/2

A man who has lived in England for 30 years returns to Saigon and Hanoi to discover the Vietnam his late parents left behind – in cinemas and on Vimeo, BFI Player, Curzon Home Cinema, Amazon and elsewhere from Friday, September 25th

Saigon, present-day Vietnam, when bicycles and motorbikes swarm along the roads like purposeful, scurrying ants. Kit (Henry Golding) returns there in an attempt to discover the Saigon and Hanoi of his childhood before his now deceased parents left for England 30 years ago. He checks into the posh area of town, putting the wooden box containing his mother’s ashes on a bare shelf in his sparsely furnished, luxury apartment.

High tech housing blocks give way to the less affluent and more traditional blocks where most urban Vietnamese live. Kit meets with Lee (David Tran), with whom he remembers playing as a child and to whose family Kit’s mother loaned a considerable sum of money to help them start a small business, now a small mobile phone shop. Lee wants to repay the loan to Kit.

Kit goes on an English language tour in an attempt to track down some of the places from his childhood, but so many locations have changed or disappeared.… Read the rest

Tags art, ashes, bar, business, contemporary, cultural identity, debt, displacement, drink, emigration, England, exploring, gay lifestyle, Hanoi, history, Ho Chi Mihn City, immigration, loss, obligation, parents and children, pickup, Saigon, smoking, tea, train, travel, UK, Vietnam

Features Live Action Movies

The Personal History
Of David Copperfield

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 21 January 2020
No Comments on The Personal History
Of David Copperfield

Director – Armando Ianucci – 2019 – UK – Cert. PG – 119m

***

What the Dickens? A Victorian recalls his life from birth to middle age and the many people he encountered along the way – on VoD in June

The mid-19th century novel The Personal History Of David Copperfield is considered Charles Dickens’ masterpiece. Narrated in the first person by the eponymous David, it tells of one man’s life from birth through a series of adventures and encounters with a motley crew of relatives, friends and associates that seem to span the social breadth of Victorian England.

To cut the novel’s tale down to a manageable movie length, director Ianucci and his co-writer Simon Blackwell have dumped certain characters and subplots to focus on others. As with the director’s previous outing The Death Of Stalin (2017), the final film half works yet is beset by strange casting choices – actors playing Russians sporting a variety of English dialects in Stalin, various BAME actors playing roles that aren’t always entirely believable in terms of their ethnicity in Copperfield. That includes the film’s lead Dev Patel, who plays David convincingly as a wide-eyed innocent… [Read more]

The Personal History Of David Copperfield is out in the UK on Friday, January 24th.… Read the rest