Tag: delivery

Hidden
(Caché)

Director – Michael Haneke – 2005 – Austria, France, Germany – Cert.15 – 117m

***1/2

Covertly delivered VHS videotapes suggest to an upper middle class family that they are being watched, and begin to tease out guilt for an incident in the husband’s past – the closing film of Complicit: A Michael Haneke Retrospective, in UK cinemas from Friday, June 20th and on BFI Player from Thursday, September 11th 2025

A lengthy, locked-off camera shot of a street. A woman (Juliette Binoche) leaves the house through a full body height metal gate that seems to serve a security function, although the street seems largely quiet and unremarkable. Then the image starts to rewind in the manner of a videotape; what we are watching is a recording in the videotape player of a couple Georges and Anne Laurent (Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche), who are discussing its contents. The tape has been left outside their front door for reasons that are not immediately obvious and by person or persons unknown.

This opening shot is mirrored by another static shot at the end taken from outside the school of their son Pierrot (Lester Makedonsky) as pupils leave, in which… well, you’ll have to see for yourself, and director Haneke doesn’t make it easy to see what it is he wants you to see, so you’ll have to work at it… and even then, you may miss it.… Read the rest

Tags adopt, adultery, affair, affluent, Algerian, Algerian boy, apartment, Austria, axe, banlieue, book publishers, Caché, chicken, closest friends, collective guilt, coming to light, Complicit: A Michael Haneke Retrospective, corridor, courtyard, covert, Daniel Auteuil, Daniel Duval, delivery, dinner parties, dreams, drowned, Europe, family, farmhouse, flat, France, French colonial history, gate, Germany, guilt, hidden, How did you find me?, incident in the past, judgement, Juliette Binoche, killing, Lester Makedonsky, locked-off camera, Luke 8:17, Maurice Bénichou, media professional, memories, Michael Haneke, Nathalie Richard, Paris Massacre of 1961, past misdemeanours, recording, rewind, school, security, Seine, street, surveillance, talk show, talk show host, television, torment, trigger, upper middle class, VHS, video recording, videotape, Walid Afkir, watched

Features Live Action Movies

Cloud
(Kuraudo,
クラウド)

Director – Kiyoshi Kurosawa – 2024 – Japan – Cert. 15 – 124m

*****

The art of the deal. The past of an internet goods reseller driven by making money who has made enemies among his one-off suppliers and customers comes back to bite him – out in UK cinemas on Friday, April 25th

Ryosuke Yoshii (Masaki Suda) makes a take-it-or-leave it offer to Tonoyama (Masaaki Akahori), who manufactures electric therapy devices: ¥90 000 for his entire inventory. Tonoyama protests that at such a low price he will barely make any money after all the investment he has made. Tonoyama’s wife (Maho Yamada) is horrified and pleads with Yoshii, but he is ruthless. He explains that if he can’t sell the items, the ¥90 000 will ocver him to pay someone to take the unsaleable goods away. Returning home to his sometime live-in girlfriend Akiko (Kotone Furukawa), Yoshii puts the items online at ¥200 000 each. They quickly sell out. He tells her she can buy whatever she wants with his credit card.

At Yoshii’s day job, in what appears to be a factory floor for the laundering of clothes, his boss Takimoto (Yoshiyoshi Arakawa) holds him in high regard, feeling his talents are underused as a mere shop floor worker and regarding him as a future leader.… Read the rest

Tags abandon, abandoned factory, action figurines, apartment, apparition, boss, capture, city and countryside, clothes laundering, cloud, computer, consumerism, corruption, credit card, customer, Daiken Okudaira, day job, delivery, designer handbag, designer handbags, discipline, dread, easy money, electric therapy devices, entrepreneur and consumer, ethical code, factory floor, fake, greed, internet reseller, inventory, investment, Japan, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Kotone Furukawa, lakeside house, leader, LEAFF, LEAFF 2024, legitimate business opportunity, livestreaming, local, London East Asia Film Festival, London East Asia Film Festival 2024, low price, Maho Yamada, making money, manufacturer, Masaaki Akahori, Masaki Suda, Masataka Kubota, mentor, moral code, move house, murder, online reviews, online selling, organised crime, personal assistant, personal ego-search, police, promotion, purchasing power., quit, revenge, ruthless, school acquaintance, sell out, shadow, shipment, supplier, Tokyo, torture, town and country, unemployed, unsaleable goods, van, window, woods, Yoshiyoshi Arakawa

Animation Features Movies

Mad God

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 16 June 2022
No Comments on Mad God
Sticky post

Director – Phil Tippett – 1987-2021 – US – 83m

*****

A man in a gas mask descends into a dark, dangerous world on a mysterious mission, encountering strange creatures, humanoids and societal constructs along the way – stop-frame epic 34 years in the making – as of Tuesday, June 28th, has become the most watched premier of 2022 on Shudder, where it plays in both the UK and the US from Thursday, June 16th; also plays London’s Prince Charles Cinema Tuesday. July 5th to Friday, July 8th and from Monday, December 5th is on Blu-ray, DVD and digital

My immediate reaction after watching this was two-fold. On the one hand, wow!!! On the other, how on earth do I put the experience of watching this into words? Mad God definitely has a structure, yet what’s amazing about it is the visuals, the animation, the effects. Even though I’m familiar with the work of its director Phil Tippett (as one of the heirs apparent to stop-motion maestro Ray Harryhausen in the world of visual effects – career highlights include RoboCop, 1987; Jurassic Park, 1993, Starship Troopers, 1997) this film is something altogether different (even if its roots can be seen in his VFX work).… Read the rest

Tags 3D, 3D animation, animation, baby, beasts, blood, brutality, creatures, cruelty, deities, delivery, depth, depths, descent, foetus, fog, gas mask, God, gore, infant, journey, maggot, maw, mewling, model animation, models, monsters, mouth, operating table, orifice, paradise, perils, Phil Tippett, pollution, predators, puppet, puppetry, quest, Ray Harryhausen, sights, statues, stop-frame, stop-frame animation, stop-motion, stop-motion animation, supernatural power, surgery, Tower Of Babel, volume, weight

Features Live Action Movies

Spaghetti Code Love
(Supagetikodo Rabu,
スパゲティコード
・ラブ)

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 11 February 2022
No Comments on Spaghetti Code Love
(Supagetikodo Rabu,
スパゲティコード
・ラブ)

Director – Takeshi Maruyama – 2021 – Japan – 96m

***1/2

The intersecting lives of several young Tokyoites suggests they don’t know how to communicate with one another – plays UK cinemas in the Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme 2022 between Friday, 4th February and Thursday, 31st March

A young woman hangs out in an amusement arcade. Suddenly she’s aware of a young boy. Running, shouting, “why me”. He needs something. She steps into the breach and – for a moment, at least – provides it by holding him tight, a surrogate mother, an understanding human connection.

How far this understanding goes, it’s impossible to say. We never find out the source of the boy’s malaise, we never learn anything more about the woman who holds him in the arcade. However they have connected on some level – physically and emotionally. And that’s what this film seems to be about.

It’s basically a series of character study vignettes in which the characters occasionally cross paths which could well have been written or conceived as a half dozen of so short films. They connect with or become alienated from one another. It’s set in Tokyo with a title suggestive of complex networks and computer language with the catch-all ‘love’ tacked on the end.… Read the rest