Tag: evict

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Features Live Action Movies

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

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

The Tenants
(Se-ip-ja,
세입자)

Director – Yoon Eun-Kyung – 2023 – South Korea – LKFF Cert. 12 – 90m

*****

In a black & white, futuristic Seoul, a tenant who sublets his rental apartment to prevent his eviction finds out that this approach has its drawbacks – from LKFF, the London Korean Film Festival 2024 which runsin cinemas from Friday, November 1st to Wednesday, November 13th

An alluring image turns out to be merely an image on a wall, an artifice rather than the paradise we at first assume it to be. This is an image many filmmakers have used to open their movies and, depending on what they’ve seen over the years, it will conjure different films for different viewers. For this viewer, it conjures what I consider one of the funniest films of recent decades, Quick Change (Howard Franklin, Bill Murray, 1990) where the image is revealed as a tawdry New York subway train ad above a clown who will shortly proceed to rob a bank.

The Tenants may not be a comedy, but it shares with that film a sense of urban malaise, a feeling of being trapped in a grim metropolis where everything about the place conspires to prevent the protagonists leaving.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Master Gardener

Director – Paul Schrader – 2022 – US – Cert. 15 – 107m

****

Order and chaos. A man works bringing horticultural order to his employer’s garden estate, but the disorder of his past threatens to catch up with him and wreak havoc upon it

Or. A man engaged in sexual relations with his female employer becomes involved with her grandniece, to whom his employer may one day leave her inheritance

Or. A man orders his employer’s garden estate until she ejects him for sleeping with her grandniece, leaving the pair to survive in the tough world beyond – out in UK cinemas on Friday, May 26th

This appears to be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it concerns a man (the central character, the eponymous master gardener) imposing order, but he is a man coming from chaos and at some point that chaos may undo what he has achieved there. On the other, it concerns two women – one his monied, controlling, matriarchal employer, the other her grandniece, from the wrong side of the tracks, who the employer wants to learn the business. The man is initially the lover of the first and, later, becomes the lover of the second, for which the first fires him.… Read the rest