Tag: grid

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Features Live Action Movies

Tron: Ares

Director – Joachim Rønning – 2025 – US – Cert. 12a – 119m

A CEO uses robots and vehicles from the digital world, which disintegrate after 29 minutes, to hunt down his corporate rival – out in UK cinemas on Friday, October 10th

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Third movie in Disney’s Tron franchise doesn’t presuppose much knowledge of the original film (Steven Lisberger, 1982) beyond Jeff Bridges vanishing into the world of computer games, and coloured motorbikes leaving instantly recognisable colour trails behind them in the computer graphics-styled grid world. In its day, when computer graphics effects were few and far between in the cinema, it’s visuals were memorable. Which instantly states the problem for any contemporary Tron movie: it has to stand out from the crowd of CG augmented movies released in contemporary Hollywood cinema.

The plot here is pretty flimsy (I don’t say that as an adverse criticism: the movie is what is is, a serviceable, effects-laden Hollywood blockbuster) and is as follows. Two big corporations are vying for market dominance in the area of realising computer programmes from the CG world into our own. Dillinger Systems, run by the youthful and ruthless Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters), shows shareholders at a flashy presentation how he can bring the ultimate, obedient, robot warrior Ares (Jared Leto) into our world to provide buyers with the most effective soldier imaginable.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Documentary Features Live Action Movies

A Sudden Glimpse
to Deeper Things

Director – Mark Cousins – 2024 – UK – Cert. PG – 88m

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A look at Scots artist and painter Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, who had synaesthesia – out in UK cinemas on Friday, October 18th

I am someone who frequents art galleries, yet I have to confess that before seeing this film, I had never heard of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham. Cousins starts his film off assuming we know nothing about her.

He starts with images. Who is this old woman on a verandah with palm trees in the background? Or peering down at rocky ground wearing an all-weather coat?

In later years, she frequently wore a necklace she had made resembling, in Cousins’ words, Concorde with droplets.

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, a woman to whom all men were attracted (“she’d have flirted with you”, a woman who knew her tells Marc) was fascinated by order and disorder. Her arresting 1967 abstract painting Pilgrimage consists of Vermillion squares on brown, jostling as if in a procession across the picture surface.

Her father (and here Cousins cuts in the moving image of Joseph Cotten giving his “if you rip the sides off houses you’ll find swine” speech from Shadow of a Doubt, Alfred Hitchcock, 1943) never wanted her to be an artist.… Read the rest

Categories
Art Documentary Features Live Action Movies Series Shorts Television

Greenaway
By Numbers

How Peter Greenaway’s obsession with various numeric and other cataloguing systems has led to the creation of highly complex, multi-layered film pieces that joyfully play with audiences

If ever anyone were to make a film about the Dewey Decimal System, it would be Peter Greenaway. He is obsessed with ways and means to classify the world in which he finds himself, systems to organise and make sense of that peculiar world, people’s relationship networks with one another and their movement and actions within that world and those networks.

I first came across him on the theatrical release in Hammersmith of his three hours plus epic The Falls (1980), made in between his early, self-financed short films of the 1960s and 1970s and his first, more conventional in length feature The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982). The Falls takes its name from entries in the section of a directory beginning with the letters F A L L e.g. Orchard Falla, Constance Ortuist Fallaburr, Melorder Fallaburr. The directory chronicles survivors of a Violent Unknown Event, VUE for short… [read more]

Full article at DMovies.org in association with Doesn’t Exist Magazine – purchase your copy now.