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The Return

Director – Uberto Pasolini – 2024 – Italy, Greece, UK, France – Cert. 15 – 116m

**

Odysseus returns home to his island kingdom of Ithaca ten years after the Trojan War to find faithful wife Penelope fending off insistent suitors who threaten to kill son Telemachus – out in UK cinemas on Friday, April 11th

A young man (Charlie Plummer) stares out on clear blue Mediterranean waters crashing against the shore’s rocks. In an interior, an older woman (Juliette Binoche) weaves at her shuttle. On a beach, unobserved, the flotsam and jetsam of a shipwreck wash up, as does the unconscious body of a man (Ralph Fiennes). In the local village, a man threatens the young man with a knife.

Under pressure to marry one of the men in the village – her husband Odysseus, the island’s king, never having returned from the Trojan War – Penelope (for the woman played here by Binoche is she) claims she will do so once she has finished weaving her grandfather’s shroud. She is accused of having been weaving it for months.

The Fiennes character is rescued from the sea by a boat, only for crew members to throw him back into the sea.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Evil Dead Rise

Director – Lee Cronin – 2022 – New Zealand, Ireland – Cert. 18 – 97m

****

When the Necoromicon is opened in a tower block, demons bloodily attack and possess members of an all-female nuclear family who try to fight them off – out in UK cinemas on Friday, April 21st

One of two films about living in a high rise released this week.

The first bookend: the sound of a fly buzzing around the auditorium, is if to state that this is a film about technique. Almost immediately, a POV shot travelling rapidly along a river then a lake recalls The Evil Dead (Sam Raimi, 1979). If you know the original, you’ll feel like you’re in good hands. The camera homes in on the characters as they interact with one another (a girl trying to relax on the pier, a boy goofing around nearby) and you get a strong idea of who they are. The acting is surprisingly good. Which means that, when people start being possessed by demons (which they do pretty quickly), you have a sense of what’s been lost, what’s been taken away. Pretty swiftly, you have to emotionally let the possessed go and get on the side of those still alive trying to survive the possessed demons.… Read the rest