Tag: husbands and wives

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Black Bag

Director – Steven Soderbergh – 2025 – US – Cert. 15 – 93m

*

A spy is tasked with finding and eliminating a mole from a list of five suspects – one of whom is his wife… out in UK cinemas on Friday, March 14th

London-based George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) meets with a fellow operative, who informs him the organisation has been compromised. To sort this out, and find and eliminate the mole, the operative has produced a list of five suspects. One of which is George’s wife, Kathryn St. Jean, because she ticks all the suspect boxes. Neglecting to tell Kathryn (Cate Blanchett) that she is one of the names on the list, George enlists her help in concocting a plan to identify the suspect. In the spy business, relationships inevitably involve not telling things to one another and not asking about them either.

Thus, the couple invite four colleagues – Freddie Smalls (Tom Burke), Clarissa Dubose (Marisa Abela), Col. James Stokes (Regé-Jean Page) and psychiatrist Dr. Zoe Vaughan (Naomie Harris) – round to their lavish London flat for dinner, where each of the four are surprised to discover three more guests than they anticipated. At the dinner table, George commences his plan by having his guests play a game.… Read the rest

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I’m Still Here
(Ainda Estou Aqui)

Director – Walter Salles – 2024 – Brazil – Cert. 15 – 137m

****

When a family man is disappeared by Brazil’s military dictatorship, his wife must fight for justice while raising their family of five children alone – out in UK cinemas on Friday, February 21st

1971. The middle of Brazil’s 1964-85 military dictatorship. Former government commissioner Rubens Paiva (Selton Mello), a trained civil; engineer, lives with his family in Rio de Janeiro where he is designing the new family home he plans to build. The purchased plot of land, in view of the Christ the Redeemer monument, is staked out, and he has made little models of what the whole thing will look like, captured along with his partying family on Super-8 film by his home-movie-camera-wielding, eldest daughter Veroca (Valentina Herszage). Said eldest daughter (he has four of them plus one young son) is about to go to college. Taking the lead from his wife Eunice (Fernanda Torres), who is concerned that their daughter’s likely involvement in radical student politics will get her in trouble with the dictatorship, Rubens sets her up with an old family friend to study abroad in London.

With reports on the TV news of various diplomats being kidnapped by paramilitaries, who want to exchange them for political prisoners, in a worrying taste of events to come, Veroca is travelling and filming her Super-8 as a passenger in a friend’s car wherein weed is being smoked, when they hit a military roadblock in a road tunnel.… Read the rest

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Qualia
(Qualia,
クオリア)

Director – Ryo Ushimaru – 2023 – Japan – 96m

*****

A bizarre drama plays out among a group of people running a chicken farm – plays UK cinemas in the Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme 2025 which runs from Friday, 7th February to Monday, 31st March

Wheelchair-bound Satomi (Maya Kudamatsu) likes to hunt. So sister-in-law Yuko (Kokone Sasaki) takes her out game shooting. Yuko is a people pleaser: she likes to help. Disability nothwithstanding, Satomi is the type that likes to order people around. She has Yuko wrapped around her little finger to the extent that she can get Yuko to phone the air con repair man on his annual leave, insist he come and fix the system while he’s on holiday and even absolve Satomi of any involvement during the phone call. Yuko is, to say the least, compliant, while Satomi is a bully.

Yuko’s small holding, battery chicken farmer husband Ryosuke (Kenta Kiguchi) delivers freshly laid eggs to the egg station every morning, where he pretends not to know his mistress Saki (Ruka Ishikawa), instead confining their relationship to a hidden away hotel room later in the day. Here, she shows him her positive pregnancy test.… Read the rest

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Hard Truths

Director – Mike Leigh – 2024 – UK – Cert. 12a – 97m

*****

A woman with a chip on her shoulder makes her own and her extended family’s lives a misery, as she does with everyone with whom she comes into contact – expertly crafted slice of Brit Misery Porn is out in UK cinemas on Friday, January 31st

While her plumber husband Curtley (David Webber) and his assistant Virgil (Jonathan Livingstone) are out all day working, which seems to consist of removing plumbing fixtures and fittings from unoccupied houses, Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) stays at home berating their 22-year-old, videogame-playing son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett) for being unemployed and lacking in ambition.

It’s as if the world has it in for Pansy, and she takes it out on anything and everything. Without realising what she is doing, she turns the family home into a place of misery, making her son and husband’s lives a living hell through no fault of their own.

She couldn’t be more different from her sassy and outgoing sister Chantelle (Michelle Austin), who despite being abandoned by her husband has made a go of life, passing on her ‘can do’ spirit to her two moderately successful daughters Kayla (Ani Nelson) and Aleisha (Sophia Brown).… Read the rest

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The Girl
with the Needle
(Pigen med Nålen)

Director – Magnus Van Horn – 2024 – Denmark, Sweden, Poland – Cert. 15 – 123m

*****

A young Copenhagen woman’s attempts to escape poverty following the Great War lead her into a dark nightmare – Denmark’s entry for Best International Feature is out in UK and Ireland cinemas on Friday, January 10th

In the darkness, faces writhing, superimposed on other faces. Katherine (Vic Carmen Sonne from Godland, 2022; Holiday, Isabella Eklöf, 2018), behind on the rent for her room by 14 months, is evicted. She works at a rag trade factory as a seamstress, where the owner Peter (Besir Zeciri) wants to be able to help her but cannot grant her widow’s supplement without proof of death of her husband, who has gone missing in the war. She manages to find herself cheaper lodgings. Sensing something more behind Peter’s kindness and an offer of a shoulder to rest on, Katherine has sex with him in an alley in broad daylight.

One day, her husband Jørgen (Joachim Fjelstrup) returns from the war, his face heavily disfigured. She takes him in but, unable to cope with his recurring nightmares, soon throws him out. Something similar is soon visited on her; Peter agrees to marry her, but when his mother (Benedikte Hansen from Borgen, TV series, 2010) explains that her son can do as he wants, but not with her money or her estate, he changes his mind (this, incidentally, is the same plot that drives Anora, Sean Baker, 2024).… Read the rest

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Nosferatu
(2024)

Director – Robert Eggers – 2024 – US – Cert. 15 – 132m

*****

Unaware a woman has unwittingly summoned Count Orloc, her husband is sent to the latter’s castle in Transylvania – out in UK cinemas on Wednesday, January 1st 2025

The German expressionist silent film Nosferatu (F.W. Murnau, 1922) has been described as setting the cinematic template for the horror film. Broadly speaking, it’s an unofficial adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula, with names changed for the purposes either of connecting to the German audience or avoiding copyright issues. While there have been numerous Dracula movie adaptations and spin-offs over the years, remakes of the 1922 film are comparatively few and far between; prior to the current film, Werner Herzog notably made Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979).

Eggers is a great admirer of the 1922 film, and originally planned to remake it after The Witch (2015). It’s not hard to see why. His films have about them a terrible sense of dread, of dire events about to occur. Like F.W. Murnau, he is a great visual stylist (although the silent film industry of the 1920s was very different to the far more sophisticated sector of today). The film has had time to marinate in his head for the best part of a decade, which has probably done the project no harm at all.… Read the rest

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Mother’s Kingdom
(Uhm-mah-ui
Wahng-gook,
엄마의 왕국)

Director – Lee Sang-hak – 2024 – South Korea – LKFF Cert. 15 – 97m

*****

A Christian mother, her ‘Christian book’ author son, and her local pastor brother-in-law are haunted by traumas from their collective past – suspense thriller from LKFF, the London Korean Film Festival 2024 which runs in cinemas from Friday, November 1st to Wednesday, November 13th

—

I don’t often preface a film review with a piece of verbal, religious text, but in this exceptional case, the following Old Testament quote may be pertinent, particularly the phrase in bold:

The Lord passed before him and proclaimed, “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation.”

– Exodus 34:6–7

—

Ji-wook (Han Ki-jang) lives with his mother Kyung-hee (Nam Kee-ae), and although he’s earning a respectable living working from home as a writer of self-help motivational books, in many ways he seems deeply unqualified to be peddling such advice to a wider public.… Read the rest

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Reawakening

Director – Virginia Gilbert – 2024 – UK – Cert. 15 – 90m

***

When a couple’s daughter returns after a decade’s long absence, the husband starts to suspect she is not really their daughter – out in UK cinemas on Friday, September 13th

It’s been ten years since their daughter Clare left home at 14. Not a day has gone by for her parents John (Jared Harris) and Mary (Juliet Stevenson) when they haven’t thought about her. The couple are in touch with the police and give periodic press conferences which have, so far, yielded nothing in the way of results.

Yet John, a self-employed electrician, has never given up hope. On the streets, he looks out for his daughter in the hope that he might one day see her again. And then, one day, he sees her sitting at then getting up from a table outside a café. He runs towards her, nearly getting hit by a car in the process, then follows her only to lose her down a turning.

Every morning at the primary school where she teaches, his wife Mary re-pins the poster of their missing daughter over the top of other bits of posters pinned on top of it to ensure that it can be clearly seen.… Read the rest

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Widow Clicquot

Director – Thomas Napper – 2023 – UK – Cert. 15 – 90m

****

A nineteenth century French widow innovates in the male-dominated world of champagne production – out in UK cinemas on Friday, August 23rd

In the early nineteenth century, Veuve Clicquot established itself as something of an innovation in the world of champagne. You would imagine that if anyone were to make a period picture about it, it would be the French, but as may well be guessed from the English language translation title here, this is a British production using English actors speaking English.

There’s nothing whatsoever wrong with that, but given that France has a sizeable movie industry which, among other things, often makes period costume dramas, watching a film about an historical period in that country in English feels decidedly odd. Perhaps if there were more of an epic sense of scale (think: Napoleon, Ridley Scott, 2023) it might feel less so. The screenplay is based on a book by North American writer Tilar J. Mazzeo.

Perhaps it’s explained with greater clarity in the book, but the film assumes a familiarity on the part of the audience with the ins and outs of the Napoleonic Wars, which take place in the backdrop of the film and on the edge of the narrative, affecting it from a distance, as it were.… Read the rest

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Love Hotel
(Rabu Hoteru,
ラブホテル)

Director – Shinji Somai – 1985 – Japan – Cert. 18 – 88m

***1/2

After violently taking out the stress of yakuza business debts on a call-girl, a man finds her two years later and attempts to rekindle a relationship – roman porno is out on UK Blu-ray on, Monday, July 22nd

NSFW.

Tokyo. Muraki (Minori Terada) phones Milky Way from room 301, all dark suit and shades, obviously a gangster, to be is told a girl, Yumi, will be with him in 10 minutes. Only, a flashback reveals him as the owner of a publishing office, his stairwell to his small office premises blocked by a yakuza, another of whose number, he discovers on entering, is forcibly having sex with Muraki’s wife (Kiriko Shimizu) while two further fellow yakuza look on approvingly. Later, he considers throwing himself out of the third storey window of his unfurnished office with “for rent” signs, but swats a fly and thinks better of jumping.

When Yumi (Noriko Hayami) arrives at 301, her initial euphoria at Y100 000 for two hours is dispelled when Muraki unexpectedly slaps handcuffs on her, pulls a knife, slashes at the bedsheets and her clothing to undress her than violates her with a dildo, later cutting the skin between her breasts as she writhes orgasmically.… Read the rest