Tag: James Bond

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Features Live Action Movies

Ballerina
(2025)

Director – Len Wiseman – 2025 – US – Cert. 15 – 125m

*****

A young, female assassin seeks out the man behind the organisation that killed her father – John Wick franchise spin-off is out in UK cinemas on Friday, June 6th

While the Bond movie No Time To Die (Cary Joji Fukunaga, 2021) divided viewers, there seemed to be a widespread consensus that Ana de Armas’ scene as a kickboxing 007 sidekick was something special, crying out for her to be given her own action film. In the interim, the actress’ high profile career has burgeoned – her portrait of Marilyn Monroe in Blonde (Andrew Dominik, 2002) proved that she can act just as well as she can do stunt action.

Meanwhile, writer Shay Hatten’s spec screenplay about a ballerina bent on revenge found its way to John Wick franchise originator and director Chad Stahelski, who thought it might fit into John Wick’s world. As they worked out exactly where that might be, Hatten was put to work on the scripts for John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum (2019) and John Wick: Chapter 4 (2023). It was eventually decided that the events in Ballerina would take place at the same time as those in John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum, and an early scene has John Wick (Keanu Reeves) passing on a staircase in the Ruska Roma Ballet School in New York.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Tokyo Pop

Director – Fran Rubel Kuzui – 1988 – US, Japan – Cert. 18 – 99m

****

A girl singer, fed up with being sidelined by the music business in New York, relocates to Tokyo and falls in with local rock band hopefuls there – select UK cinema screenings from Friday, April 25th prior to its Blu-ray release on Monday, May 5th

“Hey, Mike, when do I get to use my song?” asks the band’s disgruntled, leather-clad back-up singer, feeling redundant as she stands on stage holding a tambourine. Her music career in New York stalling fast, Wendy (Carrie Hamilton from Cool World, Ralph Bakshi, 1995; Shag, Zelda Barron, 1989) receives a “Wish you were here” postcard from her friend Jane in Japan and shoots back a reply: “Hope you meant it – ‘cos I’m coming.”

In Japan, a band does an English language cover of Blue Suede Shoes. When Wendy arrives in Tokyo, her girlfriend has moved on to Thailand. Barely speaking any Japanese, Wendy winds up in a cheap hotel in Itabashi the space of a small Japanese apartment where footwear is removed on entering and, as an Aussie resident tells her, everything operates on credit card and a shower is Y100 for ten minutes.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Queer

Director – Luca Guadagnino – 2024 – Italy, US – Cert. 18 – 135m

*****

A journey through the gay fleshpots of Mexico City leading, through illness, to a deeper jungle wherein can be found a drug that will enhance telepathy – challenging William Burroughs adaptation with Daniel Craig & Lesley Manville is out in UK cinemas on Friday, December 13th

Bookended with a prologue and an episode, this is a narrative split into three separate sections or chapters. In the first, set in Mexico City, fortysomething Bill Lee (Daniel Craig) spends his days and nights drinking in bars like Ship Ahoy frequented by (mostly younger male) US ex-pats. He talks with friends such as Joe Guidry (Jason Schwartzman), he watches newcomers, he attempts, sometimes successfully, to pick some up. He is taken with Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey), and the pair embark on an intense physical relationship. Lee persuades Eugene to accompany him to South America, with no stipulation other than Eugene “be nice” to him a couple of times a week.

In the second, on the trip Bill goes down with a nasty case of the chills. In the third, following his eventual recovery, he asks around about a drug called Yaga he understands can facilitate telepathy, the pair trekking deep into the jungle to find biologist Dr.… Read the rest

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Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Brainwashed:
Sex-Camera-Power

Director – Nina Menkes – 2022 – US – Cert. 18 – 107m

***1/2

A lecture on how movies treat male and female bodies differently, augmented with interviews from female directors, actresses, critics and others, using numerous film clips – on BFI Player from Monday, July 17th

This is a film based on a lecture given by director Menkes under the title: Sex and Power, the Visual Language of Cinema. As far as I can tell from the evidence here presented, it is (or was) something like a TED Talk but much longer. It’s possible it may have worked better as a live lecture than as a film. I’m guessing also there’s something of the band Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense (Jonathan Demme, 1984) concert film about this: a live performing act wanting a film of their performance so it can reach a wider audience without the necessity of the performers physically touring the act. But where Stop Making Sense is a masterpiece of the filmed performance (or, technically, in that film’s specific case, the filmed music concert) genre, Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power is not. Even if you’re broadly in tune with its thesis (which I like to think I am), it does feel like you’re being repeatedly told the same thing and somewhere (perhaps around the 75 minute mark) you get fed up with it.… Read the rest

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Documentary Features Live Action Movies

The Other Fellow

Director – Matthew Bauer – 2022 – UK – Cert. 15 – 80m

**1/2

The name’s Bond. James Bond. This is a look at real life people who share the name of Ian Fleming’s popular spy character – out in UK cinemas and on demand from Friday, May 19th

What’s in a name? When Ian Fleming was looking to name the secret agent he’d written a novel about, he wanted a dull, ordinary name that wouldn’t stand out. On his shelf in Goldeneye, the Jamaican retreat where he wrote the books, was Birds Of The West Indies by James Bond. It was perfect. He stole the name for his character. When the wife of the real James Bond later got in touch by letter, Fleming was concerned they were going to sue. Fleming appears in a film clip from that time, which must be used here two or three times. The author’s wife and the bird book author James Bond himself are here played by actors Tacey Adams and Gregory Itzin.

That’s just one of the stories about identity in this brilliantly conceived documentary about people named James Bond. There’s a Bond family who have been passing the name James down for generations and weren’t going to stop because of Ian Fleming’s character.… Read the rest

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Animation Features Movies

Guillermo del Toro’s
Pinocchio

Directors – Guillermo del Toro, Mark Gustafson – 2022 – US – Cert. PG – 114m

*****

Created as a puppet by a bereaved, religious woodcarver father, a little wooden boy must make his way in a world of ruthless show business, Fascism and war – stop-frame puppet movie is out on Netflix on Friday, December 9th

Co-helmed by Will Vinton alumnus Gustafson, del Toro’s Carlo Collodi adaptation sees him return to the theme of the Catholic Church collaborating with Fascism that he previously explored in Pan’s Labyrinth (2006). The story roughly follows the familiar template of Disney’s Pinocchio (1940), even down to punctuating the action with songs, but with the loosely defined place and time of a fairytale shifted to a very specific Italy before (briefly) and during World War II, with Pleasure Island replaced by a boys’ military training camp. The emphasis has shifted, too, from the notion of the narrator cricket character as conscience to coming to terms with mortality, although the idea that just because things appear to be fun they may not necessarily be good is knocking around in there too.

A narrator who will later identify himself as Sebastian J. Cricket (voice: Ewan McGregor) introduces us to churchgoing woodcarver Gepetto (voice: David Bradley), who is working on a statue of Jesus Christ crucified for the local church, raising dutiful son Carlo (voice: Gregory Mann), an equally religious child with a true sense of wonder at the world around him, including planes in the sky.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Deliver Us From Evil
(Daman Akeseo
Guhasoseo,
다만 악에서 구하소서)

Director – Hong Won-chan – 2020 – South Korea – Cert. 18 – 108m

*****

An assassin trying to rescue his ex-girlfriend’s child from organ thieves discovers a rival is after him for killing his brother – Wednesday, October 26th, 20.30 at The Cinema At Selfridges as part of a strand of films celebrating actor Lee Jung-jae (Squid Game) at London East Asia Film Festival (LEAFF) which runs in cinemas from Wednesday, October 19th to Sunday, October 30th; also available to rent on Sky Go, Sky Store, iTunes, Amazon Prime and Google Play

In a darkened building somewhere in Japan, former South Korean government agent turned professional assassin In-nam (Hwang Jung-min) surprises and pacifies then kills his terrified, Japanese-Korean mob boss target. Meanwhile, his former girlfriend Young-joo (Choi Hee-Seo) is in Thailand in the process of putting down the deposit to buy a golf course when her small daughter Yoo-min (Park So-yi) is kidnapped. Desperate, Young-joo attempts to contact In-nam through his boss over the phone, but In-nam has long since told her she must decide between her child and him and as far as he is concerned, she made her decision. He instructs his boss to inform her he is dead.… Read the rest

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Animation Features Movies

Minions:
The Rise Of Gru

Directors – Kyle Balda, Brad Ableson, Jonathan del Val – 2022 – US – Cert. U – 87m

***1/2

Three plots involving the Minions, their pre-teen, supervillain master Gru and a gang of supervillains called Vicious 6 compete with each other – out in cinemas on Friday, July 1st

This starts off bravely for a franchise entry with the introduction of a raft of six new supervillains who comprise the gang Vicious 6, their names thrown at the audience in rapid-fire vignettes too fast too absorb, suggesting the makers have half an eye on freeze-frameable, home viewing platforms and half an eye on merchandising. The fabulous, motorbiking Belle Bottom (voice: Taraji P. Henson) who appears to have wandered in from 1970s blaxploitation with enormous Afro hair and disco diva clothing is the main focus of an enthralling car chase in which she outwits the cops with incredible stunts.

Her co-villains are voiced mostly by a roster of action stars known for that rather than animation voice work: the crab-pincered Jean Clawed (voice: Jean-Claude Van Damme), the Scandinavian-sounding Svengeance (voice: Dolph Lundgren), Stronghold (voice: Danny Trejo) and nunchaku-wielding nun Nunchuk (Lucy Lawless).

(A quick aside: older readers will recall that back in the 1970s, nunchaku were a no-no for the BBFC who would prune their use or even excise them altogether, sometimes in the most innocuous of contexts.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Jurassic World
Dominion

Director – Colin Trevorrow – 2022 – US – Cert.12a – 148m

***

Sixth Jurassic movie promises then dumps a plot where humans and dinosaurs co-exist in the modern world and instead heads for a secluded valley where numerous dinosaurs are kept by a dodgy corporation – out in cinemas on Friday, June 10th

There’s a long tradition in cinema of putting dinosaurs alongside humans, as if the dinosaurs on their own wouldn’t be enough to bring in audiences. This is nonsense of course: look no further than the TV series Walking With Dinosaurs (1999), Walt Disney’s Fantasia (segment directors: Bill Roberts, Paul Satterfield, 1940) or The Animal World (effects: Willis O’Brien, Ray Harryhausen, 1956), and the high regard in which they’re held, for proof.

The genius of Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993) was to reconstruct the dinosaurs from their DNA, providing a much better reason to put both species side by side than the lost plateau of The Lost World (effects: Willis O’Brien, 1925), the lost island of King Kong (effects: Willis O’Brien, 1933), the lost valley of The Valley Of Gwangi (effects: Ray Harryhausen, 1969) or the cavemen and dinosaurs of One Million Years B.C. (effects: Ray Harryhausen, 1966).… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Operation Mincemeat

Director – John Madden – 2021 – UK – Cert. 12a – 127m

*****

The British WW2 deception involving a corpse and fake documents to make Germany think the Allies are landing in Greece rather than Sicily – out in cinemas on Friday, April 15th

At the height of World War II, the Allies plan a mass landing at Sicily. They want the Germans to think it’s going to happen in Greece to reduce Allied casualties. In a Whitehall Admiralty basement operates the Twenty Committee, so-called after its initials XX (or double-cross) and its work managing double or triple agents (this work of the committee isn’t really alluded to in the film although a British triple agent appears later on and plays a fairly important part in the plot, which will include some racy if subtly understated physical sexual activity). On the floors above are top brass Admiral John Godfrey (Jason Isaacs) and his assistant Ian Fleming (Johnny Flynn), the latter devouring novels and constantly bashing out prose on his typewriter in every spare moment.

The office in the basement itself is run with a rod of iron by the fearsome Hester Leggett (Penelope Wilton) while the Committee’s top man is Ewen Montagu (Colin Firth), a former Old Bailey lawyer whose friends believe to be in charge of naval supplies.… Read the rest