Tag: matriarch

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Features Live Action Movies

Avatar
Fire and Ash

Director – James Cameron – 2025 – US – Cert. 12a – 195m

Immersive Cinema *****

Screenplay ***1/2

Return to Pandora – this time, with a terrifying tribe whose trust in the planet’s spirit has been wiped out by a volcano – second Avatar sequel is out in cinemas from Friday, December 19th

Whatever you think of the Avatar movies – of which this is the third – there’s no denying that audiences love them, and that these films are, for the time being at least, critic-proof. The original Avatar (2009) is a remarkable work, right at the cutting edge of what one might call immersive cinema, with Cameron making superb use of 3D in an industry which long ago decided 3D was a fad useful primarily for jacking up the price of tickets: in Cameron’s hands, however, 3D goes hand-in-hand with artistic intent as he involves you in a planet or a world – Pandora – with its own, unique, eco-system. Having done that, the question is, where can you go. The second film Avatar: The Way of Water (James Cameron, 2022), in this writer’s opinion, is just as impressive as a further piece of immersive cinema; however, while it delivers some extraordinary sequences, it fails to deliver in terms of story in the way that the original did.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies

Belleville Rendez-Vous
(US: The Triplets of Belleville,
Les Triplettes de Belleville)

Director – Sylvain Chomet – 2003 – France – Cert. 12a – 80m
*****

Hailing from France, this animated fable is a heady concoction of nightclub singers, long distance cyclists, doting matriarchs and ruthless mobsters – out in UK cinemas from Friday, August 23rd, 2003

Like the animator’s earlier short The Old Lady And The Pigeons (1996), Sylvain Chomet’s animated fable is a highly personal work driven by intense character study.

Champion is a small boy obsessed by bicycles, put through a rigorous training programme by grandmother Madame Souza (voice: Monica Viegas) and entered years later (voice as an adult: Michel Robin) in the Tour de France. When during the race he and some fellow competitors are kidnapped by gangsters, the trail leads granny and faithful hound Bruno to Belleville, where aging chanteuses Les Triplets De Belleville agree to help them rescue Champion.

It isn’t so much the plot that makes this great as the detail large and small that Chomet hangs upon it. From its opening, joyous, Fleischeresque jazz number through slow, overcast grey sequences where railway trains roar past the upper floor of the family house to the unexpected car chase finale with broad-shouldered gunmen in unbelievably long cars, the little touches grab the attention and never let go.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Boy Kills World

Director – Moritz Mohr – 2023 – Germany, US, South Africa – Cert. 18 – 111m

***1/2

Relentless, non-stop action via a deaf-mute, orphaned kid, schooled in martial arts, returning to the city as a grown man to wreak vengeance on those who killed his family – out in UK cinemas on Friday, April 26th

Elite family the Van Der Koys have taken control of the city and instigated an annual ceremony known as The Culling, a physical contest staged for television in a vast arena in which anyone who opposes the Van Der Koys and the way they run the place is killed. This was of little concern to Boy, who as a child (twins Nicholas and Cameron Crovetti from TV series Big Little Lies, 2017-19) grew up in a carefree existence eating Frosty Pops cereal every morning with his sister Mina (Quinn Copeland) and, the pair naively making insulting hand gestures at publicly displayed Van Der Koy statues during the day which gets their family onto the list of candidates for The Culling. And so his parents and sister are despatched in the ceremony, leaving Boy a traumatised deaf-mute.

All of the above comes out early on in a mixture of flashback and over-the-top interior monologue (hilariously voiced by H.… Read the rest