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Art Documentary Features Live Action Movies

War Paint
Women at War

The Crying Game. Between a Rock and a Hard Place 2017 by Marcelle Hanselaar

Director – Margy Kinmonth – 2025 – UK – Cert. 12a – 89m

*****

A look at the output of various women artists who have documented and dissected war, and what they can tell us – out in UK cinemas on Friday, March 28th

Although being promoted, reasonably enough, with an image from World War Two of women working with barrage balloons, right from the start in narration over its opening titles this breaks the mould for anyone expecting it to cover any one specific historical or geographical war. “I’m going to talk to women all round the world”, says director Kinmonth in regard to the concept of war as a catalyst for creativity. “What do women see that men don’t?” Quite apart from her gender, she is well-placed to tackle such a subject having recently made two documentaries on the subject of war artists: Eric Ravilious: Drawn to War (2022), War Art with Eddie Redmayne (2015), and many more before that on the subject of art in assorted social contexts.

The film is a compendium of interviews with living female artists or, in the cases of artists who’ve passed on, their descendants or proponents. Some of the names are familiar, such as Lee Miller, Maggi Hambling or Dame Rachel Whiteread, others much less so.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Borderlands

Director – Eli Roth – 2024 – US – Cert. 12a – 102m

*

A ragtag collective of misfits must outwit their pursuers on a hostile planet– videogame adaptation is out in UK cinemas on Friday, August 9th

Intergalactic bounty hunter Lilith (an orange-haired Cate Blanchett) is hired by the universe’s most powerful industrialist Atlas (Edgar

Ramírez) to find his missing teenage daughter Tiny Tina, last seen on Lilith’s home planet Pandora, famed for an ancient civilisation of the Eridians and their much sought after vault which can only be opened by a member of that race. The planet is a renowned hell-hole, and while Lilith knows her way around there, she has no intention of going back.

Atlas, however, makes her an offer she can’t refuse, so it is that Lilith finds her way to Pandora where she is soon united with Tiny Tina (Ariana Greenblatt) who turns out to have a love of using children’s cuddly toys as explosive missiles. Tina is accompanied by a soldier on the lam (Kevin Hart) and a sympathetic if none-too-bright muscleman (Florian Munteanu). Her entourage soon expands to include an irritating motormouth robot (voice: Jack Black) programmed by an unknown client to protect Tina and a cynical scientist (Jamie Lee Curtis).… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Movies Shorts

Scenes With Beans
(Babfilm)

Director – Ottó Foky – 1976 – Hungary – 12m

*****

A metal space bird approaches the bean planet to observe various aspects of life upon it before being discovered then shot at with a missile in this remarkable stop-frame short – out on MUBI as part of the animated shorts season Fables, Folklore, Futurism: Visionary Hungarian Animations on Monday, September 20th

Framed by a story of a giant alien metal bird observing a planet from space, this is primarily an excuse to create numerous scenarios using animated kidney beans and butter beans to stand in as people in a 3D, model animated world. It’s the sort of film where you constantly marvel at the inventiveness of shooting scenes in a particular style of animation which, were they shots in a live action documentary, would simply appear banal – but in the form here presented prove completely compelling.

A crescent moon resembling nothing so much as a croissant floats past the planet. The approaching giant bird looks like it could have wandered in from the Clangers stop-frame BBC TV series (Oliver Postgate, 1969-72, 1974) except that it’s less a character like that show’s fabled Soup Dragon than a tech-equipped space opera craft with a visual recording device that has a calibrated viewfinder like a camera or a periscope.… Read the rest