Tag: money

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Features Live Action Movies

I, the Song

Director – Dechen Roder – 2024 – Bhutan, Norway, Italy, France – 112m

*****

A woman fired from her teacher’s job for appearing in an online sex video she claims is of someone else sets out to find her doppelgänger and clear her name – winner of Best Director in the Critics’ Picks Competition of the 28th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival

This starts off deceptively with singing children’s voices, cutting into accompanying images of a school play with the children costumed as various types of flowers. The camera moves slowly to the back of the school hall where watching teacher Nima (Tandin Bidha) is told she is urgently needed in the office of the principal (Kezang Dorjee aka Kazee), where she finds herself being fired because of the video, now widely seen online, in which she appears. She protests that the person in the video isn’t her, but the principal says he can’t have her seen on school premises with so many parents about today.

She phones her boyfriend Penjor (Dorji Wangdi), who is in the middle of a gig hosting traditional Bhutanese folk plays. She goes to see him. His reaction is, “so, I’m not the only person who thinks it’s you.”… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

The Brothers Kitaura
(Kitaurakyodai)

Director – Masaki Tsujino – 2024 – Japan – 94m

***1/2

A 40-year-old living at home accidentally kills his father, then enlists the help of his brother to dispose of the body – premieres in the Critics’ Picks Competition of the 28th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival

Morning. 40-year-old Sato wakes up, surrounded by bagged-up piles of manga, used food packaging and drink cans. The used food packaging squelches as he stretches into it. He is a slob. Meanwhile, his better-dressed, retired and widowed art teacher father is out teaching watercolour painting to a lady of a similar age to himself. They sit on the bank overlooking a picturesque river scene and seem to be enjoying both the act of painting and each other’s company.

Sato finds the note his father left him, and orders takeaway food to feed himself accordingly. Then, to satisfy more carnal appetites, he also orders a call-girl from Bang Club Tokyo, who arrives as promised in a matter of minutes, sitting for a relaxing smoke (which we see) before servicing her client (which we don’t).

The father isn’t just enjoying his lady student’s company. He appears to be teaching her and her alone for a number of consecutive days, and would like to formalise the relationship into something more.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Hani
(Hani)

Director – Hou Dasheng – 2024 – Canada – 73m

*

In a remote, Southern Chinese mountain village, a 14-year-old needs the money for the dowry to buy his 12-year-old sweetheart as a wife – premieres in the Critics’ Picks Competition of the 28th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival

Credited on the Festival’s website as a Canadian production in the Burmese and Chinese languages, this is a Chinese-made film not sanctioned by the Chinese authorities dealing with subject matter which the filmmakers fear would not be passed by the Chinese censor. The caption review suggests that a number of the film’s cast and crew have used pseudonyms to avoid prosecution. The narrative takes place in the mountainous, Southern region of China close to the border with Myanmar, where people are known by their Burmese names, but occasionally refer to other people by their Chinese names. You get the feeling that this area of China has been largely forgotten by the distant Beijing authorities.

The central characters are young teenagers or pre-teenagers, Hani (14; Gao Xiaokang) and his friend Apao (Qian Long), who seems to be frequently seeking advice from others on his mobile phone, and Hani’s longtime sweetheart Pushiha (12; Pu Juan).… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Twilight of the Warriors
Walled in
(Jiu Long Cheng
Zhai·Wei Cheng,
九龙城寨之围城)

Director – Soi Cheang – 2023 – Hong Kong – Cert. 15 – 126m

*****

A refugee steals money from a Hong Kong triad then hides out in Kowloon Walled City, a place as dangerous as the triads pursuing him – out on Zavvi-exclusive Limited 4K UHD + Blu-ray Special Edition from Monday, November 11th

Never entered by those outside, an uneasy peace has reigned in Kowloon Walled City a.k.a. the City of Darkness since Cyclone defeated ‘Dragon Head’ Liu and his warlord partner Jim. It’s Hong Kong in the 1980s, when refugees were flooding into the territory. In a nightclub where women dance to Cantopop, one such refugee (Raymond Lam) wins a fist fight competition then is conned by gang boss (Sammo Hung) into paying for a shoddily made fake ID card, which he refuses to accept when he calls to collect it two weeks later. Leaving the ensuing argument, he snatches a bag from the villain’s drug warehouse and runs hell for leather into the Walled City, where the gangsters won’t follow.

Inside, he discovers to his horror that he’s snatched not a bag of banknotes as he supposed but a bag of drugs. Trying to sell it, he finds himself fighting local gangsters, who don’t want him selling drugs on their turf.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Things Will Be Different

Director – Michael Felker – 2024 – US – Cert. 15 – 102m

****

A brother and sister go through a portal into the past, are trapped there by an unseen adversary, and must wait for a mysterious visitor – out in UK cinemas on Friday, October 4th

This movie is different. It’s about philosophical ideas. It would work very well as a piece of writing (a short story? a novella?), it would work as a radio drama, and – yes – it works very well as a movie. Because what’s compelling about it is not what you see with your eyes or hear with your ears, it’s the implications of it all, the stuff that goes through your head as you’re watching the movie. Welcome to the Cinema of Ideas.

Early one bright and sunny Summer morning, Sidney (Riley Dandy) enters the diner where her brother Joseph (Adam David Thompson), who she’s not seen for a while, is having breakfast. She has the rifle. He has the two bags with the money. As arranged, they go through the woods, across the high cornfields towards the house. There are people in the woods, which are supposed to be deserted. She is concerned.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

The Weak and the Wicked

Director – J. Lee Thompson – 1954 – UK – Cert. 12 – 88m

***1/2

A woman spends 12 months in prison after being convicted of fraud – one of two J. Lee Thompson movies out on UK Blu-ray, DVD and Digital in August, 2024

Jean (Glynis Johns) is marched from her cell and up the stairs into the courtroom to hear the judge’s verdict. She gets 12 months for fraud, and is sent to HM Prison Blackdown. Her crime is detailed in flashback – she has a gambling problem, which costs her her doctor boyfriend Michael Hale (John Gregson) who walks out on her. She pays for chips at a casino with a cheque, for which she hadn’t the funds in the bank. In this office, the owner Mr. Seymour (Edwin Styles) tells her he has his own way of dealing with debts, as she’ll shortly find out.

Her friend Pam (Ursula Howells) gets her a job in a clothing store, but it turns out Pam is actually working for Mr. Seymour and steals a family heirloom from Jean’s handbag the first chance she gets. Jean claims the insurance money only for two policemen to arrest her the day the money comes through, going into her home and finding a pawn ticket for the allegedly stolen item tucked into the back of a mirror.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Cadejo Blanco

Director – Justin Lerner – 2023 – Guatemala, US, Mexico – Cert. 15 – 125m

*****

A young woman infiltrates a drugs gang in order to find out what happened to her elder sister, who never came back from a night out – out in UK cinemas on and on demand Friday, August 23rd

This opens with a deceptively simple sequence of two young women getting ready to go out for an evening. The older one, who apparently goes out a lot, and we’ll later learn is called Bea (newcomer Pamela Martínez), is pressurising the younger one Sarita (Karen Martínez from The Golden Dream, Diego Quemada-Diez, 2014), who has never been out to a club before. They might be flatmates, but as the scene plays out, it emerges that they are sisters. Bea helps Sarita dress up.

While this may sound banal, it’s shot in a long take, and there’s something utterly compelling about it. Perhaps it’s the script, which appears to do everything it needs to with no flab or wastage. Perhaps it’s the casting: you absolutely come to believe these two are sisters (as far as I can tell, despite having the same surname and looking quite similar, the two actresses are not real life sisters).… Read the rest

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Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Eternal You

Directors – Hans Block, Moritz Reisewieke – 2024 – US – Cert. – 87m

*****

People deal with bereavement with the help of interactive versions of their deceased, loved ones recreated by AI – out in UK cinemas on Friday, June 28th

In a rare visual shot in this mostly verbally based documentary, an aerial shot of a graveyard, with light creating lots of little blocks of shadow as it falls on the ranks of gravestones, resembles a slice of internal computer electronics. It’s a pertinent pictorial moment that stands out from almost everything else here.

“Is there some reason you wouldn’t believe me?,” a woman asks her boyfriend. “You died,” comes the sceptical reply. Joshua, from Ontario, Canada, had to endure the trauma of watching the life support machines that were keeping her alive being switched off. After she died, about two weeks short of high school graduation which she was expected to pass, he got the school to graduate her. He later explains this by written chat to her interactive AI.

Psychiatrist Sherry Turkle talks about the problems people face coping with grief in the modern world, where they often live on their own following the death of a partner and don’t have an extended network of family around them like they would have done in former times.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

the G

Director – Karl R. Hearne – 2023 – Canada – Cert. 15 – 106m

*****

A 72-year-old conned out of her home and assets calls up someone from her past to exact revenge – gripping thriller is out in UK and Ireland cinemas on Friday, June 21st

After a brief opening in which two men complete the task of burying a third alive, this switches to a hospital appointment of Mrs. Hunter (Dale Dickey from Hell or High Water, David MacKenzie, 2016; Winter’s Bone, Debra Granik, 2010), 72 years old and gruffly describing herself as “socialite, retired”. She is accompanied by her grown-up granddaughter (Romane Denis), photogenic legs in tight shorts, and giving the middle finger to men who come on to her. The elder drives the younger home, deliberately missing the turn-off so they can spend more time together talking in the car.

Then Hunter returns to her condo to care for her bedridden partner Chip (Greg Ellwand from February, Oz Perkins, 2015), hit a bottle of vodka and perch precariously on a stepladder on her balcony to fix a dicky light. She is watched by a man from a car parked in the street. Next morning, there’s a knock at the door, and men including “your legal guardian Rivera” (Bruce Ramsay) and his assistant (Jonathan Koensgen) come into the apartment bearing a court order to move the couple to a facility.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Maria Full of Grace

Director – Joshua Marston – 2004 – US, Colombia – Cert. 15 – 101m

Reviewed for Third Way magazine to coincide with UK release date 25/03/2004.

Life’s options are limited for 17-year-old Maria Alvarez (Catalina Sandino Moreno). She would rather climb old ruined buildings in the open air than succumb to her parochially-minded boyfriend’s constant demands for sex, but that doesn’t stop him getting her pregnant. When he offers to marry her for no other reason than because that’s what you’re supposed to do; she dumps him. She hasn’t told anyone else about this yet. Warned she can’t use the lavatory on work time by the foreman at the rose-stripping factory where both she and her best friend Blanca (Yenny Paola Vega) works, she quits. She’s also fed up with being asked to contribute money to support her sister’s baby. What’s a good Catholic, Columbian girl to do? She visits the church to pray about it.

Travelling to Bogotá ostensibly in pursuit of a possible lead on work as a maid, Maria runs into carefree, leather-jacketed Franklin (Jhon Alex Toro) and the word “mule”. Suckered in by his confidence and the promise of $5 000, she agrees to bodily transport Heroin pellets to the US despite the terrible stories she’s heard of people being arrested for the offence.… Read the rest