Tag: mountain

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

The Ice Tower
(La Tour de Glace)

Director – Lucile Hadzihalilovic – 2025 – France, Germany, Italy – Cert. 15 – 117m

*****

Midwinter. A homeless girl stumbles onto a film set where a notoriously difficult actress is shooting an adaptation of The Snow Queen – out in UK cinemas on Friday, November 21st

Opening with microscopic images of of snowflakes and more abstract visuals of refracted light, this swiftly delivers a female voiceover (by Aurélia Petit from Saint Omer, Alice Diop, 2022; By the Grace of God, François Ozon, 2018; Happy End, Michael Haneke, 2017; Personal Shopper, Olivier Assayas, 2016; The Science of Sleep, Michel Gondry, 2006) in French with English subtitles for those of us in the UK, in which the word ‘neige’ (snow) is seemingly, endlessly repeated. Then images of a girl wandering snow covered mountainsides gives way to night time small town streets before Jeanne (newcomer Clara Pacini) is told off for arriving late at the supper table. “I was afraid you’d gone”, says one of the younger girls (Cassandre Louis Urbain).

At night, Jeanne surreptitiously reads a postcard from a friend picturing Alpenaille skating rink addressed to her at the Bon Secours (Good Rescue) Foster Home.

The little girl from earlier comes into her room complaining of a nightmare.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Shark Skin Man
and Peach Hip Girl
(Samehada Otoko
to Momojiri Onna,
鮫肌男と桃尻女)

Director – Katsuhito Ishii – 1998 – Japan – Cert. 15 – 108m

*****

Arresting and highly inventive thriller is out as a standalone Blu-ray release in the UK from Monday, April 14th 2025, also on digital, having previously appeared as the first disc of the three disc release Katsuhito Ishii Collection from Third Window Films just over a year ago (when the following piece was written for All the Anime).

Deriving its odd title from a literal translation of the leads’ surnames, Katsuhito Ishii’s highly original gangster movie from 1998 is based on a familiar plot: a man runs off with the mob’s money, and a lady companion. Or, as pioneering French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard once put it: all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun.

Shark Skin Man and Peach Hip Girl has much the same strengths as Godard when he’s on form. Ishii demonstrates a similar flair for taking actors or actresses and having them do what they do on camera so that it’s completely absorbing to watch: look no further than the extraordinary title sequence which starts about five minutes in and consists of little more than names and images of all the major cast members against a white background with overlaid black line animation images.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies

Boonie Bears
Future Reborn
(Xiong Chu Mo
Chong Qi Wei Lai,
熊出没·重启未来)

Directors – Lin Yongchang, Qu Caijia – 2025 – China – Cert. PG – 107m

**

Park Ranger Vick unwittingly releases pink spores into the atmosphere, reducing the earth to a toxic wasteland, then he and the bears time travel forward 100 years to sort it out– in a dubbed format for family audiences – out in UK cinemas on Friday, April 18th

One hundred years in the future, cities (and a cute rabbit that gets less than a minute of screen time) have been subsumed by toxic spores. This is because of one man. Flashback into the present and Park Ranger Vick (voice in the English language dub: Chris Boike), familiar from previous Boonie Bears outings, holding a cute baby, seeing the child’s beautiful mother approach them and then coming down to Earth when her tourist husband turns up behind him.

The disappointed Vick guides his charges to snow-covered mountain Crystal Peak, where a combination of awkward customers and Vick’s slipping on a banana skin causes a noise which triggers a deadly avalanche. And a wormhole opening in the sky, from which falls a boy with jetpack shoes. He perches on a high branch, marvelling as a butterfly alights on his glove.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

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

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Goryeojang
(고려장)

Director – Kim Ki-young – 1963 – South Korea – 89m

2019 Korean Film Archive (KOFA) Restoration (two reels missing)

****

Goryeojang is the concept of taking your elders up a mountain when they reach 70 so that they can face death – plays in Echoes In Time | Korean Films of the Golden Age and New Cinema which runs from Monday, October 28th until the end of 2024 at BFI Southbank – from the London Korean Film Festival 2019

Over fifty years old, Goryeojang is sadly available as only a print with two reels (three and six) missing. The LKFF screened the version where the missing scenes are explained by a brief series of intertitles so that the rest of the film can make sense. It’s a tough film to pigeonhole. A description like period drama, which genre it absolutely fits, proves woefully inadequate. To a Western viewer, it plays out like a classic fairy tale, with archetypal characters and considerable amounts of cruelty. The art direction is light years away from any sort of social realism with its rural sets obviously artificially constructed in a studio, recalling (to name but one obvious example) The Singing Ringing Tree (Francesco Stefani, 1957), especially for all those British people who saw that latter film in black and white on BBC children’s television in the 1960s.… 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
Animation Features Live Action Movies

Mavka
The Forest Song
(Mavka.
Lisova Pisnya,
Мавка.
Лісова пісня)

Directors – Oleh Malamuzh, Oleksandra Ruban – 2022 – Ukraine – Cert. PG – 99m

Ukrainian language dubbed version with English subtitles ****1/2

English language dubbed version ****

#Mavka

Can the love of a brave and essentially honest youth for Mavka the forest spirit succeed in the face of the enmity between humans and nature? – Ukrainian animation is out in UK cinemas on Friday, July 28th

Long ago, events flared into a terrible winter war between the Guardian (voice in Ukrainian: Nazar Zadniprovskyi; in English: Marc Thompson) of the forest beyond the Dark Mountain and a sawmill owner who initially wanted to obtain one drop of the Source of Life to heal his sick daughter but then became greedy and brought an army to seize the rest of the Source of Life for himself. Seeing the terrible devastation wrought upon the forest in the conflict, the Guardian decreed that no human should ever again set foot in the forest.

Many years later, as young forest spirit Mavka (voice in Ukrainian: Natalka Denysenko; in English: Laurie Hymes) awakens from her winter sleep to spread the new life of Spring, in the nearby village where flautist Lucas (voice in Ukrainian: Artem Pyvovarov; in English: Eddy Lee) is performing with fellow musicians, the late sawmill owner’s daughter Kilina (voice in Ukrainian: Olena Kravets; in English: Sarah Natochenny) returns promising well paid work.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Lunana:
a Yak in the Classroom
(ལུང་ནག་ན)

Director – Pawo Choyning Dorji – 2022 – Bhutan – Cert. PG – 109m

****

A young man trapped in and frustrated with a teaching career is sent to a remote village, which turns out to be the best thing that’s ever happened to him – 2022 Oscar-nominated film for Best International Feature is out in UK cinemas on Friday, March 10th

Bhutan operates a system of National Service, and for Ugyen (Sherab Dorji) this means five years working in education. His heart was never in it, and he finds it something of an ordeal. His grandmother (Tsheri Zom) constantly berates him for not getting up early enough, while the State education system is less than impressed with his record. If he had his own way, he’d give it all up, take his guitar and go to Australia to try and set himself up as a singer. He’s still required to finish his five years first, though.

That’s bad enough, but then this die-in-the-wool urbanite addicted to his mobile phone and music listening on headphones finds that the system is so fed up with him, it sends him to an unexpected Autumn term teaching placement he’s in no position to refuse, much as he might wish to do so.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Fantastic Beasts:
The Secrets
Of Dumbledore

Director – David Yates – 2022 – UK – Cert. 12a – 142m

***

In the 1930s, Newt Scamander, Albus Dumbledore and others attempt to prevent the despotic wizard Grindlewald from seizing power in a wizard’s election in J.K. Rowling’s third Fantastic Beasts movie – out in cinemas on Friday, April 8th

It’s difficult to know where to start with the third of J.K. Rowling’s self-penned Fantastic Beasts productions. A plethora of characters who apart from a few main ones quickly get confusing, some genuinely fantastic beasts as you would hope and some truly great underlying ideas poorly served by a narrative that doesn’t seem to understand basic storytelling in cinema. Perhaps if I’d immersed myself in all the books and films and whatever else is out there, it would make more sense (and no doubt this is what much of the dedicated fan audience will do), but as a standalone film, even one that’s a part of an ongoing saga, it makes little sense, although certain sequences are terrific.

The big ideas here are built around a creature called a Qilin (pronounced chillin) – a beast borrowed from Chinese and Far Eastern mythology – specifically an orphaned newborn Qilin that looks a lot like a golden version of Bambi, a resemblance underscored by the fate meted out to its mother in the opening reel.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

The Battle
At Lake Changjin II
aka
Water Gate Bridge
(Zhang Jin Hu,
长津湖之水门桥)

Director – Tsui Hark – 2022 – China – Cert. 15 – 153m

**

Ill-considered sequel to box office barnstorming, Chinese war movie fails to match the emotional engagement and excitement of the original – out in cinemas on Friday, February 11th

After the exciting and energetic original, this sequel is a disappointment. It has the same expertise of CG special effects as its predecessor. However the cast is cut down, many of the memorable characters having died heroically in the first film, and there’s no attempt to replace them. Similarly, the spectacular locations are fewer in number because there’s no journey from home through different regions, so this has a smaller geographical palette to play with.

The cast of characters issue would be easy enough to fix within the war genre: members of a military unit die, others come to the fore to replace them in the vacuum created. But no, here all we get are People’s Volunteer Army (PVA) 7th Company commander Wu Qianli (Wu Jing from The Wandering Earth, Frant Gwo, 2019, and sequels) and his younger brother Wu Wanli (Jackson Lee) and no real attempt to further develop their relationship under fire. The two characters are just there, and the audience is expected to carry over their emotional investment from the first film without the second one providing any reason for doing so.… Read the rest