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Features Live Action Movies

Late Shift
(Heldin)

Director – Petra Blondina Volpe – 2025 – Switzerland – Cert. 12a – 92m

****1/2

An experienced and competent nurse in a hospital in the Western world endures a particularly gruelling night shift – out in UK cinemas on Friday, August 1st

There’s a moment of calm at the start of Late Shift… Scrubs going through a laundry system… Floria Lind (Leonie Benesch from September 5, Tim Fehlbaum, 2024; The Teachers’ Lounge, Ilker Çatak, 2023; The White Ribbon, Michael Haneke, 2009) on the night bus to her shift… She and a colleague making small talk whilst changing at the lockers… (The film ends similarly, with a reverse of this bookend, peace after the night shift is over.) And then, they’re on shift.

As soon as Mrs. Lind comes into the ward, the chaos starts. She helps a male colleague (bilingual in German and, for the patient, French) lift the demented Mrs Kuhn (Margherita Schoch) out of her wheelchair so Floria can change the lady’s underwear (and, quite literally, clean her shit off the floor). This evening, it’s Floria, one other nurse (Sonja Riesen), and Amelie (Selma Jamal Aldin), an inexperienced med student. Handing over, a colleague runs through by name the patients on the ward this shift and their various medical needs.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Movies Shorts

Little Shrew
(Snowflake)

Director – Kate Bush – 2024 – UK – Cert. PG – 4m

*****

As modern warfare decimates a landscape, a shrew crosses countryside and town as a small, spirit-like light falls towards it – short accompanies the UK cinema release of From Hilde, With Love on Friday, June 27th

Musician / songwriter Kate Bush originally recorded the song Snowflake, which appeared on her album 50 Words for Snow (2011), in part to record her young son Albert’s voice before it broke. The creative process is such that people don’t always know exactly why they do what they do, and that is clearly the case with this song, since Kate has returned to it after the event to direct an animated film around it. Animation being a painstakingly slow production process, the soundtrack for the short is an edit of the song, pulling it down from almost 10 minutes to 4 minutes. The 4-minute edit is surprisingly coherent and seems to distil the essence of the piece.

Most of the lyrics are sung by Albert, yet Kate sings the haunting refrain:

The world is so loud

Keep falling

I’ll find you

It’s impossible to listen to this without thinking she is the mother somehow waiting for her falling son, whatever that means.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Finding Angel
(Cheonsaneun Baileoseu,
천사는 바이러스)

Director – Kim Seong-jun – 2021 – South Korea – Cert. 15 – 114m

****

Who is the mysterious so-called ‘Angel’ who every Christmas delivers a box containing a large sum of money to a needy local resident of a small, rural town? – out in cinemas on Friday, November 26th

For the last seventeen years at Christmas, the ‘Faceless Angel’ has visited the town of Rohsong in Jeonju City, South Korea to leave a box containing money for a local person in need. Last year, an old woman received the money she needed for a knee operation. Who this person might actually be has remained a mystery, but the locals are glad the Angel is there doing what he or she is doing.

Wishing to solve the mystery and with the journalist’s scent of a good story, newspaperman Kim Ji-hoon (Park Sung-il from Samjin Company English Class, Lee Jong-pil, 2020) arrives in the town in December as the temperature plummets. He makes enquiries at the town office but the girl on the front desk (Lee Ga-kyung) stonewalls him. His attempts at talking to the townspeople don’t get him very far until he talks to old Miss Ok-bun (Moon Sook) about renting a room and she promptly puts him up in her freezing upstairs bedroom.… Read the rest