Tag: nightclub

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Features Live Action Movies

Street Wanderers
(Los Caminantes
de la Calle)

Director – Juan Martin Hsu – 2025 – Argentina, Peru – 90m

*****

Argentinian cops and robbers procedural is set largely in the world of Mendoza’s immigrant Chinese community – premieres in the Critics’ Picks Competition of the 29th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival

2010. Mendoza, Argentina. The family-run, Chinese restaurant of Dageng (Kon Yam Pin) receives telephone threats for protection money. When they don’t pay up within 24 hours, a motorbike with two riders pulls up on at their door which opens onto the main street and fires four shots. So Dageng’s son (Willy Kon Chin Yi) delivers a rucksack containing $50 000 to the gang. But later, the riders complain there was only $30 000 and demand another $20 000.

Lots of similarly threatening phone calls overlap on the soundtrack as we see numerous yellow cables plugged into a telecoms hub, recalling similar motifs in movies as diverse as Three Colours Red (Krzysztof Kieślowski, 1994) and Dial M for Murder (Alfred Hitchcock, 1953).

The prosecutor’s office is monitoring phone calls, but faces challenges. One such is that the calls are in Cantonese so require an interpreter to turn them into intelligible Spanish. Another is illustrated when the current interpreter quits, terrified what might happen to her family if word about the nature of her work gets out.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

The Silent Virgin
(La Virgen Silenciosa)

Director – Xavi Sala – 2025 – Mexico – 127m

*****

A legal secretary frustrated in her job embarks on a relationship with another woman, but her possessive mother does not approve – premieres in the Critics’ Picks Competition of the 29th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival

This certainly knows how to grab your attention at the start. An icon of the Blessed Virgin Mary (BVM) hangs on the wall. On the bed, a grown woman pleasures herself until… The earth moves! Everything is shaking, and she quickly recovers her composure as her middle-aged mother runs in to get her out of the house as the earthquake alarm goes off.

After, they eat at the meal table, and her mother (Mercedes Hernández from New Order, Michel Franco, 2020) asks Vale (“Va-lay”; Zamira Franco also from New Order), who she’ll later address as Valeria, to pick up prescriptions while she’s out and makes sure she doesn’t forget her packed lunch. Then it’s train, bus and the walk past colourful stalls to work. Vale’s office with about half a dozen or so people seems to be piled high with paperwork. They are dealing with the cases of people being arrested. One man being interviewed claims that one of them is lying.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

3670
(3670)

Director – Park Joon-ho – 2025 – South Korea – Cert. 15 – 124m

*****

A gay man who has defected from North to South Korea must get to grips with Seoul’s gay scene and his own sexual and religious identity – from LKFF, the London Korean Film Festival 2025 which runs in cinemas from Wednesday, November 5th to Tuesday, November 18th

Sexually active, gay Seoul resident Cheol-jun (Cho You-hyun) grapples with the fact that his partners don’t stick around after physical interaction. Cheol-jun has recently escaped from North to South Korea. He works at a local store counter and attends a class to help defectors adapt to their new way of life. After class, rather than hang out with fellow defectors such as Hak-min (Jeon Du-sik), who is trying to pair him off with pretty class girl Ji-ye (Choi Yun-seol), he follows phone directions to a mixer, a club night to help gay men make friends.

Numbers are assigned. Asked why he is dressed so formally – is he from North Korea, or something – he responds candidly, “I am.” After drinking “love shots” – two men drink with arms intertwined – guests are invited to write “love notes” to the number they fancy.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Mongrel
(Baiyi Cang Gou,
白衣蒼狗)

Director – Chiang Wei-liang – 2024 – Taiwan, Singapore, France – Cert. 15 – 128m

****1/2

An immigrant caregiver is caught between the demands of his exhausted, needy clients on the one hand and his profit-oriented gangster taskmasters on the other – out in UK cinemas on Friday, May 23rd

This gets straight in there with a taboo-breaking shot of a human bottom covered in excrement, something familiar to anyone who has worked as a carer for an incontinent person but a bit of a shock to the rest of us. A hand bearing a cloth comes into shot and wipes the excrement off. When we eventually see the carer’s head, he is wearing earphones as he does the work. All his male client is doing is wordlessly moaning. We watch the carer lift the man, reassuring him, and deposit him in an offscreen chair. An elderly woman dozes on the sofa. He wipes her brow with a fresh towel. She takes it from him and wipes her face. He tells her he’s fed and bathed Hui (i.e. the son, played by Kuo Shu-wei who has cerebral palsy).

The carer goes outside in the rain. In the cab of his truck, his boss asks, what the hell took you so long?… 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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Nowhere to Hide
(Injeong Sajeong
Bol Geot Eobtda,
인정사정 볼 것 없다)

Director – Lee Myung-se – 1999 – South Korea – Cert. 15 – 100m, 113m

***1/2

A cop determinedly pursues a gangland killer in a city where, since he committed the murder for which he is bing hunted, it always appears to be heavily raining – 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

Effectively a four-hander – an impulsive detective, his partner on the force, a ruthless killer gangster and his long-suffering girlfriend. Like a slobbish, South Korean version of Chow Yun-fat without the charm, Park Joong-Hung is the Oriental action movie homage-named Inspector Woo, who before the titles have rolled has pursued a black-clad gang into an underground train for a machete fight, shot in stylish, bleached black and white for no apparent reason.

The ground is covered in Autumn leaves, recalling The Conformist (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970). The downtown location of public stairway 40 Steps has a schoolgirl look up and see it begin to rain, the torrential downpour continuing for the two months and more of the remainder of the narrative. A man leaves his car to ascend the steps; halfway up, he approaches another man (Song Young-chang) and kills him, even as the victim stretches out his hand in a futile attempt to keep his murderer’s knife at bay.… Read the rest

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Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Agent
of Happiness

Directors – Arun Bhattarai, Dorottya Zurbó – 2023 – Bhutan, Hungary – 94m

****

A civil servant travels around Bhutan assessing individual people’s happiness even as his personal life begs the questions whether he, himself, is truly happy – out in UK cinemas on Friday, July 12th

Judging by the opening montage of cloudy and hilly scenery here, Bhutan may not be the sunniest place on the planet, but it looks fabulously beautiful. In their house, a fortysomething man clips and files his mother’s fingernails. He puts on his uniform (which includes a traditional type of robe), says goodbye to her, and goes out to work. He has a job as one of 75 agents who travel the kingdom conducting surveys assessing people’s happiness. We will only lean his name fortysomething minutes into the film.

The surveys have 148 questions and nine categories. The King of Bhutan has instigated a Happiness Index, to measure Gross National Happiness (GNH), which serves as the basis of future policy to improve his subjects’ lot and make them as happy as they can be.

The agent and his colleague drive around in his car meeting people and asking them the questions. At the end of each interview, a chart overlays the image of the person (sometimes it’s more than one family member) showing marks from one to ten for each category, plus another mark for their overall Happiness Level.… Read the rest

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The Beast
(La Bête)
(2023)

Director – Bertrand Bonello – 2023 – France – Cert. 15 – 146m

*****

Required to expunge her emotions by the ruling AI of 2044, a woman with a sense of dread revisits her past lives in 1910 and 2014 and their incarnations of the love of her life – curious mix of art house movie and science fiction is out on MUBI from on Friday, July 12th

An actress (Léa Seydoux) against green screen rehearses a scene in a house – the director’s voice tells her where the stairs and other features are in relation to her position and marks on the floor. With these minimal visuals but with the addition of music and full sound effects, she works through the scene up to the point where she sees the terrifying shadow of the Beast on a wall and screams. Consciously or unconsciously, this echoes the screen test on the boat of Ann Darrow (Fay Wray) in King Kong (Merian C. Cooper, Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1933) as she is required to scream at an unseen, gargantuan monster for the camera.

As in Kong, this scene anticipates one that will play out later in the film. However, Bonello plays it as a curious introduction to the whole, rather than part of the story proper.… Read the rest

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The Beast
(La Bête)
(2023)

A Fatal Belief

The Beast
Directed by Bertrand Bonello
Certificate 15, 146 minutes
Released 31 May

As satisfying as it is infuriating, this French genre-bender is part science fiction, part period costume drama and part literary adaptation. It’s based on Henry James’ 1903 novella The Beast in the Jungle, in which a man refuses to marry the woman he loves to spare her from the attack he believes will be perpetrated upon him at some point by a horrible beast.

About a third is, as you might expect, a period costume drama, sumptuously shot on film. However, the co-writer and director Bonello introduces two more separate timelines set in 2014 and 2044 and shot on harsher digital technology for a more modern feel.

He also switches the gender roles round, so that… [Read the full review in Reform]

[Read my longer review on this site]

Trailer:

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Luminous Woman
(Hikaru Onna,
光る女)

Director – Shinji Somai – 1987 – Japan – Cert. 15 – 118m

*****

A Hokkaido farmer comes to Tokyo in search of his vanished fiancée but finds a world he has not expected – on Blu-ray from Monday, Monday, May 20th

At a rubbish tip on the outskirts of Tokyo, a barefoot man (Takeiji Muto) in cheap trousers and top encounters a suave-looking sophisticate (Kei Suma) and a woman opera singer (Michiru Akiyoshi), the latter performing gracefully atop the rubbish heap. The woman is dependent on the sophisticate. The barefoot man has travelled from Hokkaido to find his fiancée Kuriko Sakura, who was supposed to return after studying accounting to help him run a farm.

The sophisticate knows someone of that name, and drives the barefoot man into the city. In his nightclub, he offers the outsider a deal – if he’ll fight the club’s pro-wrestler for ¥100 000, the other will tell him where to find Kuriko. However, she may not be the person he seeks. Out of her boss’ earshot, the woman warns the outsider that the wrestling may be to the death.

In the club she plays the piano while another woman sings opera and, on the circular dias bordered by a water pool, a challenger fights the incumbent wrestler and loses.… Read the rest