Tag: party

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Primavera
(Primavera)

Director – Damiano Michieletto – 2025 – Italy, France – Cert. 15 – 110m

*****

A young orphan woman comes into her own learning to play the violin under her orphanage’s new Master of Music, Antonio Vivaldi – period drama is out in UK and Ireland cinemas on Friday, April 24th

A group of girls, all wearing similar dresses, fawn over a cat’s newly birthed litter of kittens. That doesn’t last long, as an older woman unceremoniously picks up the kittens one by one, stuffs them into a sack, goes to the huge wooden door of the courtyard, opens it, and throws the sack into the canal. In seconds we have gone from unbearably cute to unspeakably cruel.

The older woman is the Prioress (Fabrizia Sacchi) who presides over an orphanage in eighteenth century Venice. Baby girls are abandoned outside their doors, accompanied by half a memento – should the woman later wish to reclaim her daughter, she need only turn up at the orphanage bearing the matching half. The orphanage’s archive lists the details of every girl, complete with half memento. Many of the mementos are religious, such as an image of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

The orphanage is renowned for its orchestra.… Read the rest

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The Wizard of the Kremlin
(Le Mage du Kremlin)

Director – Olivier Assayas – 2025 – France – Cert. 15 – 137m

*****

Starting in 1990s Russia, an avant-garde theatre director morphs into first a TV producer then the mastermind behind the rise and rule of Vladimir Putin – out in UK cinemas on Friday, April 17th

2019. Roland (Jeffrey Wright) writing a book on a prominent Russian novelist and on a research trip to Moscow when he receives a message from someone who has materials that will interest him. So he accepts the invitation and is driven to a private house on the woodlands outskirts of that city where he is shown first editions and documentation pertaining to the writer.

All this, however, is a pretext to the main event. His host, Vadim Baranov (Paul Dano), starts to tell Roland his life story from his student days onwards. Which sets the scene for what is to follow: a portrait of a close-up portrait of a shadowy figure who was to become Vladimir Putin’s arch-manipulator and right-hand man.

Dismissive of Gorbachov, he takes us back to the early 1990s when the Soviet Union was collapsing and Boris Yeltsin was in the presidential ascendant. A time of gunfire and violence, when men of increasing wealth and power could be killed at any time, a fact illustrated by an SUV exploding mid-convoy along a Muscovite spaghetti junction.… Read the rest

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The Bride!

Director – Maggie Gyllenhaal – 2026 – US – Cert. 15 – 126m

**

In 1930s Chicago, Frankenstein’s monster seeks love and companionship, so a dead girl, possessed by the spirit of Mary Shelley, is reanimated as his Bride – out in UK cinemas on Friday, March 6th

Stuck for eons in a black and white limbo, having died of brain cancer after writing the novel Frankenstein – perhaps the novel was part of a brain tumour – and feeling that she’d not managed to say within it what she needed to say, the departed spirit of Mary Shelley (Jessie Buckley from Hamnet, Chloe Zhao, 2025; The Lost Daughter, Maggie Gyllenhaal, 2021; Misbehaviour, Phillippa Lowthorpe, 2020) observes the world of the living, in colour, and enters it to take possession of a living woman in 1930s Chicago through whom she intends to say what still needs to be said. She picks the fearless and vivacious Ida (Buckley again) in the orbit of ruthless gangster Lupino (Zlatko Burić from Superman, James Gunn, 2025; Triangle of Sadness, Ruben Östlund, 2022; Pusher, Nicolas Winding Refn, 1996).

Being fed one oyster too many in a nightclub, Ida wilfully throws up over one of Lupino’s men.… Read the rest

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Blue
is the Warmest Colour
(La Vie d’Adèle)

Director – Abdellatif Kechiche – 2013 – France – Cert. 18 – 180m

UK release date 22/11/2013;

Review originally published in Third Way magazine, November 2013.

A loose adaptation of Julie Maroh’s graphic novel Le Bleu est une Couleur Chaude, this is one of the most touching films about romantic love (and physical passion) ever. Be warned, it contains some pretty explicit, real rather than simulated, sex scenes (there’s good reason for the 18 certificate) but these appear in a wider, character-driven context.

Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos) and her mainly girl peer group at school spend much time discussing boys. She sleeps with but feels no real connection to a boy who’s a “sure thing”. While this romance is going nowhere, she exchanges glances with an unknown blue-haired girl on the arm of another woman on the street and is completely smitten. Seeing her emotional turmoil, she’s dragged off for a drink by her confidant, a boy she’s unaware is gay until they’re together in a gay bar, from which she makes her excuses and somehow winds up alone in an all-girl bar where Emma (Léa Seydoux), the girl with blue hair, chats her up. From there, to the confusion of her straight peers, a relationship slowly blossoms into full-blown passion.… Read the rest

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This is England

Director – Shane Meadows – 2006 – UK – Cert. 18 – 101m

A young, pre-teenage lad falls in with a gang of skinheads in Post-Falklands War, Thatcherite Britain – originally published in Third Way in 2007, to coincide with the film’s UK release date

The above one line synopsis, although accurate, doesn’t even begin to convey the piece’s considerable strengths. (Note: Meadows would subsequently develop this into a series of TV dramas in the UK using many of the same cast and characters: This is England ‘86, This is England ‘88 and This is England ‘90 in 2010, 2011 and 2015 respectively.)

Meadows is a unique and powerful voice, a teenage school dropout who kicked off his career in features with 1996’s 60-minute feature Small Time and went on to greater things TwentyFourSeven (1997) and critical favourite A Room For Romeo Brass (1999). His highest profile effort is the less impressive Once Upon A Time In The Midlands (2002), which suffers from trying to make an epic with an all-star British cast. Meadows is not about big movies (not yet, anyway) – he began shooting movies with mates as actors and has an uncanny ability to draw incredible performances out of actors and non-actors alike, based as much on the people concerned as on their acting ability.… Read the rest

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The Conversation

R.I.P. Gene Hackman (1930-2025)

Director – Francis Ford Coppola – 1974 – US – Cert. 12a – 113m

*****

A surveillance expert records a conversation between two people, then worries about turning the recording over to his corporate client as contracted – 50th anniversary 4K Restoration is out on UHD, Blu-ray and DVD on Monday, July 15th, 2024

There’s nothing else quite like The Conversation in cinema.

Union Square, San Francisco. People milling around. Among them, a couple (Frederic Forrest and Cindy Williams) having a conversation. Also in the square, a man in a plastic mac (Gene Hackman). And another man (Michael Higgins) following them around, holding a bag. And, at two separate windows above the square, two long range microphones.

The first man, Harry, enters a nearby van, inside which is his recording assistant Stan (John Cazale). He’s shortly followed by the other man, Paul, who believes the couple spotted him trailing them.

Harry pays a nighttime visit to his girlfriend Amy (Teri Garr). She wants him to spill his secrets. He claims he has none. He leaves, with her telling him not to bother to come back.

He goes to work in his office, situated at one end of the floor in an otherwise deserted warehouse.… Read the rest

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I’m Still Here
(Ainda Estou Aqui)

Director – Walter Salles – 2024 – Brazil – Cert. 15 – 137m

****

When a family man is disappeared by Brazil’s military dictatorship, his wife must fight for justice while raising their family of five children alone – out in UK cinemas on Friday, February 21st

1971. The middle of Brazil’s 1964-85 military dictatorship. Former government commissioner Rubens Paiva (Selton Mello), a trained civil; engineer, lives with his family in Rio de Janeiro where he is designing the new family home he plans to build. The purchased plot of land, in view of the Christ the Redeemer monument, is staked out, and he has made little models of what the whole thing will look like, captured along with his partying family on Super-8 film by his home-movie-camera-wielding, eldest daughter Veroca (Valentina Herszage). Said eldest daughter (he has four of them plus one young son) is about to go to college. Taking the lead from his wife Eunice (Fernanda Torres), who is concerned that their daughter’s likely involvement in radical student politics will get her in trouble with the dictatorship, Rubens sets her up with an old family friend to study abroad in London.

With reports on the TV news of various diplomats being kidnapped by paramilitaries, who want to exchange them for political prisoners, in a worrying taste of events to come, Veroca is travelling and filming her Super-8 as a passenger in a friend’s car wherein weed is being smoked, when they hit a military roadblock in a road tunnel.… Read the rest

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Point Break
(1991)

Director – Kathryn Bigelow – 1991 – US – Cert. 15 – 122m

*****

A rookie FBI man goes undercover with a group of surfers, believing them to be a gang of bank robbers who disguise themselves as former US Presidents – milestone action movie is out in a 4K Restoration in UK cinemas on Friday, November 8th as part of Art of Action, a major UK-wide season celebrating the artistry of real action choreography at cinemas across the UK October-November 2024

At a cursory glance, there’s nothing particularly remarkable about Point Break, a crime movie about bank robbers, surfers and undercover cops, except perhaps the juxtaposition of surfers on the one hand with cops and robbers on the other except as a route into making a film about cops undercover. Certainly, that juxtaposition pervades the film, with fresh out of training school, undercover FBI man Johnny Utah (Keanu Reeves) coming up against accomplished surfer Bodhi (Patrick Swayze) and his new age-y philosophy of life, which is all about living in the moment and experiencing the biggest rush. Those two concepts happen to embody elements that could potentially make a great action film. Point Break does exactly that. Even though it’s a 35-year-old film, it feels as fresh today as it did on initial release.… Read the rest

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The Critic

Director – Anand Tucker – 2023 – UK – Cert. 15 – 101m

The first four fifths of The Critic *****

The final fifth of The Critic *

In the 1930s, a London theatre critic, a flamboyant homosexual known for destroying careers with his acerbic prose, finds his job under threat from his newspaper’s new proprietor – out in UK cinemas on Friday, September 13th

This originally played in the Toronto Film Festival in a 95m version, only to be acquired for UK release on the proviso that an ‘unsatisfactory’ ending be changed by way of reshoots involving the director, the screenwriter (Patrick Marber), and key cast members. So this current cinema release is the version with the ending changed, and this writer found that new ending less than satisfactory. Which is a pity, because up to about the last twenty minutes, the film impresses.

Now, one could construct a review narrative which says that the original ending must have worked better, and the film has been ruined by its UK distributor. It’s possible that that is indeed the case. However, not having seen that first cut, it is equally possible that the original ending had severe problems which this new version has attempted to fix, even if that doesn’t seem to have entirely worked, and that this new version is an improvement.… Read the rest

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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