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Mickey 17

Director – Bong Joon Ho – 2024 – US – Cert. 15 – 134m

*****

Contracted to have his fleshly body reprinted, and his memory restored every time he dies, the expendable Mickey is assigned to a ship run by a right-wing power couple who plan to colonise a distant planet – science fiction adaptation is out in UK cinemas on Friday, March 7th

The snow has given way beneath his feet. Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson) has plummeted through several layers of ice and now lies helpless on a subterranean ice shelf. His best friend Timo (Stephen Yuen) comes to rescue him. Sorry. To retrieve mickey’s his gun, but leave Mickey himself there to die. Because, after all, it’s easier to reboot Mickey and upload his memories. His friend can’t but help to ask, “Mickey, what’s it like? To die?”

Left alone in the planet’s underground ice caves, where he’s already seen a fellow crew member attacked by cow-sized, insect-mammals for which will later be named “creepers”, Mickey 17 expects to be digested alive by the alien life forms. Of course he does – that’s what happens in movies about alien life on other planets. However, the script has some surprises in store, and the creepers, who are set to play a much bigger role in the story, don’t so much play the role of unfriendly monster as that of the misunderstood race of indigenous outsiders in relation to invading, would-be colonisers.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Moor
(Mavr)

Director – Adilkhan Yerzhanov – 2024 – Kazakhstan, France – 83m

***

A mercenary known by the codename ‘Moor’ returns from the war to the big city to rescue his younger brother’s wife and son from her husband’s debts – premieres in the Critics’ Picks Competition of the 28th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival

Found by the authorities, who apprehend him by a perimeter fence and remove his bag of home-made weaponry which includes a wooden bow and arrows and a knife carved from bone, which he will get back and make use of later in the plot, Moor is processed alongside wounded and traumatised veterans. He speaks few words and is in complete control of his faculties. The chief of police, who talks in a confident, jokey manner and insists on addressing him as Bro, feels more like a gangster than a cop, wearing a snakeskin jacket not unlike the hero of Wild at Heart (David Lynch, 1990) and often accompanied by a small entourage who read as gangsters rather than cops, even though the group occasionally expands to contain officers with the word POLICE on the back of their jackets.

He explains that Moor’s younger brother Houdini has disappeared, leaving behind him not only a mountain of debt but also a wife and small son.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

The Third Murder
(Sandome
No Satsujin,
三度目の殺人)

Director – Hirokazu Kore-eda – 2017 – Japan – Cert. 15 – 124m

*****

For a director usually associated with family dramas like I Wish, Like Father, Like Son and After The Storm, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s The Third Murder might seem like a change of direction. It begins with a murder, and focussed on a lawyer trying to uncover what actually happened, a narrative template familiar from countless films about journalists in search of a story, detectives trying to solve crimes and courtroom dramas of lawyers at work.

Yet there are plenty of Kore-eda concerns evident here. Ambitious young lawyer Shigemori (Masaharu Fukuyama from Like Father Like Son and John Woo’s thriller ManHunt) is a workaholic estranged from his wife. His daughter commits petty offences like shoplifting. His client Misumi (Koji Yakusho) was imprisoned for a murder over thirty years ago, but since his release has confessed to a second murder. He, too, has a daughter, but she wants nothing to do with him.

As for the murder victim, [Read the remainder of the review at All The Anime…]

Trailer: