Tag: personal life

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Zodiac

Director – David Fincher – 2007 – US – Cert. 15 – 158m

Two cops, a crime reporter and a geek working on the same paper attempt to solve the identity of San Francisco’s 1970s Zodiac Killer – engrossing crime thriller / character study is now out on 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray

Fincher’s feature filmography is a fascinating hit-and-miss affair, debuting with the middling Alien3 (1992) then covering gems Se7en (1995, make sure you see a silvered print), Fight Club (1999) and The Social Network (2010) plus lesser outings The Game (1997), Panic Room (2002) and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008). Zodiac concerning a serial killer, you’d be forgiven for pigeonholing it as similar to Se7en – but in fact it’s something rather different. Se7en is a fictional thriller concerning cops hunting a serial murderer – or, you might argue, the murderer himself – whose killings are inspired by the Seven Deadly Sins and an exercise in avant-garde visual style.

Zodiac is based on the unsolved case of the real life Zodiac Killer who terrorised San Francisco in the seventies. It spans decades, focusing on the four men attempting to solve the case. Attempting to stay true to the facts, it avoids a wrapped up, neat ending, presenting instead the contradictory evidence and leaving you to draw your own conclusions – or make your own guess as to the killer’s identity.… Read the rest

Categories
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

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Lost In The Stars
(Xiao Shi De Ta,
消失的她)

Directors – Cui Rui, Liu Xiang – 2022 – China – Cert. 15 – 121m

*****

A man’s wife vanishes and is replaced by an imposter; when no-one believes him, he hires a hotshot lawyer to find out what’s happening and get his real wife back – out in UK cinemas on Friday, July 14th

He Fei (Zhu Yilong) walks into a police station to ask for help with finding his wife Li Muzi, who has disappeared. The desk sergeant, who has clearly heard it all before, tells him there’s nothing they can do. Outside the station, in the pouring rain, he is approached by Officer Zheng (Du Jiang) who overheard and helpfully tries to calm him. The couple are holidaying in the island of Barlandia, outside of Chinese jurisdiction. He has recurring nightmares of her (Huang Ziqi) calling out his name for help and feels helpless in the face of them.

The next morning, events take a turn for the worse when He wakes up beside his wife Li Muzi (now played by Janice Man), who is not the real Li Muzi but an imposter he’s never seen before. Yet every piece of evidence he can think of to support his story seems to have changed to support hers– her passport seems genuine and shows that she entered the country at the same time as him, she can answer all manner of questions about the couple’s personal life, she has a scar on her upper thigh that no-one but the two of them know about.… Read the rest