Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Novocaine
(2025)

Directors – Dan Berk, Robert Olsen – 2025 – US – Cert. 15 – 110m

*****

An assistant bank manager who is medically unable to feel pain pursues the bank robbers who have kidnapped his brand new and first ever girlfriend – out in UK cinemas on Friday, March 28th

(There have been several other movies with this title. Apart from having the same title, this one appears to be completely original.)

San Diego, California. Driving to work in gridlock, Nathan Caine (Jack Quaid) is the type to annoy fellow motorists by obsessively maintaining the correct space in front of his vehicle when no-one else is doing so. At work, he’s the assistant bank manager. He’s a genuinely nice guy who genuinely cares from people, such as long-standing customer Earl (Lou Beatty Jr.) who Nate helps through an unpleasant foreclosure on his workshop by doing things on a schedule that will help ease the man’s pain.

Also, there’s this new teller Sherry (Amber Midthunder) at the bank who Nate rather likes but can’t bring himself to talk to. In fact, despite her obvious attentions, he goes out of his way to avoid talking to her.

Somehow, she talks him into a lunch date where she has cherry pie and he… doesn’t.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies

Memoir of a Snail

Director – Adam Elliot – 2024 – Australia – Cert. 15 – 94m

*****

A young woman recounts her life story to her newly freed pet snail after her best friend dies – stop-frame animation marvel is out in UK cinemas on Friday, February 14th

Following a bravura title sequence which consists of a camera moving around (a scale model set of) detritus from a life, everything from soap on a rope to snail poison, with various objects bearing upon themselves various credits for the film, a young woman has tears in her eyes as her bedridden friend Pinky (voice: Jacki Weaver from Silver Linings Playbook, David O. Russell, 2012; Animal Kingdom, David Michod, 2010; Picnic at Hanging Rock, Peter Weir, 1975) breathes her last, briefly coming back to life to utter the legend, “potatoes”. But what can this word mean?

Taking her pet snail Sylvia (the name is painted on the back of the creature’s shell) out of a glass jar and setting her free to cross Pinky’s garden in the course of her subsequent narrative, the woman remembers her childhood down to the smallest detail, and starts to recount it to the liberated gastropod. She was born prematurely as Grace Prudence Pudel (voice: Sarah Snook from Steve Jobs, Danny Boyle, 2015; Predestination, The Spierig Brothers, 2014), shortly followed by her twin brother Gilbert (voice: Kodi Smit-McPhee from Maria, Pablo Larraín, 2024; The Power of the Dog, Jane Campion, 2021; The Congress, Ari Folman, 2013; ParaNorman, Chris Butler, Sam Fell, 2012).… Read the rest