Tag: sea

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Features Live Action Movies

Dongji Rescue
(Dong Ji Dao,
東吉 嶼)

Director – Fei Zhenxiang, Guan Hu – 2025 – China – Cert. 15 – 133m

The first hour and a half **1/2

The last half hour ****1/2

Chinese islanders under Japanese Occupation in WW2 set out to rescue a thousand plus British prisoners from a sinking, torpedoed ship – streaming on UK VoD from Friday, April 17th

An announcement in English on the BBC, from October 1st, 1942: “On September 27th 1942, the Japanese transport ship Lisbon Maru carrying 1,816 British prisoners of war departed Hong Kong for Japan. On October 1st, she was struck by a torpedo from American submarine USS Grouper and began to sink off the Eastern coast of China. Just two miles South West of the site lies a small island known to the Chinese as Dongji Island… This information comes overwhelmingly fast at the start, accompanied by CG images of the incident. Anyway, you get the drift.

And then, as if to suggest at least one of the directors’ true interests lie somewhere else altogether, there follow breathtaking images of an island, vast spaces with grasses blowing in the wind. And more verbal exposition: two young boys were rescued from the sea by Old Wu, but then the Northern islanders banished the boys to the Southern part of the island, believing them to have “pirate blood”.… Read the rest

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Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Kim Novak’s Vertigo

Director – Alexandre O. Philippe – 2025 – UK – Cert. uncertificated – 76m

*****

An essential addition to the canon of work surrounding and helping audiences to understand the power of one of the cinema’s greatest works– out in UK cinemas on Friday, April 3rd

The opening black and white scene features actress Kim Novak, probably shot in the 1950s, as if through a peephole. This recalls Norman and his peephole in Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960). Novak here seems to know she is being watched, looks directly at the camera, then rolls her head so her eyes go into the darkness of shadow. Then, colour footage of present day, images that could be out of Spellbound (Hitchcock, 1945): a gate opening, a passage along a country roadway, a wooden memorial to someone. All this accompanied by the voice of Kim Novak, now in her twilight years, talking about her life on the soundtrack – her present difficulty in getting breath, how awful it must be to gasp for breath prior to dying.

All this has a Hitchcock connection. Novak is familiar to us from her twin roles in Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958), the favourite film of director Philippe (and also, as it happens, of this critic) who specialises in documentaries about movies and made the definitive documentary about Psycho’s shower scene 78/52 (2017).… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Rose of Nevada

Director – Mark Jenkin – 2025 – UK – Cert. 12a – 114m

****1/2

A fisherman joins the crew of a mysteriously reappeared fishing vessel and finds himself inexplicably trapped 30 years in the past when it originally disappeared – plays in a UK director Q&A Tour from Friday, April 3rd, then is out in UK cinemas on Friday, April 24th

30 years ago, the Rose of Nevada, a small fishing vessel, set sail from a small, Cornish coastal village and never returned. Now, suddenly, it reappears in the harbour with its captain looking for crew. Nick (George Mackay) and Liam (Callum Turner), but on their return after their first fishing trip, they arrive back not in the present but 30 years ago.

Apart from this peculiar slippage of time, everyone behaves as if nothing unusual is going on. Nick misses his partner and child. Liam finds himself with a new partner and child, and plays along, taking advantage of what circumstances have offered to him, which doesn’t seem so bad. 

Nick, however, feels increasingly isolated and uneasy in this situation.

Jenkin’s film plays out as a strange, enigmatic mystery.

Working as is his wont as director, cameraman and editor, not to mention sound designer and musician, Jenkin takes real pleasure in building up his story from a series of tiny details, necessitated to some extent by his use of a clockwork Bolex camera which can’t shoot a take longer than 27 seconds.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Resurrection
(Kuangye Shidai,
狂野时代,
lit. Wild Times)

Director – Bi Gan – 2025 – China – Cert. 15 – 160m

****

An authority figure pursues a Deliriant – a man who escapes the authorities and his own social responsibilities by dreaming – through a period of a hundred years – out in UK cinemas on Friday, March 13th

This opens with a long series of intertitles about people discovering that the secret to eternal life is to stop dreaming. Rebels who refuse to do this are known as Deliriants, and they cause all manner of disruption to wider society. Then, the celluloid image catches fire…

revealing people watching stupified from the cinema stalls only to be rushed out by a truncheon-wielding policeman as music plays in the manner of a silent film. A lady photographer (Shu Qi from The Assassin, Hou Hsaio-hsien, 2015; The Transporter, Louis LeTerrier, Corey Yuen, 2002; Millennium Mambo, Hou Hsaio-Hsien, 2001) appears to take a picture of the unseen projector (where we, the audience, are sitting).

The intertitles continue. One Deliriant (Jackson Yee from The Battle at Lake Changjin II: Water Gate Bridge, Tsui Hark, 2022; The Battle at Lake Changjin, Chen Kaige, Dante Lam, Tsui Hark, 2021) has been forgotten because he’s hiding in an ancient, distant past – that is film.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Mo Papa
(Mo Papa)

Mo Papa

Director – Eeva Mägi – 2025 – Estonia – 88m

*****

A young ex-con imprisoned as a teenager for killing his younger brother tries to make his way in present-day Tallinn – premieres in the Critics’ Picks Competition of the 29th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival

I am wary of unscripted feature films. There is a reason why most narrative movies are made working from scripts; actors have lines to speak, to help them get a handle on their characters. Technicians have an idea of what they are realising on the screen or the soundtrack for a director. Without a script, most attempts at making a film are liable to founder. And quite probably result in an indulgent, unwatchable movie.

Mo Papa, according to the Festival’s blurb, was unscripted. On the one hand, I fear the worst. On the other, after three years of watching Critics’ Picks at Tallinn, I know the standard to be generally high, and duff films are happily all too rare. Would Mo Papa turn out to be one of those rare blips?

It’s also an Estonian movie, and because this is an Estonian festival, in a sense that ups the ante. So I’m really hoping it’s going to be good.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Alone in the Night
(Yoru ga Mata Kuru,
夜がまた来る)

Director – Takashi Ishii – 1994 – Japan – Cert. 18 – 108m

****1/2

After her undercover cop husband is killed by a gang, Nami infiltrates the gang and suffers much abuse as she attempts to identify and take her revenge on his killer – out on Blu-ray as part of the Takashi Ishii: 4 Tales of Nami limited edition digipack set (2000 copies) 

A compelling yet initially indecipherable image is slowly revealed, as we pull out, to be a pink marker pen colouring the handle of a black pistol in the hands of a girl wearing the pyjama top of the man against the side of whose bed she is sitting. He, it turns out, is Mitsuru (Toshiyuki Nagashima from Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla, Miyagawa, 2002; Godzilla vs. Biollante, Seiichi Yamamoto, 1989; Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, Paul Schrader, 1985), an undercover cop; she is Nami (Yui Natsukawa from I Wish, Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2011; Still Walking, Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2008; Zatoichi: The Blind Swordsman, Takeshi Kitano, 2003), and she’s fed up with his lack of contact while he’s on the job. As they embrace, she pleads with him, “Don’t do it!… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Avatar
The Way of Water

Director – James Cameron – 2022 – US – Cert. 12a – 192m

Immersive Cinema *****

Screenplay *

Now raising their own family on the planet Pandora, a couple flee the attacking Sky People to live among a tribe of sea people – first Avatar sequel is back out in cinemas on Friday, October 3rd

Having gone native on the planet Pandora following the events in Avatar (James Cameron, 2009), in which paraplegic human soldier Jake Sully (performance capture including voice or Pcap: Sam Worthington) was transformed into an avatar of a non-disabled, native Pandoran, in the first third of the film, Jake is raising a family with Na’vi partner Neytiri (Pcap: Zoe Saldaña): two boys, two girls. They play in the jungle forest with their friend Spider (Jack Champion), a human child who was too young to be evacuated when the other Sky People left. Spider has been raised by human scientists who remained behind, and he must constantly wear a breathing mask to survive in Pandora’s atmosphere; he is to all intents and purposes feral.

When the Sky People return to Pandora with a new remit – to prep the planet for human habitation since the Earth is becoming uninhabitable – Jake’s old commander Quaritch (Pcap: Stephen Lang), who died in the first film but is now reconstituted as an an avatar embedded with the character’s DNA and memories, is determined to hunt down and kill the Sully who, as he sees it, betrayed him.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Islands
(2025)

Director – Jan-Ole Gerster – 2025 – Germany – Cert. 15 – 123m

****1/2

A British ex-pat tennis coach working for a hotel on a sun-drenched island in the Canaries gets more than he bargained for when he befriends the couple whose young son he is coaching – out in UK cinemas on Friday, September 12th, and on BFI Player from Monday, October 27th

Tom (Sam Riley) wakes up in the desert and walks back to his car. He often nods off – at one point he is woken by a tap on his car window by the local police chief Jorge (Pep Ambròs) in a scene reminiscent of the one in Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), one of the differences being that he’s a local and he and the cop not only know each other, but are friends. (Another is that in Psycho, the motorist is a woman and the cop a man, which brings a whole other dynamic into play.) Jorge fines him for a traffic violation, but apologises for the fact, and the two men’s friendship is able to accommodate that.

The desert, or beach, is a very specific location: Fuerteventura, one of the Canary Islands. And Tom has manoeuvred his life into a very nice routine, thank you very much, as he sees it.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Jurassic World Rebirth

Director – Gareth Edwards – 2025 – US – Cert. – 134m

***

A group of mercenary hunters and a traumatised family find themselves on an equatorial island populated by mutant dinosaurs – out in UK cinemas on Wednesday, July 2nd

The difficult seventh movie, made on a shorter production schedule than its predecessors – according to the production notes – and probably made too quickly for its own good. First there were three Jurassic Park movies, then there were three Jurassic World movies, and now there’s a seventh Jurassic. What to call it? Jurassic Beyond? Jurassic Outside? Jurassic Environment? Jurassic Habitat? Jurassic Equator? Jurassic Island? Jurassic Laboratory? Jurassic Lab? Jurassic Experiment? Jurassic Mutation? (Those took me a mere five minutes.) No: unable to think of a word to replace Park or World, this one is saddled with the marketing-led Jurassic World Rebirth. Which no doubt will do the job, but when Michael Crichton coined Jurassic Park for his novel’s title and Spielberg ran with it, no-one outside of palaeontologists and dinosaur-geeks (I number myself among the latter) knew what ‘Jurassic’ was. It didn’t matter: it was Spielberg and dinosaurs, that sold it, and the film more than lived up to the lure and the promise.… Read the rest

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Live Action Movies Shorts

Afternoon Clouds

Director – Payal Kapadia – 2017 – India – 13m

*****

An old woman, her home and her cat interact in the former’s coastal flat – Kapadia’s first short evidences a sensibility which will inform her debut feature All We Imagine as Light – on the UK Blu-ray/DVD (Dual Format Edition) of All We Imagine as Light, released Monday, March 3rd

A room with two windows looking out on the sea. The constant sound of its roar, the net curtains stir in the breeze. An elderly woman (Usha Naik) holds a bowl of milk as she calls out for, “Koshu”. Elsewhere in the house, a younger woman (Trimala Adhikari) sits, dozing, on a bench, until she hears the older woman calling her name, “Malti”. She opens her eyes.

The older and younger women stand in a room, staring, the elder explaining to the younger that the plant will last two days. As the ginger cat Koshu feeds contentedly, the younger woman Malti limps back to her room. Preparing food in the kitchen, the younger tells the older that three chillis are too much for her. The older protests.

The conversation turns to the older’s medication, the next life, and why not get a plant that lasts longer, asks the younger.… Read the rest