Tag: sex

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Features Live Action Movies

Dreaming of Lions
(Sonhar com Leões)

Director – Paolo Marinou-Blanco – 2024 – Portugal, Brazil, Spain – 85m

****

A woman diagnosed with terminal cancer signs up with a corporate programme allegedly aimed at helping people in her situation to humanely end their own lives – premieres in the Critics’ Picks Competition of the 28th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival

“Chemo never worked. So I decided to beat the fucker to the punch.” Thus says Gilda (Denise Fraga) at the start of this tale about voluntary euthanasia. Gilda has cancer and a year and a half left to live. She exasperates her husband when he hilariously stumbles into the bathroom as she’s trying to shoot herself in the head, both of them winding up in hospital as a result.

She is determined to kill herself. If she does nothing, the condition will take its course and the end of the process won’t be pleasant. In the hospital, she picks up a leaflet of a company which might provide some help for those considering voluntary euthanasia. So Gildagoes for an interview with Joy Transition International and finds herself facing a panel of three: Isa (Joana Rebeiro), Eva (Sandra Faleiro), and Bruno (Alexander Tuji Nam).

Isa has her mouth fixed in a somewhat ingratiating, permanently lipstick-painted smile.… Read the rest

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Streets of Glória
(Ruas da Glória)

Director – Felipe Sholl – 2024 – Brazil – 103m

****

A man mourning his late grandmother but estranged from the rest of his family embarks on a gay relationship with an escort – premieres in the Critics’ Picks Competition of the 28th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival

Gabriel (Caio Macedo) arrives in Rio de Janeiro with his late grandmother’s ashes in a box. He is not short of money, and rents a hotel room. He wanders around during the day talking to his grandmother, who he clearly misses a great deal. At night, he finds a club named Glória, fronted by an area with tables where style queen Monica (Diva Menner) hangs out with her small entourage of friends. She explains she is the owner. Further inside is the dance floor where he spots Adriano (Alejandro Claveaux) and attempts but fails to pick him up, instead spending the night with another man.

However, a spark has been lit, and the next night Gabriel is more successful. He and Adriano embark on a passionate relationship. Adriano is an escort, and shows Gabriel the park benches where escorts pick up clients; he takes servicing his male clients in his stride, occasionally persuading the hesitant Gabriel to join him in a paying threesome.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Hani
(Hani)

Director – Hou Dasheng – 2024 – Canada – 73m

*

In a remote, Southern Chinese mountain village, a 14-year-old needs the money for the dowry to buy his 12-year-old sweetheart as a wife – premieres in the Critics’ Picks Competition of the 28th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival

Credited on the Festival’s website as a Canadian production in the Burmese and Chinese languages, this is a Chinese-made film not sanctioned by the Chinese authorities dealing with subject matter which the filmmakers fear would not be passed by the Chinese censor. The caption review suggests that a number of the film’s cast and crew have used pseudonyms to avoid prosecution. The narrative takes place in the mountainous, Southern region of China close to the border with Myanmar, where people are known by their Burmese names, but occasionally refer to other people by their Chinese names. You get the feeling that this area of China has been largely forgotten by the distant Beijing authorities.

The central characters are young teenagers or pre-teenagers, Hani (14; Gao Xiaokang) and his friend Apao (Qian Long), who seems to be frequently seeking advice from others on his mobile phone, and Hani’s longtime sweetheart Pushiha (12; Pu Juan).… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

The Guest
(301호 모텔 살인사건)

Director – Yeon Je-gwang – 2023 – South Korea – LKFF Cert. 18 – 77m

***

An out-of-the-way motel, with numerous hidden cameras covertly recording the unwitting guests, becomes the site of multiple killings – from LKFF, the London Korean Film Festival 2024 which runs in cinemas from Friday, November 1st to Wednesday, November 13th

There’s an idea that the widespread presence of security cameras make the world a safer place, because things can be seen rather than hidden; equally, however, things can be recorded, turned into product and sold for profit. The Guest takes place in a familiar world of roads and car journeys and motels in the middle of nowhere at which the traveller can take a break. And all of it seems to be covered by security cameras.

That applies to the roads, where the cams are there for traffic enforcement (and, perhaps more pertinently, traffic tax raising or penalty charging) purposes. Why they are there, for good or ill, isn’t really discussed here. But their ubiquitous presence is inescapably noted.

It also applies in the seedy motel at the centre of this horror / drama / suspense / thriller. The loan shark Deuk-chan (Hyun Bong-sik) who owns the place employs two young staff members Min-cheol (Lee Joo-seung) and Young-gyu (Han Min) to run the place in a day-to-day basis both of whom are indebted to him and therefore have little choice other than to do whatever he asks, however unreasonable.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Mist
(Angae,
안개)

Director – Kim Soo-yong – 1967 – South Korea – 78m

****

A married man leaves Seoul to visit his dull hometown for a few days, where he embarks on a brief affair with a music teacher from the local school – plays in Echoes In Time | Korean Films of the Golden Age and New Cinema which runs from Monday, October 28th until the end of 2024 at BFI Southbank

Yun Gi-jun (Shin Seong-il from The Barefooted Young, Kim Ki-duk, 1964) is bored with his job. He sits at his desk in a huge office looking at the paperwork, seeing it crawling with insects. But when others enter the office, they don’t see any of that, so it’s clearly all in his head. In many ways, that sets the scene for the mood of this heavily introspective piece which makes much use of voice over and flashback, as Gi-jun takes time out in his hometown of Mujin, for which he claims not to feel much affection but which is nevertheless full of personal history and memories for him.

We see him at home with his wife as she straightens his tie, and later as she brings her rich father over to the house.… Read the rest

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Revenge

Director – Coralie Fargeat – 2017 – US – Cert. 18 – 108m

****

It’s a man’s world. Or is it? A predictable male fantasy switches gear to bloody thrill ride when a woman turns the tables on a group of men perpetrating violence against her – available on VoD from Monday, September 10th following UK cinema release on Friday, May 11th 2018

Flown in by private helicopter pilot, Frenchman Richard (Kevin Janssens) takes Jen (Matilda Lutz) to his luxury home in the middle of the desert for a day or so. He is clearly rolling in money, she appears to be in love with him, but perhaps she’s play-acting: something of the gold-digger in her, maybe. She wears skimpy clothing, emphasising sexual aspects of her body. She comes on strong to him. Passion ensures. All of which is a lot less fun to watch than it sounds: the male is little more than a caricature of the sort often found in the less carefully made end of French action and gangster movie production while the girl displays every patriarchal cliché in the book in the way she moves, dresses, acts and interacts.

Director Fargeat has a very different agenda, however.… Read the rest

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My Favourite Cake
(Keyke Mahboobe Man,
کیک محبوب من)

Directors – Maryam Mogadam, Behtash Sanaeeha – 2024 – Iran, France, Sweden, Germany – Cert. 12a – 97m

****1/2

An old woman living alone in Iran takes a shine to a taxi driver after learning he has no romantic attachments – out in UK cinemas on Friday, September 13th

Mahin (Lily Farhadpour), 70, likes to lie in. Every morning, she’s woken by her mobile phone and her friend Pouran’s distinctive Vivaldi Four Seasons ringtone. She waters her small courtyard garden, she goes to the market to buy vegetables, she gets a lift home. She talks to her daughter and grandkids on a videolink – her daughter has long since left Iran. In the evening, she has friends round for a meal, including the hypochondriac Pouran who insists on talking about her recent colonoscopy (of which she’s brought along a disc with a video).

The next day, she gets a cab to a hotel to visit a coffee shop inside its premises, where she is confounded by a menu consisting of a QR code. She visits a park and asks a man there, where do people exercise? It seems they tend to come earlier in the morning than she gets up.… Read the rest

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Kneecap

Director – Rich Peppiat – 2023 – Ireland, UK – Cert. 18 – 105m

****

A fictionalised origin story about an Irish language rap band as a music teacher teams up with two younger men to turn their confrontational, anti-British poetry into Irish rap music – provocative sex-, drugs-, and violence-laced music biopic is out in UK cinemas on Friday, August 23rd

NSFW

Kneecap are an Irish-speaking rap band who came together on the eve of the 2017 Irish language march in Belfast, Northern Ireland. This drama about them, whatever else it might be and whatever other accusations can be levelled against it, certainly never plays it safe.

That’s obvious from the get-go, when the voice-over by one of the band members explains and shows how all movies abut Northern Ireland start – with footage of terrorist explosions during ‘the troubles’. The film then proceeds to have its cake and eat it, having started in exactly that manner, by starting again with the story of one of its members as a child being baptised in a wood at night and attracting RUC helicopter searchlights for their pains.

It moves pretty swiftly on to show the two fully grown lads in the band as party animals, consuming alcohol and drugs and dealing the latter, for instance giving it away free at early gigs to attract an audience, and engendering a hostile attitude to the Peelers (as they refer to the British police).… Read the rest

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Animation Features Live Action Movies

Hundreds
of Beavers

Director – Mike Cheslik – 2022 – US – Cert. 12 – 108m

***1/2

A ruined drinks purveyor reduced to hunting beavers (played by actors in onesies) attempts to kill the amount required to buy a trader’s daughter’s hand in marriage – visually astonishing slapstick comedy is out in UK and Ireland cinemas on Tuesday, July 9th and on Blu-ray from Monday, August 5th

Opening with what is essentially a music video extolling the bibulous virtues of the booming, farm home of Jean Kayak’s Acme Applejack, this shows a simplistic caricature of a prosperous nineteenth century business when the wooden supports of one of Kayak’s gigantic barrels of beverage is nibbled by a beaver causing it to roll down a hill on which it’s situated into his house at the bottom of the hill, causing it to burn down his hillside apple orchard.

Leaving aside such questions as, why store the huge barrel on top of a hill above your house? – the answer, so it can roll down a hill, catch fire and burn down your orchard to get the plot going, proving less than satisfactory – this leaves the ruined Jean Kayak (co-writer Ryland Brickson Cole Tews) homeless in midwinter and forced to survive by hunting animals.… Read the rest

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Love Hotel
(Rabu Hoteru,
ラブホテル)

Director – Shinji Somai – 1985 – Japan – Cert. 18 – 88m

***1/2

After violently taking out the stress of yakuza business debts on a call-girl, a man finds her two years later and attempts to rekindle a relationship – roman porno is out on UK Blu-ray on, Monday, July 22nd

NSFW.

Tokyo. Muraki (Minori Terada) phones Milky Way from room 301, all dark suit and shades, obviously a gangster, to be is told a girl, Yumi, will be with him in 10 minutes. Only, a flashback reveals him as the owner of a publishing office, his stairwell to his small office premises blocked by a yakuza, another of whose number, he discovers on entering, is forcibly having sex with Muraki’s wife (Kiriko Shimizu) while two further fellow yakuza look on approvingly. Later, he considers throwing himself out of the third storey window of his unfurnished office with “for rent” signs, but swats a fly and thinks better of jumping.

When Yumi (Noriko Hayami) arrives at 301, her initial euphoria at Y100 000 for two hours is dispelled when Muraki unexpectedly slaps handcuffs on her, pulls a knife, slashes at the bedsheets and her clothing to undress her than violates her with a dildo, later cutting the skin between her breasts as she writhes orgasmically.… Read the rest