Tag: siblings

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

A Normal Family
(Bo-tong-ui Ga-jog,
보통의 가족)

Director – Hur Jin-ho – 2023 – South Korea – Cert. – 116m

***

Lacking any moral sense of right and wrong, the teenage children of two brothers, a lawyer and a doctor, kick a homeless man to death – from LKFF, the London Korean Film Festival 2023 which runs in cinemas from Thursday, November 2nd to Thursday, November 16th

After a road rage incident in which an out of order, rich twentysomething wilfully runs down an irate baseball player who objects to his driving, and puts the baseball player’s young daughter in a coma, the twentysomething hires defence lawyer Jae-wan (Sol Kyung-gu from The Boys; Chung Ji-young, 2022; 1987: When That Day Comes, Jang Joon-Hwan, 2017; Memoir Of A Murderer, Won Shin-yeon, 2017; Peppermint Candy, Lee Chang-dong, 2000) who is motivated not by justice but by doing everything he can to get his client off scot-free. Jae-wan has a new, young wife Ji-su (Claudia Kim from Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes Of Grindelwald, David Yates, 2018; The Dark Tower, Nikolaj Arsel, 2017; Avengers: Age Of Ultron, Joss Whedon, 2015) with a small baby and a teenage daughter Hye-yoon (Hong Yi-ji) by his late first wife.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Killers
Of The Flower Moon

Director – Martin Scorsese – 2023 – US – Cert. 15 – 206m

*****

A returning WW1 veteran marries into Oklahoma’s Osage Indian tribe at the time of the Osage Indian Murders – plays the 2023 London Film Festival which runs from Wednesday, October 4th until Sunday, October 15th, and will be out in UK cinemas on Friday, October 20th

At slightly over 80 years of age, Martin Scorsese has now been making movies for over 60 years. Like his last, fictional, narrative feature The Irishman (2019), this one is pushing three and a half hours. I always have issues with films that long: the vast majority are that way due to director’s ego and / or inability to tell a story concisely. Some of them might have been better suited to a TV mini-series ( a medium in which, incidentally, Scorsese also works). Yet if you try and imagine Killers Of The Flower Moon cut down in length, it’s difficult. Maybe you could take out the frame story – the performance of a crime drama on the radio on the subject of the Osage Indian Murders – but that sets the scene nicely at the start and takes you back out of the movie equally nicely at the end, so it would be a shame to do so.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies

Puffin Rock
and the
New Friends

Director – Jeremy Purcell – 2022 – US, UK, Ireland, China – Cert. U – 92m

***1/2

The puffin and animal community of Puffin Rock is thrown into crisis by the arrival of a few refugees, the disappearance of a puffin egg and a terrible storm – spinoff feature from preschool children’s animated TV series out in UK cinemas on Friday, August 11th

Irish animation house Cartoon Saloon’s Puffin Rock TV series (2015-2016) has deservedly won awards in the world of preschool children’s television. Narrated by Chris O’Dowd, who acts as a running commentary and offers guidance to the two main characters, it centres around two preschool puffins Oona and her younger brother Baba who live on the isolated, human-free island of Puffin Rock with their kind, protective and loving parents. Through O’Dowd’s voice-over and the introduction of other animal characters, episodes deliver simple facts about natural history in a friendly and informative manner. While this educational is never allowed to get in the way of the storytelling, it’s a welcome extra. The programmes are around six minutes in length. (The series can be found on Netflix in the UK, where three six minute episodes are gathered into twenty minute batches comprising three episodes.)… Read the rest

Categories
Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Name Me Lawand

Language for the deaf

Name Me Lawand
Directed by Edward Lovelace
Certificate PG, 91 minutes
Released 7 July

Lawand, a young Iraqi boy, has been written off. He is different, he apparently doesn’t want to communicate with others. No one in his home country can help him. And that’s that.

Except, his parents don’t believe it. They are sure something can be done for their son, just not in Iraq. So, although all their friends and family are there, they leave the country believing it has nothing whatsoever to offer their son. And they move to the UK and settle in Derby.

Lawand’s issue is that he is completely deaf, and therefore can’t be taught in a school set up for those with functioning hearing. As such, he has no way of learning language from those who can hear. A different approach is required to enable him to develop basic language skills.

This documentary… [Read the rest at Reform magazine]

[Read my longer review on this site]

Name Me Lawand is out in UK and Irish cinemas on Friday, July 7th.

Trailer:

Categories
Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Name Me Lawand

Director – Edward Lovelace – 2022 – UK – Cert. PG – 91m

**** 1/2

A family leave Iraq for the UK where their deaf son can receive education appropriate to his needs, only to find themselves falling foul of the UK’s anti-immigration policies – out in UK and Irish cinemas on Friday, July 7th, with previews in Refugee Week – Monday, June 19th to Sunday, June 25th

As a Saturn V space rocket rises into the atmosphere, we hear a voice struggling to complete a word (and read it in the accompanying subtitles, which is at once weird, because this is a documentary film and in real life, you don’t get subtitles, and helpful, because without them most viewers, that is to say those viewers with fully functioning hearing capability, would have no idea as to what is going on. First come the letters… S… P… E… Then, slowly, the single words. SPECIAL. PLACE. NEED. NEED. “I think my brother was born in the wrong place,” comments Lawand’s older brother Rawa.

The soundtrack’s conversation by the hearing-abled moves on to skim over the story of how and why Lawand’s family came to the city of Derby in England, something it doesn’t cover at any great depth, instead showing us images from somewhere inside a car of travelling across Europe, then images familiar to any English person of moving past telegraph wires atop green fields seen from a train window.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Transformers:
Rise
Of The
Beasts

Director – Steven Caple Jr. – 2022 – US – Cert. 12a – 127m

*

A giant, planet-eating entity comes to earth in search of a mysterious key which the Transformers must prevent him from obtaining – out in UK cinemas on Thursday, June 8th

The posters for this latest Transformers instalment promised something a little different: a group of animal robots made up, like the original Transformers, of disparate parts. What was their purpose? Would they transform into vehicles? Well, the answer is, no, they just run around like big robotic animals and never transform into cars or anything else. Why bother?, you might ask. According to the press handouts, they convert from less conspicuous animals, but if that occurred in the film, I must have missed it.

These robotic animals, who include the gorilla Optimal Prime (voice: Ron Perlman), whose name echoes that of series regular Transformer Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen, who has voiced this character through all the movies and the original TV series), the eagle Airazor (voice: Michelle Yeoh) and the cheetah Cheetor (voice: Tongayi Chirisa)…

…belong to a race whose planet is threatened by the villain of the piece, a larger than planet-sized Transformer villain named Unicron (voice: Colman Domingo) – does he transform into anything?… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

The Boogeyman

Director – Rob Savage – 2023 – US – Cert. 15 – 98m

*** 1/2

Two sisters recently bereaved of their mother start to imagine something nasty waiting for them in the darkness of night – Stephen King adaptation is out in UK cinemas on Friday, June 2nd

An uninvited man Lester Billings (David Dalmachian) turns up at the home-based office of therapist Will Harper (Chris Messina) wanting to talk. His family died, and he is suspected of murdering them… but, he claims, it wasn’t him who did it. Harper has recently lost his wife, so it’s inevitable that Billings’ story will resonate with him. While Harper excuses himself to covertly call the police, Billings starts wandering round the home in which Harper lives with his two daughters – the teenage Sadie (Sophie Thatcher) and the much younger Sawyer (Vivien Lyra Blair).

The scene in the office is the Stephen King short story (published in his Night Shift collection) and only a small part of the movie. It is, however, a highly significant part – the incident that sparks everything else off. Billings claims his family was slain by a hideous monster, and the impressionable Sawyer is at the age of childhood where she imagines monsters lurking in the closet or hiding beneath the bed.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Evil Dead Rise

Director – Lee Cronin – 2022 – New Zealand, Ireland – Cert. 18 – 97m

****

When the Necoromicon is opened in a tower block, demons bloodily attack and possess members of an all-female nuclear family who try to fight them off – out in UK cinemas on Friday, April 21st

One of two films about living in a high rise released this week.

The first bookend: the sound of a fly buzzing around the auditorium, is if to state that this is a film about technique. Almost immediately, a POV shot travelling rapidly along a river then a lake recalls The Evil Dead (Sam Raimi, 1979). If you know the original, you’ll feel like you’re in good hands. The camera homes in on the characters as they interact with one another (a girl trying to relax on the pier, a boy goofing around nearby) and you get a strong idea of who they are. The acting is surprisingly good. Which means that, when people start being possessed by demons (which they do pretty quickly), you have a sense of what’s been lost, what’s been taken away. Pretty swiftly, you have to emotionally let the possessed go and get on the side of those still alive trying to survive the possessed demons.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Shazam!
Fury Of The Gods

Director – David F. Sandberg – 2023 – US – Cert. – 130m

***1/2

Three Daughters of Atlas enter present day Philadelphia to repossess a staff which contains power that has been stolen from them; immature teenager recast as adult superhero Shazam! and his six superhero companions must stop them – out in UK cinemas on Friday, March 17th

Something of an oddity in the DC Comics canon, Shazam! concerns Philadelphia teenager Billy Batson (Asher Angel) who inadvertently absorbs superpower energy which enables him to transform into the adult superhero Shazam! (Zachary Levi) by merely uttering the word “Shazam!” However, despite the adult physique, he still thinks like a teenager. Outside of superhero life, he is one of seven orphans who, since the end of the original Shazam! (David F. Sandberg, 2019), have had the same thing happen to them. So, seven children, seven superheroes. And their two put-upon foster parents, Rosa and Victor Vásquez (Marta Milans and Cooper Andrews).

To be honest, I could take or leave the title character (as played by teenager Angel and adult Levi) but the other kids are likeable enough – at least to the extent that their characters are fleshed out here… and some are fleshed out far more than others in the narrative.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

I Wish
(Kiseki,
奇跡,
lit. Miracle)

Director – Hirokazu Kore-eda – 2011 – Japan – Cert. PG – 128m

*****

A broken family consists of father, mother and two pre-teenage boys. Each of the boys is living with one of their parents at opposite ends of Kyushu, Japan’s south-western island: the elder with his mother and grandmother in Kagoshima and the younger with their gigging rock guitarist father in Fukuoka. The two boys keep in touch by mobile phone… [Read the full review at All The Anime]

On MUBI from Saturday, February 4th as part of Family Matters: A Hirokazu Kore-eda Double Bill; originally reviewed for All The Anime as part of Arrow’s Family Values Blu-ray box set which includes I Wish (2011), Like Father, Like Son (2013) and After the Storm (2016). Also available to rent on Amazon UK, BFI Player and Curzon Home Cinema.

Trailer – I Wish (2011):