Tag: thugs

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Nobody 2

Director – Timo Tjahjanto – 2025 – US – Cert. 15 – 89m

**

A professional hitman takes his family on holiday to rebuild their trust, embracing and revelling in the violence that erupts around him – out in UK cinemas on Friday, August 15th

“Who are you people?”, asks one of two investigating officers of a man (Bob Odenkirk) and his dog in an interrogation room in the bookend device that opens and closes this sequel. Flashback: he is a married man Hutch with a wife Becca (Connie Nielsen) and two teenage kids Brady (Gage Munroe), 17, and Sammy (Paisley Cadorath), 12. As the days of the week go by – Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday – mum gets the kids fed and off to their school (which we never see) and she drives off to her demanding real estate job (which, again, we never see).

We do see his work, though. Some days, he lies in, his head flashing back to disturbing and violent memories. Some days, he works: for instance, the day when he enters a hotel lift and brutally fights to the death with the three bodyguards protecting a suited convention guest who has in his possession the Card which our man has been instructed to retrieve.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies Music

Slade in Flame

Director – Richard Loncraine – 1975 – UK – Cert. – 91m

****

Slade play Flame, a small-time rock band who cut their musical teeth managed by lowlife crooks before going on to a meteoric rise and fall managed by corporate suits– 2K Remaster for the film’s 50th Anniversary Re-release is out in UK cinemas on Friday, May 2nd following BFI Southbank premier on Thursday, May 1st

In the early 1970s, four-piece pop act Slade (singer-guitarist Noddy Holder, bass player Jim Lea, guitarist Dave Hill and drummer Don Powell) were a British pop phenomenon. They clocked up six number one singles, with three going straight to the number one position. To capitalise on that success, the band’s manager Chas Chandler, previously Jim Hendrix’s manager and, before that, the bass player with The Animals, decided Slade should make a movie; the band, however, didn’t want to make light, upbeat, whimsical fantasies like The Beatles vehicles (A Hard Day’s Night, 1964; Help!, 1965, both Richard Lester; Yellow Submarine, George Dunning, 1968); they wanted instead to make something darker, reflecting the experience of trying to make it in a band in England in the late 1960s.

First-time feature director Richard Loncraine proved to be an inspired choice, confirmed both by the gritty, urban nature of his many subsequent films (The Missionary, 1982; Bellman and True, 1987; Richard III, 1995) and for his signature compositional style (letterbox frame, sepia-dominated palette), developed with cinematographer Peter Hannan (The Missionary, not to mention Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, Terrys Gilliam and Jones, 1983).… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

All We Imagine as Light

Director – Payal Kapadia – 2024 – France, India, Luxembourg, Netherlands – Cert. 15 – 118m

*****

The lives, loves and challenges of three women working in a hospital in Mumbai – on UK Blu-ray/DVD (Dual Format Edition) from Monday, March 3rd, on BFI Player from Monday, February 17th, and on iTunes and Amazon Prime from Monday, March 17th

Mumbai. Opening with serial, engrossing tracking shots showing first men working throwing goods onto lorries, then men in traffic riding in the open boot of a car, then people riding on the urban rail system, all to the accompaniment of soundtrack vox pops of men and women talking about their lives and how the city helps you forget, All We Imagine as Light is, among other things, a paean to the city of Mumbai.

On a typical working day in the hospital, Nurse Prabha (Kani Kusruti from Girls Will Be Girls, Shuchi Talati, 2024) explains to a doctor why an old lady refuses to take her pills (she’s seeing visions of the torso of her late husband) and opts out of going out to see the latest action blockbuster featuring dreamy male stars with her fellow nurses. She talks about helping with free legal advice to kitchen worker Pavarty (Chhaya Kadam from Sister Midnight, Karan Kandhari, 2024; Laapataa Ladies, Kiran Rao, 2023; Bombay Rose, Gitanjali Rao, 2019) who is having problems with intimidation by thugs to move out of her home.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Wrath Of Silence
(Bao Lie Wu Sheng,
暴裂无声)

Director – Xin Yukun – 2017 – China – 120m

***

Fist of parental fury: mute villager fights hard to find his missing son in rural China, in a film teeming with extraordinary social commentary and… fighting!!! From the BFI London Film Festival 2017

The young boy Zhang Liu tends sheep on a hillside in Northern China not far from a mine where lorries come and go. One day he doesn’t come home. His mother, already in debt for various medical treatments for her swollen legs, is at her wits’ end. The boy’s mute father, the miner Zhang Baomin (Song Yang), has a way of solving problems. Fisticuffs. He beats up people in the local mine. In the village restaurant he plunges a broken meat bone into the eye of the local organiser of signatures to sign away the village mining rights for which he’s holding out but everyone else in the village has signed. He goes around showing a picture of the missing Liu in the hope that someone has seen the boy.

This takes him to a local mining site where he’s inside eating with the foreman when thugs turn up in vans and jeeps to tell the miners a new company has bought out the mine and their service are no longer required.… Read the rest