Tag: torment

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Features Live Action Movies

It Was Just an Accident
(Yek Tasadef Sadeh,
یک تصادف ساده)

Director – Jafar Panahi – 2025 – Iran, France, Luxembourg – Cert. 12a – 105m

*****

When a man hits an animal driving on country roads late at night, unforeseen consequences ensue – out in UK cinemas on Friday, December 5th

It’s late at night and the family are returning by car. Eghbal (Ebrahim Azizi), who is driving, and his wife (Afssaneh Najmabadi) keep their small daughter (Delnaz Najafi) amused with raucous, Iranian dance music. Then there’s a bang as the car hits something. Dad stops, gets out and finds he’s hit an animal. “Animals just walk onto these roads,” he explains to his traumatised daughter. The mother tries to pacify the child, saying this happens all the time and is nothing to worry about. The little girl is upset; she was enjoying the loud music before, but now she isn’t. At her request, dad turns it off. A sombre mood settles over the car.

The vehicle isn’t right since the collision, so dad takes it to a garage for them to have a look at it. One of the mechanics Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri) spots him, keeps out of sight, then borrows his boss’ van keys for a emergency to follow the departing vehicle.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Silver Apricot
(Eunbitsalgu,
서울독립영화제)

Director – Jang Man-min – 2024 – South Korea – Cert. 12 – 121m

***1/2

A Seoul woman in need of funds to buy a condo returns to her childhood coastal town to get the alimony payments her estranged father never stumped up – from LKFF, the London Korean Film Festival 2025 which runs in cinemas from Wednesday, November 5th to Tuesday, November 18th

Tormented by dreams set at night in which sometimes she herself and sometimes people she knows are vampires preying on others, which inspires her to draw a webtoon series, 32-year-old Kim Jung-seo (Na Ae-jin) has moved to Seoul and bought into the corporate dream, agreeing to split the cost of a condo, the right to buy for which she won on a lottery, with her fiancé Park Gyeong-hyun (Kang Bong-seong).

The only problem is, she has just been refused a permanent position at the graphic design company which employs her, so doesn’t have the money. So she resolves to visit her estranged father and pick up the alimony he never paid her mother Choi Mi-yeong (Park Hyun-sook) after their divorce. Jung-seo regularly visits the latter, who also lives in Seoul, whereas it’s been years since she was in the coastal town where her father lives with his new family.… 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

Hidden
(Caché)

Director – Michael Haneke – 2005 – Austria, France, Germany – Cert.15 – 117m

***1/2

Covertly delivered VHS videotapes suggest to an upper middle class family that they are being watched, and begin to tease out guilt for an incident in the husband’s past – the closing film of Complicit: A Michael Haneke Retrospective, in UK cinemas from Friday, June 20th and on BFI Player from Thursday, September 11th 2025

A lengthy, locked-off camera shot of a street. A woman (Juliette Binoche) leaves the house through a full body height metal gate that seems to serve a security function, although the street seems largely quiet and unremarkable. Then the image starts to rewind in the manner of a videotape; what we are watching is a recording in the videotape player of a couple Georges and Anne Laurent (Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche), who are discussing its contents. The tape has been left outside their front door for reasons that are not immediately obvious and by person or persons unknown.

This opening shot is mirrored by another static shot at the end taken from outside the school of their son Pierrot (Lester Makedonsky) as pupils leave, in which… well, you’ll have to see for yourself, and director Haneke doesn’t make it easy to see what it is he wants you to see, so you’ll have to work at it… and even then, you may miss it.… Read the rest

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Animation Features Live Action Movies

Karate Kid
Legends

Director – Jonathan Entwhistle – 2025 – US – Cert. 12a – 94m

*****

Latest franchise entry plays by all the rules that you would expect, yet somehow manages to completely break the mould and come up with something fresh and original – out in UK cinemas on Wednesday, May 28th

All a Karate Kid movie has to do is put a boy in peril from a bully or similar, then have him schooled in martial arts by a trainer to discover his inner strength and ultimately overcome the bully in combat. This is facilitated by a fight competition at the end, in which the two come face to face with one another. While the original The Karate Kid (John G. Avildsen, 1984) clearly struck enough of a chord to spawn more films, some entries, such as The Karate Kid Part III (John G. Avildsen, 1989), have felt worn, tired and clichéd.

That changed with the genuinely brilliant idea of introducing Hong Kong’s clown prince of kung fu Jackie Chan as the trainer in the two decades later remake The Karate Kid (Harold Zwart, 2010), which breathed new life into the big screen franchise (there have also been live action and animated spin-offs made for television).… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies Music

Control

Director – Anton Corbijn – 2007 – UK – Cert. 15 – 122m

*****

UK release date 05/10/2007

The story of Joy Division lead singer Ian Curtis: his disintegrating marriage, struggles with epilepsy and eventual suicide – review originally published in Third Way magazine, September 2007

For the uninitiated, post-punk Mancunian band Joy Division formed in 1977, then achieved near immediate cult status through Tony Wilson’s Granada TV show and Factory Records label. The four-piece band grew out of a three-piece (guitar, bass, drums) who Ian Curtis (Sam Riley from Widow Clicquot, Thomas Napper, 2023; Firebrand, Karim Ainouz, 2023; Byzantium, Neil Jordan, 2012) joined as singer and songwriter. The resultant recordings still resonate down the annals of rock: even today, songs such as (to name but three) Transmission, the eponymous She’s Lost Control and Love Will Tear Us Apart carry an undeniable charge.

Curtis took his life in May 1980 just prior to the band’s first scheduled American tour. His three survivors carried on under the moniker New Order to become incredibly successful; yet to this writer’s mind, their work pales beside those early Curtis / Joy Division songs. Quite simply, his work with the band has a focus, a power and a bleakness rare in rock.… Read the rest

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Art Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Exhibition on Screen
Michelangelo
Love and Death

Director – David Bickerstaff – 2017 – UK – Cert. U – 91m

*****

Sixteenth Century Renaissance sculptor Michelangelo remains one of the greatest artists of all time, yet his overreaching ambition frequently proved his undoing – back out in UK cinemas to tie in with the 550th anniversary of Michelangelo’s birth from Tuesday, May 20th

“From a fountain of mercy… my suffering is born.” These words (voiced by James Faulkner as Michelangelo) accompany images of a present day sculptor (Marco Ambrosini) working away at a piece of marble in his studio. The writings of Vasari (voice: Lawrence Kennedy) take up the story. A boy was born to a noble family in 1475. Art Critic and Author Jonathan Jones places Michelangelo among the greats, like Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt, Picasso. He deals with the strangest, darkest and most difficult stuff. He is the original famous artist. He had two biographies written about him in his lifetime, and took great interest in them, helping bring them to fruition. He painted, sculpted, built architecture, wrote poetry, even built military fortifications. This was the time when artists started being regarded as creative geniuses, according to Art Historian Jennifer Sliwka. Vasari referred to Michelangelo and his art in terms of Divinity and then the Divine.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

No Trees in the Street

Director – J. Lee Thompson – 1959 – UK – Cert. 12 – 96m

****

An essentially honest young woman living in her parents’ East End slum fails to stop her impetuous younger brother from becoming involved in the criminal underworld – one of two J. Lee Thompson movies out on UK Blu-ray, DVD and Digital

Framed by a contemporary story of plain clothes policeman Frank (Ronald Howard) trying to talk sense into a knife-carrying teenager (David Hemmings), this takes place in the East End street where the latter lives some 20 years previously. The name has changed: back then, Somerset Street was known as Kennedy Street. The policeman, who is local, has always worked this beat. 20 years ago, he was trying to prevent another young man from drifting into a life of crime.

That other young man is Tommy (Melvyn Hayes), who lives with his father, mother and older sister Hetty (Sylvia Syms) in fairly basic accommodation. It’s a poor area and honest work is hard to come by. Both brother and sister would like to find a way out, into a better life. Both have less than honest ways of doing so, in the form of local ‘businessman’ Wilkie (Herbert Lom).… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Padre Pio

Director – Abel Ferrara – 2022 – Germany, Italy – Cert. 15 – 104m

***1/2

Post-WW1, In San Giovanni Rotondo, Italy, a Catholic mystic undergoes temptation while down in the village, armed landowners and military officers attempt to halt the rising tide of socialism – out on Blu-ray, DVD & DL from Monday, March 11th

Ferrara has long been something of an outsider, working with small budgets. This current offering is highly uneven, very strong and moving in places, betrayed by a lack of planning and resources in others. Perhaps its besetting sin (to use Christian religious parlance) is that it doesn’t deliver exactly what it sets out to: this is not exactly a portrait of early 20th Century, Catholic mystic Pio (Shia LaBeouf). The friar really only forms half of the film – arguably its weaker half – dealing only intermittently with his life from arrival in the impoverished Italian village of San Giovanni Rotondo in 1916 through to his visitation by Jesus and first manifestation of stigmata some years later.

The other half of the film, running in parallel to this, deals with the aftermath of World War One in that same village, as men return from the Front to be reunited with wives and mothers.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies Shorts

Piggy
(Cerdita)

Director – Carlota Pereda – 2022 – Spain – Cert. 18 – 99m

*****

Director – Carlota Pereda – 2018 – Spain – 13m

*****

Fat-shaming, bullying, overbearing mothers, growing up as the local butcher’s daughter, and more – feature based on short is out in UK cinemas on Friday, January 6th

Sara (Laura Galán) is attempting to navigate the difficult waters of adolescence. It isn’t much fun if you’re different and cliques of your contemporaries gang up on you. In Sara’s case, she isn’t just fat, she’s also introverted and shuns people, which compounds the amount she gets teased. She often works in her father’s butchers shop, so bullies can easily put together insults based on fat and flesh and pork and meat. A clique of three, thinner girls – Roci (Camille Aguilar) and Maca (Claudia Salas) and their unwilling hanger-on Claudia aka Clau (Irene Ferreiro) – call her Piggy.

It’s Summer, and everyone is going down to the Madrigal (Waterfall) festivities at the pool on the river, where a mysterious out-of-towner is lounging about, but Sara sneaks down there later for a swim when she hopes nobody is around. She’s just getting into the water when the stranger (Richard Holmes) surfaces innocently, startling her.… Read the rest