Tag: torture

Categories
Animation Features Movies

Ghost Cat Anzu
(Bakeneko Anzu-chan,
化け猫あんずちゃん)

Director – Yoko Kuno, Nobuhiro Yamashita – 2024 – Japan – Cert. N/C 15+ – 97m

****

When her father leaves to sort out his loan shark debt problem, a man-sized, ghost cat is charged to look after her by her grandfather – animated fable plays UK cinemas in the Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme 2025 which runs from Friday, 7th February to Monday, 31st March

A man, his arm in plaster, drags his daughter to the picturesque town of Iteru, self-proclaimed Town of Eternal Summer. The demeanour of down-at-heel Karin (voice: Noa Goto) couldn’t be more at odds with that sentiment. Climbing the steps to the local temple to arrive at the door of the monk’s residence, Tetsuya (voice: Munetaka Aoki) proclaims to his father his return, and the fifth grade status of his schoolgirl daughter. What’s he doing now, his father asks. “This and that,” comes the reply. His wife, the girl’s mother, died three years ago.

While Karin is outside looking at a giant statue of Buddha, a human-sized cat arrives on a motorcycle fielding mobile phone calls. Who are you?, the cat (voice: Mirai Moriyama) asks the girl. Tetsuya, meanwhile, asks his father for money to pay off a loan shark and is told never to show his face there again.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

I’m Still Here
(Ainda Estou Aqui)

Director – Walter Salles – 2024 – Brazil – Cert. 15 – 137m

****

When a family man is disappeared by Brazil’s military dictatorship, his wife must fight for justice while raising their family of five children alone – out in UK cinemas on Friday, February 21st

1971. The middle of Brazil’s 1964-85 military dictatorship. Former government commissioner Rubens Paiva (Selton Mello), a trained civil; engineer, lives with his family in Rio de Janeiro where he is designing the new family home he plans to build. The purchased plot of land, in view of the Christ the Redeemer monument, is staked out, and he has made little models of what the whole thing will look like, captured along with his partying family on Super-8 film by his home-movie-camera-wielding, eldest daughter Veroca (Valentina Herszage). Said eldest daughter (he has four of them plus one young son) is about to go to college. Taking the lead from his wife Eunice (Fernanda Torres), who is concerned that their daughter’s likely involvement in radical student politics will get her in trouble with the dictatorship, Rubens sets her up with an old family friend to study abroad in London.

With reports on the TV news of various diplomats being kidnapped by paramilitaries, who want to exchange them for political prisoners, in a worrying taste of events to come, Veroca is travelling and filming her Super-8 as a passenger in a friend’s car wherein weed is being smoked, when they hit a military roadblock in a road tunnel.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Save the Green Planet!
(Jigureul Jikyeora!,
지구를 지켜라!)

Director – Jang Joon-Hwan – 2003 – South Korea – Cert. 18 – 118m

*****

NSFW

Convinced that a corporate boss is an alien who killed his mother, a man takes him prisoner and tortures him to find out his race’s plans for planet Earth – plays alongside 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

Lee Byong-gu (Shin Ha-kyun) is convinced that corporate CEO Kang Man-shik (Baek Yoon-shik) is not only responsible for the death of his mother but also is an alien spy set to communicate with his extra-terrestrial superiors at the next full moon in seven days time. So, aided by girlfriend Sooni (Hwang Jung-min), Lee kidnaps Kang and brings him back to his underground workshop beneath his hilltop home near which he keeps bees in hives. Lee wants to hear the truth from Kang’s own lips, and is prepared to torture him to get it.

CEO Kang is clearly not a nice guy – he is obviously raking in the money, yet we watch him driven home drunk by a valet who he shamelessly short changes on his fare.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Escape
(Talju,
탈주)

Director – Lee Jong-Pil – 2024 – South Korea – LEAFF Cert. 18 – 94m

*****

An army sergeant is caught attempting to escape from North to South Korea, but then a second chance presents itself – played as the Opening Gala at the 2024 London East Asia Film Festival (LEAFF) which runs from Wednesday, October 23rd to Sunday, November 3rd

North Korea. Sgt. Lim Kyu-nam (Lee Je-hoon) is stationed at the edge of the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) separating North from South Korea, a smart but frustrated soldier who knows he’s never going to rise up the chain of command riddled as it is with nepotism and privilege. Nights, when the rest of his unit is asleep, and inspired by his treasured book of the explorer Edmund Amundsen, he sneaks out of the barracks to map a section of the minefield in the DMZ.

His plan is to escape through that minefield and reach South Korea to defect before the monsoon arrives in four days time and the water moves all the mines around, making his map useless. Then he learns that the bad weather is coming two days earlier than expected. So he must move the date of his escape forward.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Firebrand

Director – Karim Ainouz – 2023 – UK – Cert. 15 – 121m

*****

Henry VIII’s sixth wife Katherine Parr must navigate the increasingly treacherous waters between her desire for religious tolerance and Henry’s more authoritarian take on Christianity – out in UK cinemas on Friday, September 6th

With her husband Henry VIII away fighting wars abroad, the Queen – Henry’s sixth wife Katherine Parr (Alicia Vikander) – has been declared Regent. Yet, for all the power, at least temporarily, entrusted to her, she cannot go anywhere outside the castle without male guards. On the pretext of visiting a religious shrine to which only women can be admitted, she (and her loyal ladies in waiting) slip off to a forest glade where her old friend Anne Askew (Erin Doherty) is preaching on the fact that the Bible has recently been translated into English and therefore made available to the common people in their own language for the present time. “Where will it all end?”, Anne asks her small, gathered audience.

Where indeed? Katherine may be a reformer at heart, but she is also staunchly royalist and believes in the King both as an institution and Henry himself specifically.

And then Henry (Jude Law) comes back from the wars, bringing her time as Regent to an end.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Firebrand

Directed by Karim Ainouz
Certificate 15
121 minutes
Released 6 September

Reviewed for Reform magazine.

History. The Tudors. King Henry VIII wanted a male heir to the throne. His first wife failed to deliver, so he divorced her. When the Pope excommunicated him, Henry set up the new, Protestant, Church of England. He kept marrying new wives who ended up, as a popular rhyme puts it, ‘divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived’.

The wife who died, Jane Seymour, gave Henry his desired son – however, Edward (Patrick Buckley) later dies at age 15. The wife who survived, Katherine Parr (Alicia Vikander), is the subject of this movie, which deals with the later period of Henry’s sixth marriage… [Read the rest at Reform magazine]

[Read my longer, alternative review on this site.]

Firebrand is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, September 6th.

Trailer:

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Sorcery (Brujería)

Director – Christopher Murray – 2023 – Chile, Mexico, Germany – Cert. 15 – 100m

*****

When the father of an indigenous Christian convert is murdered by her German Christian employer’s dogs, her thirst for justice leads her to employ occult folk magic against his family – out in UK cinemas on Friday, June 14th

1881. Chiloé, the Northernmost island of an archipelago off the coast of Chile. Indigenous, 13-year-old Rosa (Valentina Véliz Caileo) works as a maid for German immigrant Stefan (Sebastian Hülk from All Quiet on the Western Front, Edward Berger, 2022; Little Joe, Jessica Hausner, 2019; The White Ribbon, Michael Haneke, 2009) who together with his wife (Annick Durán) runs a sheep farm. The couple have two young boys, Thorsten (Matías Bannister) and Franz (Iker Echevers). The family are Christians, and Rosa is a convert to that religion.

One day, Stefan’s sheep lie dead in his field, with woven garlands of vegetation round their necks. With tensions understandably high, Rosa’s father approaches Stefan holding a knife, and Stefan releases his two dogs upon him, killing the man. Rosa later places a makeshift cross of two sticks bound together on his basic grave, which she and Stefan’s family visit, Stefan’s wife pointing out that the man wasn’t a Christian.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Io Capitano
(Io Capitano)

Director – Matteo Garrone – 2023 – Italy – Cert. 12a – 121m

*****

Two teenage Senegalese boys set out on a journey to Europe and a better life – out in UK cinemas on Friday, April 5th

Garrone’s earlier features (Gomorrah, 2008; Tale of Tales, 2015; Dogman, 2018; Pinocchio, 2019) have a particular, muted look, making considerable use of browns and, to a lesser extent, greys or greyish colours. These were all films set in Garrone’s native Italy, featuring characters with an Italian perspective of one sort or another. This new film eschews all that and, while it’s recognisably the work of the same director, exhibits a completely different colour palette in accordance with its different location. It’s brighter and much less dingy.

The different look very much fits with the different intent. Garrone wanted to deal with migrants crossing the Mediterranean from Africa to Europe, but portray the journey from the migrants’ perspective rather than that of their destination countries. So this starts with two teenage, Senegalese boys who want to run away to Europe and is made in various African dialects, with the main one spoken by the two boys being recognisable as French.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Fez Summer ’55
(” 55″ خمسة وخمسين)

Director – Abdelhai Laraki – 2023 – Morocco – Cert. none – 114m

****

An 11-year-old boy navigates the rooftops of a Moroccan city while insurgents plot the overthrow of French colonialists in private courtyards and sometimes confront the occupying police in the streets – premieres in the Critics’ Picks Competition at the 27th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival

The old medina of Moroccan city Fez, a lattice of narrow streets where there is room for no more than pedestrian traffic. Or, to 11-year-old boy Kamal (Ayman Driwi), a network of rooftops and walkways allowing him to go anywhere. His freedom on the top of the city stands in sharp contrast to the country’s political reality: occupied by France, with their police patrolling the streets. The locals either keep their heads down or agitate for the return of their exiled ruler, Sultan Mohammed V.

The story is very much told from Kamal’s point of view. He is at once possessed of a child’s enthusiasm for life and from his rooftop vantage point able to see things unseen by most of the narrative’s adults most of the time. Yet, he is hampered by his immaturity and lack of understanding of what’s really going on.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Nobody Leaves Alive
(Ninguém Sai Vivo Daqui)

Director – André Ristum – 2023 – Brazil – Cert. none – 86m

****

After a woman is incarcerated in Brazil’s notorious Colonia psychiatric hospital simply because she is pregnant outside of marriage, her hold on reality starts to disintegrate – premieres in the Critics’ Picks Competition at the 27th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival

Lovingly shot in a stylish black and white that both makes the whole thing feel like a dream and detracts from any sense of reality, this opens with a young woman being bundled by two men into what looks like a cattle truck. Inside the truck are other people, and the group is clearly being sent somewhere specific.

Once off the train they are frogmarched down a country track, through some wrought metal gates of late 19th / early 20th Century design and into a hallway where they are separated into men and women and the women (since it is one woman’s story we are following here) are taken to a large, tiled room and hosed down by two women, the younger of whom is Laura.

Then the woman we are following is taken for interview with a man who denies he’s a doctor. Her name is Elisa, and she explains there’s been some sort of mix-up.… Read the rest