Tag: urban

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Features Live Action Movies

Gazer

Director – Ryan J. Sloan – 2024 – US – Cert. 15 – 114m

***

A single-parent mum, unable to make sense of the passing of time, struggles to get by and find the money to get out of town with her child – largely incomprehensible yet strangely compelling, urban, neo-noir thriller is out in UK cinemas on Friday, July 25th

This narrative impresses and frustrates the viewer in pretty much equal measure. There are rotten films out there on which you really don’t want to waste your time, and for all its faults, Gazer isn’t one of those (although there are times, particularly in its first hour, when it comes close). And then there are (arguably) visionary films where you can sense the makers – usually the director(s), writer(s) or performer(s) – struggling to express (a) unique viewpoint(s), and Gazer, a first-time feature by former New York electrician Sloan, who co-wrote and directs, and Canadian musician / actress Ariella Mastroianni, who co-wrote and stars, most definitely fits into that category – albeit not always entirely successfully.

The film possesses a distinctive look, which I imagine is largely down to Brazilian-Portuguese cameraperson Matheus Bastos, who shot it on 16mm.… Read the rest

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Animation Features Live Action Movies

Sister Midnight

Director – Karan Kandhari – 2024 – UK, Sweden, India – Cert. 15 – 110m

***1/2

A young woman in an arranged marriage discovers herself to be a creature of the night… and one of the undead – genre-bender is out on UK digital from Wednesday, June 18th

A young woman travels cross-country by train, face veiled by beaded hangings, to join the arranged marriage husband she has (presumably) never met in their new, urban home. Uma (Radikha Apte) and Gopal (Ashok Pathak best known here from The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, John Madden, 2015) don’t seem to know what to do with each other. Certainly not any sort of sexual congress as they unveil sitting beside one another for the first time. As the tale proceeds, sleeping with him comes to consist of curling up on her own on the other side of the bed from him. Later, her sleeping patterns will start to shift…

Theirs is a pretty basic home – a room with a mattress and a door out onto the bustling, main street outside. Her husband has a job, so goes out in the morning and comes back in the evening, although sometimes he goes out drinking after work and comes back later.… Read the rest

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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

The Old Man
and the Land

Director – Nicholas Parish – 2023 – UK – Cert. 15 – 100m

*****

As he works on the land, an aging farmer hears his two adult children argue about the future of the family farm – plays UK cinemas from Friday, September 20th 2024, with previews from Monday, September 16th following its premiere in the Critics’ Picks Competition at the 27th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, where it was the best film out of a superb lot

Movies. You think everything’s been done, then along comes something you’ve never seen before. Or, in this case, seen or heard before.

The Old Man in question is an English farmer (Roger Marten) whose family have worked the land for generations. He’s getting on in years, so won’t be around forever. His wife died a while ago, so he’s now running the farm on his own. He has two children who have long since grown up and left home: a son (voice: Rory Kinnear) and a daughter (voice: Emily Beecham), and the big question is, when he dies, will they take over – or will they get rid of the farm?

In recent years, the UK has produced a number of rural movies that stand in stark contrast to the urban- (often London-) based films produced.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies

Max Beyond

Director – Hasraf Dullul – 2024 – UK – Cert. 15 – 88m

****

Leon fails to rescue his adoptive brother Max from a corporate, experimental facility, so Max starts to move around the multiverse to find the world in which he succeeds – animated SF thriller is out on digital from Monday, April 22nd in the UK and Tuesday, April 23rd in the US

Facing very specific health challenges, eight-year-old Max (mo-cap/voice: Cade Tropeano) has been signed over to the Axion corporation and is living inside their high-tech, tower block complex where he is undergoing complicated, experimental, medical treatment under the supervision of Dr. Ava Johnson (mo-cap/voice: Jane Perry). Max’s elder brother Leon (mo-cap/voice: Dave Fennoy), a dishonourably discharged war veteran, is none too happy about this and, as protesters hold placards denouncing Axion outside the building, takes it upon himself to enter the premises, find his brother and rescue him from his oppressors, as he believes them to be.

Despite warnings from Dr. Ava over the intercom that there is no way out for Leon, he at first appears to be in control of the situation, a one-man army flooring all comers, but as his corporate security adversaries, culminating a sword-wielding man or robot (it’s never clear which) called The Sync, become increasingly impossible to defeat, it becomes clear that Ava’s predicted warning is accurate.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Concrete Utopia
(Konkeuriteu Yutopia,
콘크리트 유토피아)

Director – Eom Tae-hwa – 2023 – South Korea – Cert. 15 – 130m

****1/2

A massive earthquake makes the residents of the sole Seoul apartment block still standing close their doors to survivors outside – out on UK digital platforms on Monday, April 1st

Concrete: a structural material made of aggregate, cement, and water. (Definition from Encyclopedia Britannica.) Harsh. Unyielding. Impenetrable. Opaque. Not alive. Commonly used in today’s world in the manufacture of buildings, and associated with Brutalist architecture.

Utopia: an ideal community whose inhabitants exist under seemingly perfect conditions. (Definition from Encyclopedia Britannica.) The English word derives from two Greek words, the compound meaning of which is nowhere. Hence, “seemingly”. Utopias tend to have some fatal flaw. If they didn’t, any story about them would lack dramatic conflict. Thus, the word carries within it a degree of irony.

The eponymous montage of these two words pits them against each other: an unyielding, dead physicality confronts the optimism of a better world. The title evokes JG Ballard’s novels Concrete Island (1974) and High-Rise (1975), the former about a stranded motorist struggling to survive on a spaghetti junction after a car accident, the latter about a newly built block of flats in which the residents descend through social breakdown towards a new order.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies

Robot Dreams

Director – Pablo Berger – 2023 – Spain – Cert. PG – 102m

*****

In need of a companion, Dog builds Robot – but then, disaster strikes – charming, dialogue-free 2D animation is out in UK cinemas Friday, 22nd March following its screenings in the 2023 London Film Festival

The 1980s. Brooklyn. The East Village. Bored with endless, cook from frozen macaroni cheese meals from the fridge and channel hopping or playing both parts of computerised table tennis against himself, Dog longs for a companion. To this end, he buys a DIY self-assembly kit from which he builds Robot. For a short period, the pair are inseparable, walking and eating hot dogs together in Central Park, but then disaster strikes after Robot swims in the sea when the pair visit the beach. When it’s time to go home, his battery power is depleted, and he can’t move.

So Dog has to leave incapacitated Robot there. He buys books on robots from the local bookstore to work out how to repair his friend. Alas, on arrival at the beach, he discovers it’s closed since yesterday was the last day of the Summer season. A less than sympathetic cop won’t listen to his entreaties and sends him packing; Dog later returns with bolt cutters and removed the chain and padlock preventing entry, but is apprehended by the unsympathetic policeman before he can rescue Robot.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies Music

Blue Giant
(BLUE GIANT)

Director – Yuzura Tachikawa – 2023 – Japan – Cert. 12a – 120m

*****

Three 18-year-olds form a jazz band with the aim of playing at Tokyo’s top jazz club – out in UK cinemas on Wednesday, January 31st and Thursday, February 1st

Before this property was a movie – an animated movie – it was a manga. Which, on one level, is nothing that out of the ordinary in Japan (see, for instance, basketball movie The First Slam Dunk, Takehiko Inoue, 2022) but on another is extraordinary. Blue Giant is about music, specifically jazz, even more specifically teenager Dai Miyamoto (voice: Yuki Yamada; musicianship: Tomoaki Baba) who gives up basketball and decides he wants to be the best tenor sax player in the world. He rehearses intensively by the banks of the river in the city of Sendai where he lives, leaving for Tokyo at age 18 and talking his way into moving in with old pal Shunji Tamada (voice: Amane Okayama; musicianship: Shun Ishikawa).

Unsure where to start, Dai visits a bar named Jazz – Take Two where the friendly Mama-san Akiko (voice: Sayaka Kinoshita), who no longer hosts live jazz gigs there, takes pity on him and plays him selections from her vast wall of jazz LPs.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies

The Boy And The Heron
(Kimitachi Wa
Do Ikiru Ka,
君たちはど
う生きるか,
lit.
How Do You Live?)

Director – Hayao Miyazaki – 2023 – Japan – Cert. 12a – 124m

*****

During WorldWar Two, a boy bereaved of his mother moves to the countryside with his businessman father where a heron lures him into another dimension to rescue his vanished stepmother – out in UK cinemas on Friday, December 26th

Directors, eh? They make their last film, then, some time later, they go and make another one. The Wind Rises (2013) was supposed to be Hayao Miyazaki’s last film, but three years later, he was working on his next one. And seven years further on, The Boy And The Heron hits cinemas. The Japanese title How Do You Live? comes from a popular children’s novel, a copy of which appears in the film, rather than the film being an adaptation of the novel.

Three years into World War Two, young boy Mahito (Japanese dub: Soma Santoki; English dub: Luca Padovan) loses his mother in a Tokyo hospital fire. Four years into the war, his father (Japanese dub: Takuya Kimura; English dub: Christian Bale) – a businessman who manufactures aircraft cockpits for the war effort – decides to move both his factory and his son out of Tokyo to the countryside where he plans to marry his late wife’s younger sister Natsuko (Japanese dub: Yoshino Kimura; English dub: Gemma Chan).… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Live Action Movies

Wonka

Director – Paul King – 2023 – US – Cert. PG – 112m

Movie ****

Hugh Grant as an Oompa Loompa when he eventually appears*****

How the youthful Willy Wonka became the world’s most celebrated maker of chocolate – musical based on one of Roald Dahl’s best-known characters is out in UK cinemas on Friday, December 8th

Willy Wonka is familiar to generations of children through both the book in which he first appeared, Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964) and its two film adaptations Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (Mel Stuart, 1971) and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Tim Burton, 2005). Rather than remake the novel a third time, Warner Bros. have taken the bold step of creating a Willy Wonka origin story. Who was Wonka before he became the innovative and eccentric chocolate factory owner that book and movie audiences know and love? It’s a great idea for a film.

Paul King, who previously breathed cinematic life into another well-known figure from British children’s literature in his two Paddington movies (2017 and 2014), has, together with Paddington 2 co-screenwriter Simon Farnaby, come up with an original story which feels like a Dahl adaptation – although it isn’t.… Read the rest