Tag: US

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Features Live Action Movies

Marty Supreme

Director – Josh Safdie – 2025 – US – Cert. 15 – 149m

*****

In the 1950s, a young New Yorker with the odds against him is determined to become a top table tennis player – in cinemas from Friday, December 26th

Manhattan’s Lower East Side, the 1950s. Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet) has a dream. It is, admittedly, a pretty odd dream which involves him rising to the top of a sport to which no-one in his native America currently pays any attention: table tennis. Also, he is possessed of the quintessentially New York sensibility of the street smart hustler who can, he believes, sell anything to anyone. A mere 23 years of age, he is naive and optimistic, but if you think that means the hard realities of day-to-day living are about to grind him down, you’ve got another think coming. For Marty is nothing less than a force of nature, blessed with unshakeable self-belief. And he needs it, because in this seriocomic rollercoaster of a sports drama, the odds seem to be increasingly stacked against him at every turn.

On top of all this, Marty is at once the person who through shrewd manoeuvring on the one hand makes his own luck and slowly builds his own destiny, and through hubris on the other has an unfortunate tendency to shoot himself in the foot..… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Live Action Movies

The SpongeBob Movie
Search for SquarePants

Director – Derek Drymon – 2025 – US – Cert. PG – 96m

*****

SpongeBob is duped by a ghostly pirate into undertaking a quest in the underworld which will have disastrous consequences for him – anarchic and inventive animation is out in UK cinemas on Friday, December 26th

The big day has arrived. SpongeBob SquarePants (voice: Tom Kenny) has finally reached the height of 36 clamshells. This means he can fulfil his dream – going on the fairground rollercoaster ride. As he bottles out, an opportunity presents itself: the chance to become a certified swashbuckler like the employer he so admires, Mr. Krabs (voice: Clancy Brown).

Thus SpongeBob joins ghostly pirate the Flying Dutchman (voice: Mark Hamill), the curse of the seven seas, on a quest into the underworld resembling the numbered stages of a computer game. However, our hero has been duped; the Flying Dutchman can only rid himself of the curse which traps him in the state of a ghost by transferring it to someone else – and SpongeBob is the fall guy. Can our hero’s friends Patrick (voice: Bill Fagerbakke), accompanying him on his quest, and Mr. Krabs and Squidward (voice: Roger Bumpass), who set out in hot pursuit, save him?… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Avatar
Fire and Ash

Director – James Cameron – 2025 – US – Cert. 12a – 195m

Immersive Cinema *****

Screenplay ***1/2

Return to Pandora – this time, with a terrifying tribe whose trust in the planet’s spirit has been wiped out by a volcano – second Avatar sequel is out in cinemas from Friday, December 19th

Whatever you think of the Avatar movies – of which this is the third – there’s no denying that audiences love them, and that these films are, for the time being at least, critic-proof. The original Avatar (2009) is a remarkable work, right at the cutting edge of what one might call immersive cinema, with Cameron making superb use of 3D in an industry which long ago decided 3D was a fad useful primarily for jacking up the price of tickets: in Cameron’s hands, however, 3D goes hand-in-hand with artistic intent as he involves you in a planet or a world – Pandora – with its own, unique, eco-system. Having done that, the question is, where can you go. The second film Avatar: The Way of Water (James Cameron, 2022), in this writer’s opinion, is just as impressive as a further piece of immersive cinema; however, while it delivers some extraordinary sequences, it fails to deliver in terms of story in the way that the original did.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

Jack Nicholson

Director – Milos Forman – 1975 – US – Cert. 18 – 133m

*****

An unpredictable new inmate unsettles the controlling nurse presiding over a hospital ward’s mental patients– out now in the UK on 4K UHD and 4K UHD Steelbook

A state hospital for the mentally ill, a live-in ward presided over by Miss Ratched (Louise Fletcher). For reasons that are never entirely clear, RP McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) arrives for a stay to evaluate his mental health. It’s also not clear whether there is anything actually wrong with him; the prison that sent him thinks he was faking it to get out of a work detail.

McMurphy finds himself on Miss Ratched’s ward, which she runs in a highly regimented fashion. He doesn’t like that, and the scene is set for a battle of the wills.

The film was originally a 1962 novel by Ken Kesey which became a play within a year with Kirk Douglas playing McMurphy. That ran on Broadway for six months, and Douglas was so taken with it that he spent most of the 1960s trying to make the film, eventually deciding on Forman as director and sending him a copy of the novel. Forman never received the book as it was seized by the Czech authorities.… Read the rest

Categories
Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Dark Star

Director – John Carpenter – 1974 – US – Cert. PG – 83m (71m Directors Cut)

*****

Let There Be Light: The Odyssey of Dark Star

Director – Daniel Griffith – 2010 – US – 118 mins

*****

A bored crew of astronauts travel through space blowing up unstable planets – out now as a 4K Ultra-HD and Blu-ray Box Set, and a standalone Blu-ray

Carpenter’s 71-minute cut of his extraordinary debut feature is a lean, if tacky, sci-fi comedy that succeeds because of clever characterisations in the script and exemplary use of minimal resources in its production. Begun as a student film at USC, it preceeds his more polished, widescreen thriller efforts of the 1970s starting with Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) and Halloween (1978) with their relentless, pounding scores which he also composed and which would enable him to reinvent himself as a performing musician much later in his career. With no driving beat, Dark Star’s keyboard tones merely hint at what is to come musically.

The spaceship interiors are deceptively simple. One is a small room with four seats crammed side to side alternately facing from which four crew members operate the ship. Or, rather, three – Lt.… Read the rest

Categories
Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Prime Minister

Directors – Michelle Walshe, Lindsay Utz – 2025 – US, New Zealand – Cert. 12a – 102m

*****

A portrait of Rt Hon Dame Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand’s 40th Prime Minister – out in UK and Irish cinemas on Friday, December 5th

There has never been a documentary quite like this before, and perhaps there never will be again. For one thing, it turns out that Jacinda Ardern’s partner Clarke Gayford is an established TV producer who shot a wealth of home movie footage, albeit with professional equipment, throughout the period for which she served as New Zealand’s Prime Minister. For another, this home movie footage covers her pregnancy and the early years of her daughter Neve. For a third, as an MP she became involved with a project in which MPs would record their thoughts at various points during their tenure. When she agreed to this, no-one, including herself, had any idea that she would subsequently become Prime Minister. And that’s the fourth reason: this is a portrait of a PM in office who had no intention of being either a party leader or the Prime Minister of a country. And then who suddenly found herself the sole candidate for the post of leading New Zealand’s Labour Party weeks ahead of a General Election, in which she led the party to victory,

In this documentary, Jacinda (as I shall call her) describes being the leader of a country as “the worst job in politics”.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Past Lives

Director – Celine Song – 2022 – US, South Korea – Cert. 12a – 105m

*****

After emigrating with her family from South Korea to North America, a Korean-American is sought out in New York by her now-adult childhood sweetheart from back in Korea – streaming exclusively on StudioCanal Presents

Have you heard the one about the Korean woman sitting between a Korean man and a WASP man in a bar in New York? Is the Korean man her partner? Is the WASP man her partner? Following this unforgettable opening image and a voice-over in which someone tries to work out the loyalties and relationships pictured, flashback 24 years to Korea’s Seoul for a chunk of narrative also involving Canada’s Toronto. Then jump forward 12 years for a further chunk of narrative in both Seoul and New York. Finally, jump forward a further 12 years to the present day for a final chunk of narrative in New York.

Intrigued? You’ll get to know two very Korean kids, who at age 12 or thereabouts in Seoul start dating. The girl, Na Young (Moon Seung-Ah), is already choosing a Westernised name, Nora Moon, in preparation for her family’s emigration to Toronto; the boy Jung Hae Sung (Leem Seung-min) has no such conflict and is firmly locked into a Korean identity.… Read the rest

Categories
Documentary Features Live Action Movies Music

The Session Man

Director – Michael Treen – 2023 – UK – Cert. 12a – 90m

***

A look at legendary pianist Nicky Hopkins who played with numerous bands and on numerous records – out in UK cinemas on Friday, November 21st

Nicky Hopkins may not exactly be a household name, but anyone who paid attention to credits on rock music albums from the early 1960s through to the early 1990s is likely to have heard of him. Trained as a classical pianist at the Royal Academy of Music, he simultaneously discovered rock and roll and began playing in bands at the start of the sixties as a 16-year-old. The right place at the right time. Up and coming British bands of the early 1960s like The Beatles, The Kinks, The Rolling Stones, and The Who – essentially bands consisting of guitars and drums – got him playing piano on their albums to fill out the sound. He was playing with Jeff Beck around the time of the Truth album, which took him to the US, where he became based for the rest of his life, occasionally returning to the UK to work on specific albums.

Narrated by Bob Harris, formerly of BBC’s The Old Grey Whistle Test, this music documentary follows the obvious format of, film a lot of interviews with people who know the subject and intersperse footage of the musician concerned playing live or in recording sessions to break the interviews up a bit.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Bugonia

Director – Yorgos Lanthimos – 2025 – US, Ireland, South Korea – Cert. 15 – 118m

****

A man with a grievance against a corporation kidnaps its CEO, believing her to be an alien with hostile designs on the human race – out in UK cinemas on Friday, October 31st

As Teddy (Jesse Plemons from Civil War, Alex Garland, 2024; Kinds of Kindness, Yorgos Lanthimos, 2024; Killers of the Flower Moon, Martin Scorsese, 2023) explains it, they live among us. While he and his autistic bother Don (Aidan Delbis) eke out their very ordinary lives with Teddy working in a warehouse for big pharma company Auxolith, the company CEO Michelle (Lanthimos regular Emma Stone) has her life on a platter: expensive home outside which she works out on the landing every morning, expensive SUV to get her to corporate HQ and back, and an army of corporate minions around her to ensure her every order is carried out. Even so, she still has difficulty speaking complicated lines for a corporate video. But that’s nothing compared to the ordeal Teddy has planned for her.

Teddy and decidedly unsure about the whole thing sidekick Don ambush her when he car arrives home from work and, after a struggle, for Michelle is used to getting her own way and is not a woman to be trifled with, overcome her after injecting her with a sedative.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Relay

Director – David Mackenzie – 2024 – US – Cert. 15 – 112m

*****

A corporate whistleblower who has changed her mind hires a fixer to give her the leverage she needs to safely vanish and start a new life, only it doesn’t work out like that – out in UK cinemas on Friday, October 31st

Sometimes companies do bad things, and when you think they couldn’t do any worse, they set out to coerce or intimidate former employees attempting to expose them. How widespread this is in real life is anyone’s guess, but it makes for great copy and feeds into paranoid left wing ideas about the immorality of corporate capitalism. Don’t get me wrong: just because you’re paranoid, as the saying goes, it doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.

To illustrate the point, this narrative opens with Hoffman (Matthew Mayer from Bringing Out The Dead, Martin Scorsese, 1999; Dogma, Kevin Smith, 1999, reissued in cinemas next week (Friday, November 7th); and Funny Pages, Owen Kline, 2022) entering a near empty New York restaurant to surrender a set of incriminating documents to McVie (Victor Garber from Family Law, TV series 2021-2025; Argo, Ben Affleck, 2012; Alias, TV series, 2001-6), safe in the knowledge that another copy of said documents will be mailed to an appropriate recipient should McVie not co-operate and ensure Hoffman’s safety.… Read the rest