Tag: war veteran

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Features Live Action Movies

Moor
(Mavr)

Director – Adilkhan Yerzhanov – 2024 – Kazakhstan, France – 83m

***

A mercenary known by the codename ‘Moor’ returns from the war to the big city to rescue his younger brother’s wife and son from her husband’s debts – premieres in the Critics’ Picks Competition of the 28th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival

Found by the authorities, who apprehend him by a perimeter fence and remove his bag of home-made weaponry which includes a wooden bow and arrows and a knife carved from bone, which he will get back and make use of later in the plot, Moor is processed alongside wounded and traumatised veterans. He speaks few words and is in complete control of his faculties. The chief of police, who talks in a confident, jokey manner and insists on addressing him as Bro, feels more like a gangster than a cop, wearing a snakeskin jacket not unlike the hero of Wild at Heart (David Lynch, 1990) and often accompanied by a small entourage who read as gangsters rather than cops, even though the group occasionally expands to contain officers with the word POLICE on the back of their jackets.

He explains that Moor’s younger brother Houdini has disappeared, leaving behind him not only a mountain of debt but also a wife and small son.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Janet Planet

Director – Annie Baker – 2023 – US – Cert. 12a – 113m

**

Over the Summer, an 11-year-old girl abandons her idealised view of her mother as the latter traverses a series of relationships – out in UK and Irish cinemas on Friday, July 19th

11-year-old Lacy (Zoe Ziegler) isn’t enjoying summer camp. So much so, that she phones home from the payphone (it’s 1991) to ask her mother Janet (Julianne Nicholson) to come and get her. That sets us up for the rest of the film, in which Lacy shares her mother’s house over the remainder of the Summer. During this time, her mother embarks on a series of short-term relationships, with the body of the film split into three sections, one for each.

First up is war veteran Wayne (Will Patton), a damaged individual who is around long enough to briefly introduce Lacy to his own daughter Sequoia (Edie Moon Kearns). But then, before you’ve really got a handle on him, or his daughter, they’re gone from Janet’s life and so from Lacy’s.

Mother takes daughter to witness an open air performance by a bizarre theatre collective involving weird, archetypal, human-sized characters from homegrown hippie folklore (these scenes prove a high point in a largely uninspiring film).… 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