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Features Live Action Movies

The Zone of Interest

Director – Jonathan Glazer – 2023 – UK, Poland – Cert. 12a – 106m

*****

A drama about the everyday, domestic lives of the Commandant of Auschwitz, his wife, and their family – out in UK cinemas on Friday, February 2nd

How do people sleep at night? If they do bad things? Well, some people who do bad things are tormented by them. They sleep badly. Their conscience, however repressed by them, disturbs them. The others? Well, they seem to sleep soundly.

The Zone of Interest is about people who, as part of their daily routine, do or at least consent to, even inaugurate, unspeakable things. These people are a respectable married couple and their extended family. The focus here is on the ordinary, everyday activities they pursue rather than the unspeakable activities. A nice bathing trip to the river; a later panic when there might be an infection in the river and family members are bathing in it. (The bad stuff seeps into the everyday, routine, speakable stuff, it seems.) Mum taking the little one round the garden and telling her the names of the flowers. Mum running an efficient household, with an army of servants. Mum trying on a second-hand, fur coat.… Read the rest

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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

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Animation Features Movies

Chicken Run

Producer-Directors: Nick Park, Peter Lord – Producer – David Sproxton – 2000 – UK – Cert. PG – 84m

*****

Which came first – the chicken or the egg? Plasticene stop-frame animation house Aardman Animations’ debut feature film reconceives The Great Escape with chickens – review originally published in year 2000

Aardman Animations’ A Close Shave (1995), the third half-hour outing for Nick Park’s popular Wallace & Gromit duo, exhibited several danger signs – specifically its close resemblance to brilliant, immediate precursor The Wrong Trousers (1993). Clearly aware of such pitfalls, Park and founding Aards Sproxton and Lord shrewdly signed a five-picture deal with Dreamworks but refused to rush into a first feature. Their caution has paid dividends: this first full length Aardmovie proves an unexpectedly wondrous odyssey.

It’s The Great Escape reconceived with chickens: familiar WW2 prison camp is reconfigured as North of England chicken coop with impenetrable fencing, rows of huts and a motley assortment of portly hen inmates. Ginger (voice: Julia Sawalha) wants to escape, but several disastrous attempts lead to solitary confinement (where she bounces a ball off the wall Steve McQueen style). Other chickens can’t see a problem – Bunty (voice: Imelda Staunton) simply keeps on laying eggs, while Babs (Horrocks) busies herself with constant knitting.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

One Of Our Aircraft
Is Missing

Producers-Writers-Directors – The Archers (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger) – 1942 – UK – Cert. PG – 103m

*****

Forced to bail out following an otherwise successful mission in which one engine is disabled, a British bomber crew must find their way across occupied Holland to return to the safety of Britain – part of major season Cinema Unbound: The Creative Worlds Of Powell + Pressburger from Monday, October 16th at BFI Southbank, also on BFI Blu-ray; other films in the season can be found on BFI Player

Made at the height of World War II, the first Powell and Pressburger / The Archers movie to deploy that verbal credit as such – but without their later trademark opening shot of an arrow striking its target – is in essence a propaganda exercise in the guise of a narrative feature film made to bolster wartime morale at home. However, the pair pull the whole thing off with such verve and inventiveness that it feels less an exercise in propaganda and more a rattling good yarn (without compromising either way).

It opens like a bizarre ghost story (as bizarre as the curse upon the Lairds of Kiloran in the castle ruins of “i know where I’m going!”Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Oppenheimer

Director – Christopher Nolan – 2023 – US – Cert. 15 – 180m

*****

Drama about the father of the atomic bomb, shot with IMAX cameras and best watched in IMAX 70mm format – out in UK cinemas on Friday, July 21st

There are certain hallmarks to Christopher Nolan’s feature length movies. Since The Dark Knight (Nolan, 2008), his second Batman movie, he has been shooting a proportion of each one with IMAX cameras. Seen projected on a screen the size of three double-decker London buses at London’s BFI Waterloo IMAX, these are larger than life experiences in a way that movies shown in the viewer’s own home on a screen, even a large one, can never be. And while Nolan is interested in character and performance, most of his movies in the IMAX format, even the historically inspired WW2 movie Dunkirk (Nolan, 2017), contain memorable action, exploiting the vastness of the IMAX screen to great kinetic effect whether it’s Batman roaring along on the Batbike, co-conspirators free floating inside a falling transit van in Inception (Nolan, 2010) or British WW2 soldiers trapped inside a flooding ship.

There is, however, a problem with watching Nolan’s IMAX-intended films in a lesser theatrical cinema format: the framing.… Read the rest

Categories
Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Getting Away
With Murder(s)

Director – David Nicholas Wilkinson – 2021 – UK – Cert. 15 – 175m

*****

Most of the perpetrators of the Holocaust were never prosecuted: this documentary attempts to understand why noton BD/DVD combo from Monday, March 27th following its debut on various streaming platforms UK, USA, Canada and Australia on Friday, January 27th 2023 (Holocaust Memorial Day)… Full details below review:

There’s something about the enormity of the issues involved here that makes this a very tough watch. (If it wasn’t, there would be something wrong. The Holocaust is not an easy issue to deal with. Films about it can consequently be tough to watch. And so they should be.) That combined with the near three-hour running time (this is not a complaint, honest) means it sat on my pending review pile for quite a while before I finally sat down and watched it.

I suspect Wilkinson is aware of this problem. As the film starts, he takes you (as it were) gently by the hand as he walks into Auschwitz and matter-of-factly discusses its horrors, helped by a man who works in the museum there and has probably helped numerous people before and since to come to terms with the implications of the place as they go round it.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Ashes And Diamonds
(Popiół I Diament)

Director – Andrzej Wajda – 1958 – Poland – Cert. 12 – 103m

*****

Two resistance fighters attempt to assassinate a Communist Party official on the last day of the Second World War – plays at the Phoenix Cinema East Finchley in conjunction with the Kinoteka Polish Film Festival at 18:00 on Sunday, March 19th, also on Blu-ray as part of Wajda’s War Trilogy

Made over a decade after not only the historical setting for the events it depicts in 1945 but also the Jerzy Andrzejewski novel on which it is based which was written in 1947 and published in 1948, this condenses that novel’s two weeks into a mere – 24 hours the last day of the Second World War and the evening and night of the victory celebrations that follow plus the subsequent early dawn.

The war is over and the Nazis defeated, but Poland still finds itself the subject of conflict as opposing factions vie for power. On the one hand is the official Party trying to get everything working again and on the other members of the resistance determined to stop them.

The older Andrzej (Adam Pawlikowski) and the younger Maciek (Zbigniew Cybulski) carry out an ordered assassination on Szczuka (Waclaw Zastrzeżyński).… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Live Action Movies

Where Is Anne Frank

Director – Ari Folman – 2021 – Belgium, France, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Israel – Cert. PG – 99m

*****

In Amsterdam, a year from now, her imaginary friend Kitty sets out to discover what happened to Anne Frank – out in cinemas on Friday, August 12th

Amsterdam, Holland, about a year from now. Early in the morning, the usual tourist queues are assembling outside the Anne Frank House, passing a tent housing refugees on the pavement. Inside, something strange happens as a glass case shatters and the original copy of Anne’s diary is exposed to ink from a pen, affecting the ink writing on the pages and materialising Kitty (voice: Ruby Stokes), the imaginary pen-friend to whom Anne addressed her diary.

The materialised Kitty is perplexed. Where is Anne Frank? What has happened to her, to the house? The staff, too, are perplexed. They can’t let the waiting crowds in with the case broken, but those people have been queueing for hours and it seems wrong not to open up for them. After a brief debate a solution is found and the diary moved to Anne’s room where it is placed on the desk where it naturally sits. The concerns of the house staff seem trivial compared to those of Kitty.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Kurt Vonnegut:
Unstuck In Time

Directors – Robert B. Weide, Dan Argott – 2021 – US – Cert. 15 – 127m

*****

A warm and compelling look at the life of writer Kurt Vonnegut, the influence upon him of the bombing of Dresden, and his decades-long friendship with director Weide – out in cinemas and on digital platforms from Friday, July 22nd, BFI Player Rental from Monday, August 22nd

Read my shorter review for Reform magazine.

The documentary Weide eventually made about Vonnegut took him the best part of four decades to complete. Weide opens with a statement about Vonnegut walking in the woods, feeling a tree and seeing the bombing of Dresden before it occurred. There seems no reason to doubt Vonnegut. He was unstuck in time, jumping around the years and decades. Weide first contacted him in 1982, never imagining that it would take him anything like as long to complete the film as it did. He starts looking at interviews of himself (“who wants to see a documentary in which a filmmaker appears as himself?”, he asks) – defined by where they were shot or what shirt Weide was wearing at the time.

Whatever else Vonnegut and his writing are, they are not conventional.… Read the rest

Categories
Movies

Where Is Anne Frank

Hiding from deportation

Where Is Anne Frank
Directed by Ari Folman
Certificate PG, 99 minutes
Released 12 August

Amsterdam, about a year from now. Inside the Anne Frank House, Anne’s imaginary pen-friend Kitty (voiced by Ruby Stokes) materialises out of the ink from the pages of Anne’s diary. The perplexed Kitty wants to know what happened to Anne, and starts reading her diary to find out, taking it with her when she leaves the premises where she is invisible. Outside the house, she becomes visible.

Asking police ‘Where is Anne Frank?’ she is shown the bridge, hospital, school and theatre bearing Anne Frank’s name and is told, Anne Frank is all around you. [Read the rest at Reform magazine…]

[Read my longer review…]

Trailer: