Category: Features

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Ilo Ilo
(爸妈不在家,
lit. Mom And Dad
Are Not Home)

Director – Anthony Chen – 2013 – Singapore – Cert. 12 – 99m

****

A Filipino maid must contend with the unruly son of a working Singaporean couple in a time of economic difficulty – now available to rent online in the new Chinese Cinema Season 2021 in the UK & Ireland as part of the Debut Spotlight strand until Wednesday, May 12th

1997, the Asian financial crisis is looming (see Default, 2018, Choi Kook-Hee) and the Leng family is under pressure. Secretary Hwee (Yeo Yann Yann) works for a shipping company that has hit difficult times: one of her jobs is to type up redundancy letters for staff who are about to be called into the manager’s office. She believes she and her immediate admin colleagues are safe. Her husband Teck (Chen Tian Wen) is a sales executive, but on the evidence of his pitching ‘unbreakable’ glass to a buyer – it breaks – is not that good at it.

The couple are expecting a second child. They’ve been so focused on work, though, that they perhaps haven’t spent as much time as they should with their son Jiale (Koh Jia Ler) who has the worst behaviour record in his school and is frequently the recipient of corporal punishment by the discipline teacher.… Read the rest

Categories
Art Features Live Action Movies

Effie Gray

Director – Richard Laxton – 2014 – UK – Cert. 12a – 104m

****

The eponymous heroine marries art critic John Ruskin who then fails to consummate their relationship – in Virtual Cinemas and on VoD from Monday, April 19th and BD/DVD Special Collector’s Edition from Monday, May 31st

The real life story of Effie Gray provides a fascinating footnote to an episode of English art history. At age 19, she married ascendant critic John Ruskin but for reasons we shall probably never fully know, their sexual relationship was never consummated and she had the marriage annulled six years later. Meanwhile, she had got to know Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais through Ruskin, marrying him a year after the annulment. Effie’s second marriage was to prove a much happier affair and she bore John eight children.

The story has been dramatised numerous times, mostly either on radio or screen, as well as the odd stage play, short story or novel. Emma Thompson’s slow and deliberate screenplay may be the first time the story has been put on the big screen in a full length feature (one of the very first adaptations was the silent short The Love Of John Ruskin, Van Dyke Brooke, 1912).… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

The Reckoning

Director – Neil Marshall – 2020 – UK – Cert. 15 – 111m

***

A woman accused of witchcraft finds herself pitted in a battle of wills against her witchfinder torturer at the time of the Great Plague – on digital from Friday, April 16th and Shudder UK from Thursday, 13th May

On the one hand, this explores the historical time period of the Great Plague and links that directly with women being burned at the stake for witchcraft by way of a widespread, social scapegoating process. On the other, it depicts a horribly misogynistic society where, for the most part women are regarded as inferior and treated really badly. Two sides of the same coin.

The film itself is mixed. Parts feel hackneyed, parts will have you on the edge of your seat. The cliché-ridden opening, for instance, cross-cuts chocolate box-y photography of a cottage-dwelling couple’s idyllic, married existence in the constantly sunlit countryside with the wife digging a grave in torrential rain after finding her husband has hanged himself from a tree at night.

It transpires that farmer Joseph Haverstock (Joe Anderson) stopped off for a pint at the local tavern and accidentally drank the beer of a plague victim, contracting the disease.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

True Mothers
(Asa Ga Kuru,
朝が来る)

Director – Naomi Kawase – 2020 – Japan – Cert. 15 – 140m

*****

An unmarried mum hands her child over to adoptive parents only to later decide that she wants the child back – Japan’s entry for the 2020/2021 Oscars is screening on Curzon Home Cinema from Friday, April 16th

Naomi Kawase’s new film True Mothers deals with the interface between unwanted teen pregnancy and infertility among married couples and was Japan’s entry for this year’s Best International Feature Film at the Oscars. Sadly, it didn’t make the Academy’s shortlist. However, UK audiences up and down the land will now be able to see it on Curzon Home Cinema. It had a brief UK big screen outing late last year at the London East Asia Film Festival (LEAFF), which, after several months of touch-and-go somewhat incredibly went ahead days before the UK went back into total lockdown.

Former documentarian Kawase has been getting a lot of exposure in the UK in recent years with both Sweet Bean (2015) and The Mourning Forest (2007) released here on Eureka! Video and Still the Water (2014) currently available on MUBI and BFI Player. I like Kawase but I must admit True Mothers sounded like it might be terrible.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Promising
Young Woman

Director – Emerald Fennell – 2020 – US – Cert. US R – 113m

*****

A med school dropout seeks revenge on the students and others complicit in her best friend’s rape years before – on Sky Cinema and Now from Friday, April 16th

Cassie (Carey Mulligan) goes to bars, gets wasted and is picked up by men whose intentions are less than honourable. However, all is not what it seems – before you can shout spoiler alert (and we’re not going to because this is the start of the film, given away in the trailer and effectively part of the narrative set up) she’s not wasted at all, only pretending. Depending on exactly how dishonourable these men’s intentions are, she exacts her revenge accordingly.

These acts are premeditated in the sense that she goes out, entraps men and does what she does, but not in the sense that she knows any of the men beforehand. Indeed, they choose her, so you could argue their fate is self-inflicted. And were any of them to behave chivalrously – take her home, put her to bed, not try to take sexual advantage, perhaps phone the next day to check she was okay – she’d probably look favourably on them for doing the decent thing.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Tracey
(翠絲)

Director – Li Jun – 2018 – Hong Kong – Cert. N/C 15+ – 119m

*****

It’s complicated. Upon hearing of the death of his oldest and dearest friend, a fiftysomething questions the edifice of family life he has constructed around himself over the decades – screened online in the UK as part of Focus Hong Kong 2021 Easter from Wednesday, March 31st to Tuesday, April 6th

Tung Tai-hung (Philip Keung – A Witness Out Of The Blue, Fung Chi-Keung, 2019) is wakened from a dream by a phone call. In the dream, he’s a teenager hanging out with his friends Ching (Wong Yat-ho) and Jun (Sham Ka-ki) by a local waterfall. The phone caller informs him of Ching’s death. For years Tai-hung has been using the loo at work to change into the ladies undergarments he never wears at home where it’s unlikely he’d be able to hide their wearing from his misophobic wife Anne (Kara Wai) who recently shocked their son Vincent (Ng Siu Hin – A Witness Out Of The Blue, Fung Chi-Keung, 2019, Mad World, Wong Chun, 2016) by badmouthing the maid Parti (Candy Knutzen Darwati) after going through the latter’s things and finding a packet of condoms.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Beyond The Dream
(Huan Ai,
幻愛)

Director – Kiwi Chow – 2021 – Hong Kong – Cert. N/C 15+ – 120m

***

A recovering schizophrenic man falls in love with his psychiatric counsellor, who has relationship issues of her own – online in the UK as part of Focus Hong Kong 2021 Easter from Wednesday, March 31st to Tuesday, April 6th

An opening a sequence throws you off guard: a woman, clearly distressed, starts removing her clothes in a busy street. Soon she is sitting huddling on the pavement naked. One passer-by stops to take pictures (the video will later go viral). A second woman (Cecilia Choi – Detention, John Hsu, 2019) and a young man (Lau Chun Him), who both know the first woman as Ling, come to her aid. Between them, they find a dull red blanket and wrap her in it in an attempt to preserve her dignity, and soon an ambulance arrives.

Having set up Ling as a character, she never appears again. Instead, the two main characters are the young man and a woman who meet in the lift as it ascends their housing block: she lives on the floor above, and he returns the blanket, which is now inexplicably a dull blue.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Once Upon a Time
in China
(Wong Fei Hung,
黃飛鴻)

Director – Tsui Hark – 1991 – Hong Kong – Cert. 15 – 135m

****1/2

Groundbreaking, period martial arts epic features some of the most spectacular stunt sequences ever filmed, spawned five sequels and made Jet Li a star – online in the UK as part of Focus Hong Kong 2021 Easter from Wednesday, March 31st to Tuesday, April 6th

The real life Wong Fei Hung (1847-1925) was a Chinese practitioner of martial arts and medicine who lived in Foshan and has been the subject of over a hundred films. Tsui Hark’s 1991 production is one of the best known and spawned a series of six movies in total, four of them with Jet Li as Wong, arguably his most iconic role.

Militia-laden American and British and French ships anchored in the harbour put Foshan in an uneasy position and Wong is concerned, as well he might be since it turns out in the course of the narrative that the Americans under a man named Jackson (Jonathan Isgar) are not only tricking local men into debt via getting them to pay for their passage to San Francisco but also trafficking Chinese women into prostitution in the New World. The film isn’t particularly interested in these misdemeanours except as providing motivation for its villain.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

My Prince Edward
(Gam Dou,
金都)

Director – Norris Wong Yee-Lam – 2019 – Hong Kong – Cert. N/C 15+ – 91m

****1/2

A Prince Edward resident starts to question whether marrying her boyfriend as the couple have long planned is really such a good idea – online in the UK as part of Focus Hong Kong 2021 Easter from Wednesday, March 31st to Tuesday, April 6th

Whatever your nationality, one of the great thrills of world cinema is when a film informs you about all sorts of aspects of a culture other than your own. That’s the case here. To call this a romantic drama is misleading because what it’s actually about is a woman on a culturally approved trajectory starting to question whether it really is something for her or whether she’d be better off finding a different life journey entirely by another route. That approved trajectory is: girl meets boy, girl moves in with boy, girl marries boy.

Perhaps there’s a second trajectory here too, suggesting that Hong Kong is a sealed, navel-gazing world caught up with looking at itself and that perhaps Hong Kongers need to get out of their homeland more, be that to mainland China to which the heroine travels for reasons of her complicated personal situation and later visits of her own volition, or be it to America, described by the film’s mainland Chinese lead as a place of freedom.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

I Still Remember
(Er Ci
Ren Sheng,
二次人生)

Director – Lik Ho – 2021 – Hong Kong – Cert. N/C 15+ – 90m

***1/2

A young loser looks back on his life prior to running a 10K marathon to create an achievement of which he can be proud – online in the UK as part of Focus Hong Kong 2021 Easter from Wednesday, March 31st to Tuesday, April 6th

If you imagine that a movie with a title like I Still Remember would be chock full of flashbacks, you’d be dead right. Lee Chi Hang (Wu Tar Tung) fondly remembers his primary school teacher Wong Kwok Wai (Patrick Tam Yiu Man) who first encouraged him when he saw him cheering on his friend Yu Leung running the perimeter of a small playground and has continued to do so through most of his life.

Whatever he does today, though, Lee can’t seem to get it right. Working at the sales company run by the now grown up Yu (Johnny Hui), he consistently achieves the lowest scores in the weekly office tables. Lee fails for a long time to notice that co-worker and sometime fellow amateur runner Cheung Chi Ling (Sofee Ng Hoi Lam) is in love with him.

Her attempts to get him to run don’t work out either.… Read the rest