Category: Live Action

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Animation Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Coup 53

Director – Taghi Amirani – 2019 – UK – Cert. 15 – 120m

*****

The officially unacknowledged British role in the 1953 coup overthrowing the Iranian government – more timely than ever, and now back out in UK cinemas from Friday, May 5th 2026; more dates added daily at https://coup53.com/
Originally in UK cinemas from Friday, August 21st 2020

A documentary begun in 2009 interviewing many people who died before the film’s completion some ten years later, this covers the 1953 coup in Iran backed by President Eisenhower in the US and Prime Minister Churchill in the UK which replaced Iran’s democratically elected, left-wing Prime Minister Mossadegh with the Shah. The UK has never officially acknowledged its role in this coup.

Amirani’s researches lead him to a basement of documents held by Mossadech’s grandson in Paris comprising archive material from the Granada TV 1985 End Of Empire documentary series, for which he gets access to the rushes from the BFI. Iran was included because it had been controlled by British interests for so long (because of its oil reserves). Amirani’s editor, helping pull all this together, is the legendary Walter Murch (Gimme Shelter / 1970, The Conversation / 1974, Apocalypse Now / 1979, The English Patient / 1996).… Read the rest

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Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Ada
My Mother the Architect

Director – Yael Melamede – 2024 – US – Cert. 12a – 81m

***1/2

A portrait by her New York-based daughter of top Israeli architect Ada Karmi Melamede – out in UK cinemas on Friday, May 1st

This opens with the filmmaker daughter asking her architect mother if she wants to speak English or Hebrew. The mother is happy to speak both. For the titles, we watch her hands drawing / designing buildings on white paper as we hear various one-liners about her qualities as an architect.

Daughter Yael lists “ a few things you should know about my mother.” Ada Karmi Melamede is eighty and goes to the office every day. She is one of a family of architects who built Israel from the ground up. She left Israel twice, once to study in London and once to spend time in New York, where Yael and her family grew up. She returned to Tel Aviv in 1983 and her career took off: she has been working ever since. The Israel Supreme Court. Airports. Universities.

Architecture seems to be her model for discussing the world. She talks about the importance of roots in buildings, decrying glass towers that have no roots, of which she clearly thinks there are too many.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Wild Foxes
(La Danse des Renards)

Director – Valéry Carnoy – 2026 – Belgium, France – Cert. 15 – 91m

***1/2

A promising young school boxer’s mindset changes following an accident which damages his arm – out in UK cinemas on Friday, May 1st

This starts off with the camera darting nimbly around a boxing ring in a gym in which two teenage fighters (one in red, one in blue) spar while their compatriots and trainer spur them on from the sidelines. Camille (Samuel Kircher), in blue, is the winner. Afterwards, five of them lark around in the changing rooms, filmed on a smartphone. (The French title, with its reference to dancing, seems particularly apt here.)

A coach journey. Camille rehearses his fighting moves in a mirror and hangs up the medal round his neck. And on a football field with a team mate. And back in the gym. Which routine is interrupted when his trainer Bogdan (Jean-Baptiste Durand) summons him for a talk with the director. The dates have come through for the Brussels competition in June, but rather than train alongside his professional team mates, Cam wants to stay at the gym and practice with his friend Matteo (Faycal Anaflous) – who has been warned by the gym, one more screw up and you’re out.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

I’ve Seen All I Need To See

Director – Zeshaan Younus – 2025 – US – Cert. 15 – 84m

*

A woman mourns her sister, dead in circumstances which remain far from clear – impenetrable drama is out in UK cinemas on Friday, May 1st

NSFW

Parker (Renee Gagner from Gazer, Ryan J. Sloan, 2024) sits on a chair and delivers a monologue. Apparently she’s doing an audition for an acting part. Either way, she rambles on about being finger-fucked in a car by a man who would later be turned to red mist as he served abroad with the military. The sequence, which consists of one unbroken, locked-off camera shot, is unlikely to engage you on any level. And it’s typical of everything else about this lacklustre effort.

In the middle comes a sequence in which car headlights appear in a night of pouring rain, and a series of characters gather outside a warehouse. One of them pulls out a gun. Shots are heard to be fired, by which time the picture has cut to a sunset landscape so you could be looking at the end of this mysterious meeting that looks like it isn’t going to go well, or it might be unrelated. It’s hard to tell.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Exit 8
(Hachiban Deguchi,
8番出口)

Director – Genki Kawamura – 2025 – Japan – Cert. 15 – 95m

*****

A commuter tries to leave the Tokyo Underground but finds himself retracing his steps within a repeating system from which there is no exit – out in UK and Ireland cinemas on Friday, April 24th

A packed carriage on the Tokyo Underground. A commuter (Kazunari Ninomiya from Letters from Iwo Jima, Clint Eastwood, 2006), heading to his first day at a new job, can’t help but notice a young mother whose baby is crying. This is not a situation anyone likes to find themselves in, least of all the young mother. One male passenger takes it upon himself to berate and belittle the woman for selfishly allowing her child to make a noise in such a crowded, public space, inconveniencing everyone present. On one level, is he simply voicing what everyone else in the carriage is thinking? On another, is he completely out of order? After all, the mother is not the child making the noise, and she is doing her best to calm it. The irate passenger is clearly not helping the situation.

Perhaps someone should intervene and tell the man to leave the woman alone.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Primavera
(Primavera)

Director – Damiano Michieletto – 2025 – Italy, France – Cert. 15 – 110m

*****

A young Venetian orphan comes into her own learning to play the violin under her orphanage’s new Master of Music, Antonio Vivaldi – period drama is out in UK and Ireland cinemas on Friday, April 24th

A group of girls, all wearing similar dresses, fawn over a cat’s newly birthed litter of kittens. That doesn’t last long, as an older woman unceremoniously picks up the kittens one by one, stuffs them into a sack, goes to the huge wooden door of the courtyard, opens it, and throws the sack into the canal. In seconds we have gone from unbearably cute to unspeakably cruel.

The older woman is the Prioress (Fabrizia Sacchi) who presides over an orphanage in eighteenth century Venice. Baby girls are abandoned outside their doors, accompanied by half a memento – should the woman later wish to reclaim her daughter, she need only turn up at the orphanage bearing the matching half. The orphanage’s archive lists the details of every girl, complete with half memento. Many of the mementos are religious, such as an image of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

The orphanage is renowned for its orchestra.… Read the rest

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Documentary Features Live Action Movies

London’s Last Wilderness

Director – Pablo Behrens – 2026 – UK – Cert. 12a – 61m

*****

London’s Thames Estuary filmed and edited from the point of view of an alien – out in UK cinemas on Friday, April 24th

A genre bender of a documentary, this owes a great deal to Petropolis (Peter Mettler, 2009) which comprises aerial cinematography of the environmental wreck of Canada’s Alberta Tar sands. The subject of London’s Last Wilderness, however, is not an ecological catastrophe, however much its narration by intertitle might (mis)interpret it as the aftermath of a war zone. It is rather the estuary of the Thames, the river that further inland flows through London, which city puts in a brief appearance towards the end. Indeed, insofar as this has a narrative spine, it is of a journey from the largely uninhabited estuary inland to the metropolis itself.

Where Petropolis was shot largely from a helicopter by a cameraman, the results recalling nothing so much as the aerial footage that opens The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980) and closes (because they bought the rights to it) Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982), aerial photography has moved on considerably in the last fifteen of so years with the evolution of drones, today a major part of the filmmaker / cinematographer’s arsenal.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Rose of Nevada

Director – Mark Jenkin – 2025 – UK – Cert. 12a – 114m

****1/2

A fisherman joins the crew of a mysteriously reappeared fishing vessel and finds himself inexplicably trapped 30 years in the past when it originally disappeared – out in UK cinemas on Friday, April 24th

30 years ago, the Rose of Nevada, a small fishing vessel, set sail from a small, Cornish coastal village and never returned. Now, suddenly, it reappears in the harbour with its captain looking for crew. Nick (George Mackay) and Liam (Callum Turner), but on their return after their first fishing trip, they arrive back not in the present but 30 years ago.

Apart from this peculiar slippage of time, everyone behaves as if nothing unusual is going on. Nick misses his partner and child. Liam finds himself with a new partner and child, and plays along, taking advantage of what circumstances have offered to him, which doesn’t seem so bad. 

Nick, however, feels increasingly isolated and uneasy in this situation.

Jenkin’s film plays out as a strange, enigmatic mystery.

Working as is his wont as director, cameraman and editor, not to mention sound designer and musician, Jenkin takes real pleasure in building up his story from a series of tiny details, necessitated to some extent by his use of a clockwork Bolex camera which can’t shoot a take longer than 27 seconds.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Blades of the Guardians
Wind Rises in the Desert
(Biao Ren
Feng Qi Da Mo,
镖人
风起大漠)

Director – Yuen Woo-Ping – 2026 – China – Cert. 15 – 126m

*****

In ancient China, a bounty hunter with his small nephew in tow must transport a man across a desert to Chang’an – out in UK and Ireland cinemas on Friday, April 17th

The synopsis opening this review might make it sound like a bad film. It’s not. Humour me.

China’s Sui Dynasty (581 to 618 AD). Bounty hunter Dau Ma (Wu Jing from Ride On, Larry Yang, 2023; The Battle at Lake Changjin, Chen Kaige, Dante Lam, Tsui Hark, 2021; The Wandering Earth, Frant Gwo, 2019; Wolf Warrior, Wu Jing, 2015) travels with his small nephew Xiao Qi (Qianlang Ju) in tow. At an incident at a village inn he demonstrates his considerable fighting skill against a mark and his thugs to force the man to pay Dau Ma triple the price on his head to leave him alone.

Dau Ma is summoned before the town’s Governor Chang (Jet Li from Hero, Zhang Yimou, 2002; Black Mask, Daniel Lee, 1996); Once Upon a Time in China, Tsui Hark, 1991), who wants him to sign on to train Chang’s cavalry – an offer Dau refuses because as an ex-cavalry officer he has long since decided he is better off outside than inside the military system.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

The Wizard of the Kremlin
(Le Mage du Kremlin)

Director – Olivier Assayas – 2025 – France – Cert. 15 – 137m

*****

Starting in 1990s Russia, an avant-garde theatre director morphs into first a TV producer then the mastermind behind the rise and rule of Vladimir Putin – out in UK cinemas on Friday, April 17th

2019. Roland (Jeffrey Wright) writing a book on a prominent Russian novelist and on a research trip to Moscow when he receives a message from someone who has materials that will interest him. So he accepts the invitation and is driven to a private house on the woodlands outskirts of that city where he is shown first editions and documentation pertaining to the writer.

All this, however, is a pretext to the main event. His host, Vadim Baranov (Paul Dano), starts to tell Roland his life story from his student days onwards. Which sets the scene for what is to follow: a portrait of a close-up portrait of a shadowy figure who was to become Vladimir Putin’s arch-manipulator and right-hand man.

Dismissive of Gorbachov, he takes us back to the early 1990s when the Soviet Union was collapsing and Boris Yeltsin was in the presidential ascendant. A time of gunfire and violence, when men of increasing wealth and power could be killed at any time, a fact illustrated by an SUV exploding mid-convoy along a Muscovite spaghetti junction.… Read the rest