Category: Live Action

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Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Next Goal Wins
(2014)

Directors – Mike Brett, Steve Jamison – 2014 – UK – Cert. 15 – 97m

*****

DVD review for Third Way, 2014.

In 2001, American Samoa suffered the worst ever defeat for a soccer team in a World Cup qualifier when they lost to Australia by a staggering 31 goals to nil. Ten years later, FIFA still ranked the side at the bottom of its league table. Where most football teams dream of winning, American Samoa dreamed of not conceding a goal. Sensing herein the seed of a subject for a documentary film, Brit filmmakers Mike Brett & Steve Jamison headed for the tiny, English-speaking, Pacific island and spent months there hanging out with and filming the team in the training run up to the 2014 World Cup. What they captured on camera and edited into a feature film is both remarkable and compelling, whether or not you’re interested in football.

Rather than the expected group of losers, they find the team are steeped in the culture of American Samoa which is all about community, family and (Christian) religion, a very different cultural underpinning to Brett and Jamison’s. Western capitalism – and football within it – is all about competing, pushing yourself and your team as far as you / they can go and, ultimately, winning.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

The Red Shoes

Producers-Writers-Directors – The Archers (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger) – 1948 – UK – Cert. PG – 135m

*****

A young dancer gives her all to the art of ballet, symbolised by the story’s centrepiece of the Ballet of the Red Shoes, in which the heroine is danced to death by the eponymous footwear – out in UK cinemas on Friday, December 8th; major season Cinema Unbound: The Creative Worlds Of Powell + Pressburger continues at BFI Southbank and on BFI Player until the end of December with a free exhibition The Red Shoes: Beyond The Mirror (booking essential) running until Sunday, January 7th 2024

The second movie by the Archers not to deal with wartime issues in any way, shape or form (the first being Black Narcissus, 1947) deals with art in the story of a young dancer torn between love and her chosen art form. Student Julian Craster (Marius Goring) is outraged to discover, during its debut performance, that his music tutor Professor Palmer (Austin Trevor) has lifted several passages of Craster’s college work to pass them off as part of his latest dance score Heart of Fire. His subsequent interview with ballet company head and creative genius Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook, who appeared in four Productions of the Archers and later in The Queen Of Spades, Thorold Dickinson, 1949) secures him a lowly job as music arranger for the prestigious Ballet Lermontov.… Read the rest

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Animation Features Live Action Movies

The Peasants
(Chłopi)

Directors – DK Welchman, Hugo Welchman – 2023 – Poland, Serbia, Lithuania – Cert. 15 – 114m

****1/2

A rural drama of romance, adultery and inheritance is expressed through the remarkable, foot-in-two-camps medium of live action filmmaking turned into animated painting – out in UK cinemas on Friday, December 8th

A small rural village in the early 20th Century. Young woman Jagna Paczesiówna (Kamila Urzędowska) is in love with Antek Boryna (Robert Gulaczyk). Unfortunately, not only is Antek already married to Hanka (Sonia Mietielica), who is fed up with his philandering, but also the latter’s father Maciej (Mirosław Baka), who is the richest person in the village, is widowed and wants Jagda to marry him – against her will but in line with that of her parents, who know a good thing when they see it. Alas, after the marriage, she carries on with Antek and things slowly go from bad to worse.

It’s gripping if harrowing stuff and would probably work well enough in live action, although it might not look that dissimilar to many other period costume dramas. It can occasionally be hard to keep track of who’s who, which I suspect is down to the script, an adaptation of a 1906 novel originally written as four volumes covering one year through the seasons Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer, a trajectory also followed by the screenplay.… Read the rest

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Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Anselm
(Anselm
– Das Rauschen
Der Zeit)

Director – Wim Wenders – 2023 – Germany – Cert. PG – 93m

****

An exploration of the work of German artist Anselm Kiefer and the influences which lie behind it – 3D documentary plays the 2023 London Film Festival which runs from Wednesday, October 4th until Sunday, October 15th, and will be out in UK cinemas on Friday, December 8th

Wim Wenders seems to step effortlessly between narrative and documentary feature films, and you never feel that he considers one or the other more important. To him, they are all movies. As with his earlier Pina (2011), similarly about an artist – the choreographer Pina Bausch – this is another portrait of an artist shot in 3D. Wenders’ subject here, again eponymously designated by Christian name, is Anselm Kiefer, a practitioner of the plastic rather than the performing arts.

From the outset, it’s clear that the film needs to be seen in 3D. Wenders’ camera moves deliberately and formally around maquettes that resemble life-sized women wearing dresses, but without the women in them so that they stand as empty objects, often with strange constructions in the space where you would expect their neck and heads to be. The forest setting in which Wenders films them seems almost as significant as the maquettes themselves as we slowly pass by an upright tree trunk between the sculpture and us.… Read the rest

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Animation Features Live Action Movies

Wonka

Director – Paul King – 2023 – US – Cert. PG – 112m

Movie ****

Hugh Grant as an Oompa Loompa when he eventually appears*****

How the youthful Willy Wonka became the world’s most celebrated maker of chocolate – musical based on one of Roald Dahl’s best-known characters is out in UK cinemas on Friday, December 8th

Willy Wonka is familiar to generations of children through both the book in which he first appeared, Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964) and its two film adaptations Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (Mel Stuart, 1971) and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Tim Burton, 2005). Rather than remake the novel a third time, Warner Bros. have taken the bold step of creating a Willy Wonka origin story. Who was Wonka before he became the innovative and eccentric chocolate factory owner that book and movie audiences know and love? It’s a great idea for a film.

Paul King, who previously breathed cinematic life into another well-known figure from British children’s literature in his two Paddington movies (2017 and 2014), has, together with Paddington 2 co-screenwriter Simon Farnaby, come up with an original story which feels like a Dahl adaptation – although it isn’t.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Eileen

Director – William Oldroyd – 2023 – US – Cert. 15 – 97 m

***** Most of the film

* The last five minutes

NSFW

In the 1960s, the life of a young woman working in a Boston boys’ correctional facility is turned on its head by the arrival of a radical, young woman prison psychologist from New York – out in UK cinemas on Friday, December 1st.

I don’t usually start with the ending of the film – and I’m not about to deliver a spoiler – but the ending of Oldroyd’s otherwise enthralling drama (if that’s the right term – I’m not sure it is) takes everything that has gone before which appeared to be building up to something and unceremoniously dumps it, as if there were another twenty minutes that had been written but not shot and an unsatisfactory ending had been tacked on.

There’s always that feeling with a truly extraordinary movie when you watch it for the first time that you don’t want the filmmakers to screw up and let go of whatever it is that’s working. Well, this one is extraordinary right up to the last five minutes, when it completely loses it. Prior to that, it starts out as one thing, turns into something else then swerves and moves about all over the place, taking the viewer with it on a strange, unpredictable journey.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

There’s Something
in the Barn

Director – Magnus Martens – 2023 – Norway – Cert. 15 – 100m

*

An American family immigrates to Norway where a relative has died and left them a farmhouse with a barn… and there’s something in the barn – badly misjudged horror comedy is out in UK cinemas and on digital download from Friday, December 1st

I have watched this film so that you don’t have to.

Incidentally, it has some of the best film stills I’ve ever seen. They are truly great. Don’t let that fool you: it’s a rotten movie.

One year after the unpleasant death of their Norwegian relative, the Californian nuclear family of dad, step-mum, son and daughter arrive at his farmhouse and barn in Norway which they’ve inherited. The unpleasant death is intriguing and workable if unoriginal horror fare; there is indeed something in the barn, and it’s not happy. So not happy, that it kills the relative.

But once the Californian family appear, the film undergoes a huge shift of tone from straight horror to pretty embarrassing comedy. Or, more accurately, alleged comedy because the laughs (or laugh – I think I may have laughed once) are (is) few and far between. Dad Bill (Martin Starr) is a happy-go-lucky, irritating, nerdy caricature; his new wife – and therefore step-mum to his kids – Carol (Amrita Acharia) is an equally annoying, former self-help guru.… Read the rest

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Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Another Body

Directors – Sophie Compton, Reuben Hamlyn – 2023 – UK, US – Cert. 18 – 80m

***

A young woman discovers her face has been added by deepfake technology into porn videos, and attempts to find out the perpetrator – documentary is out in UK cinemas on Friday, November 24th

The opening five minutes show a normal, well-adjusted, young woman. Taylor Klein comes from a family of engineers, with a mother who is the hardest working person she knows, an attribute that always encouraged Taylor to work hard to become a success. So she went to a college called C-net to study engineering. She was one of two female students out of a group of around fifty. And that was fine. Or so it seemed at the time.

Some time after successfully completing her course, a friend sent her a social media message. Her first reaction has that he had been hacked – but no, he assured her, it was definitely him. And she needed to look at the link he had sent her. When she did so, her world collapsed. Because she found herself watching porn videos on PornHub starring herself. Seven in total, and one more on another site called xHamster.… Read the rest

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Animation Documentary Features Live Action Movies Shorts

The Picks that spoiled our film critic!

Tallinn viewed from the Nordic Hotel Forum.

Jeremy Clarke returns to the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival in order to cover the Critics’ Picks section (which is now on its second year); he encounters what’s probably the strongest section of the event

Some people have a fear of flying. I don’t, but dislike of all the bureaucratic paraphernalia that surrounds airports. Not to mention London’s transport system, which is good most of the time, but not so much when it goes wrong. Coming home from the Festival last year, I got caught up in a tube strike. That didn’t happen this year. Indeed, the travel to and from the airport worked better for a number of reasons.

One was that the Festival’s hospitality team were kind enough to book my flights to and from Heathrow. This meant I could use the Elizabeth Line to travel to and from the airport. I currently live on the Victoria Line, which connects directly with three major rail terminals (Kings Cross, Euston, Victoria) but not the Elizabeth Line. The Elizabeth was all a bit too new last year, but Londoners who frequently travel into the centre of town as I do have got rather more used to it, and the Oxford Circus (Victoria Line) to Bond Street (Central Line) to Heathrow (Elizabeth Line) is reasonably easy to navigate.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Mrs.

Director – Arati Kadev – 2023 – India – Cert. none – 111m

****

After getting married, a woman is expected to work cheerfully from dawn to dusk, waiting on the menfolk of the house hand and foot – premieres in the Critics’ Picks Competition at the 27th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival

This is the Hindi remake of Malaysian film The Great Indian Kitchen (Jeo Baby, 2021).

It starts off cheerfully enough with a big song and dance routine with lots of percussion instruments in which the heroine Richa (Sanya Malhotra), who we later learn is a keen amateur choreographer, shows off various Bollywood dance moves in sync with her fellow dancers. You wouldn’t know it from the cleverly constructed trailer, but there are surprisingly few song and dance routines overall for a Bollywood production – the only two complete numbers take place right at the start and right at the end, with the film’s running length at just under two hours a lot shorter than your average, three hour, Bollywood epic which tends to interrupt the action for a song every five minutes. In that sense, the whole thing feels surprisingly Western.

In another sense, the first hour or so doesn’t feel Western at all.… Read the rest