Category: Live Action

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Features Live Action Movies

Kung Fu Hustle
(Kung Fu,
功夫)

Director – Stephen Chow Sing Chi – 2004 – China – Cert. 15 – 99m

*****

Set in the 1940s, this is at once a comedy, a romance, an effects fest, an action movie, a violent gangster thriller and a treatise on Buddhist values – out in UK cinemas on Friday, June 24th, 2005

An hilarious treat from start to finish, Kung Fu Hustle foregrounds Hong Kong’s ability to bend genres. At once a comedy, a romance, an effects fest, an action movie, a violent gangster thriller and a treatise on Buddhist values, it also manages to throw in a hugely enjoyable, first reel dance sequence and a speeded up chase sequence reminiscent of Warner Bros. classic Roadrunner cartoon shorts (Chuck Jones, 1949-1962) and The Wizard Of Speed And Time (Mike Jittlov, 1988). Which summary doesn’t even begin to do it justice.

Columbia gave director/star Stephen Chow Sing Chi a mega-budget for Kung Fu Hustle but have commendably neither pruned nor dubbed as Miramax (Disney) did on his previous outing Shaolin Soccer (Stephen Chow, 2001). Chow’s extraordinary vision is thus allowed full rein in his native Cantonese tongue to side-splitting effect.

The 1940’s plot involves landlord, landlady and tenants of down and out Pig Sty Alley confronted by the fearsome Axe Gang after low life hustler and loose cannon Sing (Chow) turns up there and throws his weight around pretending to be a Gang member.… Read the rest

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Animation Features Live Action Movies

Terminator 2
Judgement Day

Director – James Cameron – 1991 – US – Cert. 15 – 127m

*****

A second Terminator is sent from the future to kill the future leader of the war against the machines – opening film in Film Tottenham’s upcoming programme celebrating female action heroes, plays Sunday, April 12th 2026, 6.30 for 7pm start

In the 1984 original, a Terminator robot (Arnold Schwarznegger) is sent back in time to kill Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), the mother-to-be of the leader of the war in the future against the machines, who are exterminating humanity.

This sequel sees a more advanced T-1000 robot (Robert Patrick) sent back in time to kill Sarah’s now-ten-year-old son John (Ed Furlong). Another Terminator (Schwarzengger) is also running around in the present (i.e. 1991).

Sarah’s recurring nightmare pictures the coming apocalypse when the machines unleash nuclear missiles on humanity. That aside, this is basically an essay on mothers and sons – and fathers and sons – wrapped up in the best chase movie you’ve ever seen.

What makes the film work is the mother and son element. Sarah is a believer in Terminators, the coming war against the machines, and humanity’s fightback in a world where such beliefs are dismissed as delusions.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Father Mother
Sister Brother

© Vague Notion 2024 Yorick Le Saux

Director – Jim Jarmusch – 2025 – US – Cert. 12a – 110m

*****

Three separate stories follow visits by three separate sets of adult siblings to, respectively, an elderly father, an elderly mother, and a deceased parents’ cleared home – out in UK cinemas on Friday, April 10th

This harks back to a couple of earlier Jarmusch movies which similarly consist of a small number of stories: Night on Earth (1991) with five cabbies on one night in different cities and Mystery Train (1989) with its three linked stories set during one night in Memphis. There’s no suggestion that the three stories in Father Mother Sister Brother – set in rural North America, Dublin and Paris – are taking place simultaneously, international time differences notwithstanding, but they could well be, because all three take place in similarly good weather conditions. The first is rural, with snow on the ground, while the latter two are urban.

All three of FMSB’s stories feature similarities which link them beyond the overall siblings / parent(s) theme. These are both expected – car journeys to the home of the parent or parents, time spent in their presence or absence – and unexpected – skateboarders seen from the can en route, a Rolex watch.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

The Stranger
(L’Étranger)
(2025)

Director – François Ozon – 2025 – France – Cert. 15 – 120m

*****

A Frenchman living in French Algiers with an attitude of detachment is arrested following a violent incident with an Arab – adaptation of Albert Camus’ existentialist novella is in UK and Ireland cinemas on Friday, April 10th

Albert Camus’ 1942 novella is a character study of a non-conformist to the widely held ideals of the day. Ozon’s film adaptation roughly follows its template, making some subtle changes which alter its overall stance and meaning. 

The following synopsis contains spoilers, but, to be honest, given that this is an adaption of a significant work of French literature, and that you’ll get just as much if not more out of it if you read the book beforehand, I’m not convinced that knowing the plot in advance is a bad thing.

The novella has a two-part structure. First, it follows the life of its main, French Algiers-based protagonist Meursault from his receiving news of his mother’s death and taking time off work to attend her funeral, through his embarking on a relationship with the besotted Maria, to his involvement with his friend the local pimp Raymond Sintès and Meursault’s fatal shooting of an Arab, who has been following Raymond with murderous intent after Raymond mistreated his sister.… Read the rest

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Undertone

Director – Ian Tuason – 2025 – Canada – Cert. 15 – 94m

**

The co-host of a paranormal podcast is disturbed by ten mysterious sound files even as her elderly mother is nearing death in her bedroom upstairs – out in UK and Ireland cinemas on Friday, April 10th

A two person paranormal podcast comprises Evy Babic (Nina Kiri) and Justin (voice: Adam DiMarco) in a good cop / bad cop routine. Adam’s good cop is always willing to believe – or at least hoping – that the incident or phenomena underlying the latest episode is real, however strange or unlikely it might be. Evy’s bad cop always assumes the phenomena are fake or a hoax, until or unless she has incontrovertible evidence that suggests otherwise.

We never see Justin since the movie focuses on Evy living in her house and Justin only appears (on the soundtrack) as her co-host when they go live on air or in conversation with her on the phone outside of that recording / broadcasting process. You might think that focusing on the subject of the paranormal would drive someone off the deep end, but for Evy, doing the podcast with Justin is the one thing that keeps her sane.… Read the rest

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Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Kim Novak’s Vertigo

Director – Alexandre O. Philippe – 2025 – UK – Cert. uncertificated – 76m

*****

An essential addition to the canon of work surrounding and helping audiences to understand the power of one of the cinema’s greatest works– out in UK cinemas on Friday, April 3rd

The opening black and white scene features actress Kim Novak, probably shot in the 1950s, as if through a peephole. This recalls Norman and his peephole in Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960). Novak here seems to know she is being watched, looks directly at the camera, then rolls her head so her eyes go into the darkness of shadow. Then, colour footage of present day, images that could be out of Spellbound (Hitchcock, 1945): a gate opening, a passage along a country roadway, a wooden memorial to someone. All this accompanied by the voice of Kim Novak, now in her twilight years, talking about her life on the soundtrack – her present difficulty in getting breath, how awful it must be to gasp for breath prior to dying.

All this has a Hitchcock connection. Novak is familiar to us from her twin roles in Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958), the favourite film of director Philippe (and also, as it happens, of this critic) who specialises in documentaries about movies and made the definitive documentary about Psycho’s shower scene 78/52 (2017).… Read the rest

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Animation Documentary Features Live Action Movies

D is for Distance

Director – Chris Petit, Emma Mathews – 2025 – Finland – Cert. 12A – 88m

****

A diary film about a boy with epilepsy, his interior world, and parenting – out in UK cinemas on Friday, April 3rd

Opening and closing, more or less, with one of the quieter themes from Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone, composer: Ennio Morricone, 1968), and images first of a boy / young man clambering over coastal rocks and finally of the same young man and his father looking out from atop rock formations near “the top of the world”, this fits into the personal diary school of documentary filmmaking.

The two co-directors are life partners Chris Petit (Radio On, 1979) and Emma Matthews; the subject their son Louis, who started having epileptic fits around age 12. Following various NHS misdiagnoses, the family moved to the Netherlands where they could legally get hold of medical cannabis which, it turned out, cured Louis as long as he kept taking it. 

In former times, notes the unseen narrator (Jodhi May from Dune: Prophecy, TV series, 2024; The Last of the Mohicans, Michael Mann, 1992, A World Apart, Chris Menges, 1988), people with this condition would be taken as demon-possessed and burned at the stake, or (under the Nazis) forcibly exterminated.… Read the rest

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Animation Features Live Action Movies

The Last Blossom
(Housenka,
ホウセンカ)

Director – Baku Kinoshita – 2025 – Japan – Cert. 15 – 90m

*****

A man lives with his wife and child… only they are not really his wife and child – out in UK cinemas on Friday, March 27th

Here’s a movie that breaks all the moulds. I could (and will) tell you several things about it, any of which would (and will) immediately spark preconceptions about what it is. And those preconceptions would (and will) be wrong.

If we start off with it as a drama about family life, which it arguably is, that doesn’t quite give you the full idea. This is a pretty strange family: it’s effectively a single parent mum Nana (voice: Hikari Mitsushima) and her baby son Kensuke who have been taken in by the kindly Minoru Akutsu (voice: Junki Tozuka) who wants to help them. Akutsu is in love with Nana, but he’s the quiet type and can’t bring himself to verbally express his love for her. (Which, I guess, makes this into a romantic drama of sorts. Certainly a tale of unrequited love, albeit an odd one.) And over the years, as the boy grows, the man comes to think of the boy as his own son.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Two Prosecutors
(Zwei Staatsanwälte)

Director – Sergei Loznitsa – 2025 – France, Germany, Romania, Latvia, Netherlands, Lithuania – Cert. 12A – 118m

****1/2

Stalinist Russia, 1937. A young, idealistic prosecutor takes up the case of an unjustly imprisoned, political prisoner – out in UK cinemas on Friday, March 27th

A prison yard. Impassive guards. Inmates on scaffolding work at plastering the exterior wall. A man from a new prisoner detail is given a sack of letters and locked in a cell with a stove. He must burn the letters.

Given two matches, he reads some of the letters before incineration. One is written in blood from an inmate named Stepniak requesting a visit from a prosecutor. 

The young, fresh faced prosecutor Kornev (Alexander Kuznetsov) arrives at the prison to see the governor. He is seen instead to the duty assistant (Andria Keiss). 

The prosecutor is received, but the interviewing duty assistant lives in a different world. The prison staff live in a world where the apple cart is never to be upset and an easy life is paramount. They laugh uproariously at the current joke doing the rounds about a political celebrity being imprisoned both before and after the Revolution. 

They do their jobs efficiently, but woe beside interfering busybodies.… Read the rest

Categories
Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Orwell: 2+2=5

Director – Raoul Peck – 2025 – UK – Cert. 15 – 119m

****1/2

A primer on the life and work of George Orwell, particularly Nineteen Eighty-Four, and its relevance to today’s post-truth world – out in UK cinemas on Friday, March 27th

This belongs to the school of documentary which creates a film out of assembling fragments of movies, found footage, archive clips and images, moving or still. The list of feature films and other source material used in this instance is astonishing, with the director given full access to the Orwell Estate. Peck also makes use of clips from various movie adaptations of Nineteen Eighty-Four (Paul Nickell, 1953; Rudolph Cartier, 1954; Michael Anderson, 1956, Michael Radford, 1984) plus Brazil (Terry Gilliam, 1985), a film so heavily inspired by Orwell’s book that it was originally entitled 1984½, and Animal Farm (John Halas, Joy Batchelor, cartoon animated feature, 1954; John Stephenson, Jim Henson Creature Shop, 1999; illustrations by Ralph Steadman, 1995). On top of this, he uses BBC Drama The Crystal Spirit: Orwell on Jura (John Glenister, script: Alan Plater, 1983) and Orwell’s essay Why I Write (1946).

These last two are particularly pertinent, given that Peck has chosen to focus on the final year (1949-50) of Orwell’s life during which he took himself off to the Island of Jura, Scotland to finish writing Nineteen Eighty-Four and was subsequently admitted to University College Hospital, London with Tuberculosis.… Read the rest