Tag: abuse

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Features Live Action Movies

Mother’s Kingdom
(Uhm-mah-ui
Wahng-gook,
엄마의 왕국)

Director – Lee Sang-hak – 2024 – South Korea – LKFF Cert. 15 – 97m

*****

A Christian mother, her ‘Christian book’ author son, and her local pastor brother-in-law are haunted by traumas from their collective past – suspense thriller from LKFF, the London Korean Film Festival 2024 which runs in cinemas from Friday, November 1st to Wednesday, November 13th

—

I don’t often preface a film review with a piece of verbal, religious text, but in this exceptional case, the following Old Testament quote may be pertinent, particularly the phrase in bold:

The Lord passed before him and proclaimed, “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation.”

– Exodus 34:6–7

—

Ji-wook (Han Ki-jang) lives with his mother Kyung-hee (Nam Kee-ae), and although he’s earning a respectable living working from home as a writer of self-help motivational books, in many ways he seems deeply unqualified to be peddling such advice to a wider public.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Small Things Like These

Director – Tim Mielants – 2024 – Ireland – Cert. 12a – 98m

*****

A coal delivery man is troubled by the recurring sight of a deeply traumatised young woman at one of his regular customers, a convent – out in UK cinemas on Friday, November 1st

Bill Furlong (Cillian Murphy) runs a company delivering coal to customers in and around Wexford, Ireland. It’s tough, backbreaking work, as is evident from the sight of his assistants loading up his truck, one bag of coal loaded onto the back by two men. He’s happy with his men, who do a good job. Doing his rounds as driver and delivery man (locked-off camera looking out from the driver’s cab) he carries one sack at a time himself. Finishing up delivering to the local convent, where he’s required to leave the coal bags behind the door in the designated coal house, he witnesses a scene where a young woman clearly doesn’t want to be in the care of the head sister.

He comes home. As is his wont, he furiously scrubs the coal black off his hands, producing a pool of blackened water in the bathroom sink. He talks about it to his wife at home.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Kneecap

Director – Rich Peppiat – 2023 – Ireland, UK – Cert. 18 – 105m

****

A fictionalised origin story about an Irish language rap band as a music teacher teams up with two younger men to turn their confrontational, anti-British poetry into Irish rap music – provocative sex-, drugs-, and violence-laced music biopic is out in UK cinemas on Friday, August 23rd

NSFW

Kneecap are an Irish-speaking rap band who came together on the eve of the 2017 Irish language march in Belfast, Northern Ireland. This drama about them, whatever else it might be and whatever other accusations can be levelled against it, certainly never plays it safe.

That’s obvious from the get-go, when the voice-over by one of the band members explains and shows how all movies abut Northern Ireland start – with footage of terrorist explosions during ‘the troubles’. The film then proceeds to have its cake and eat it, having started in exactly that manner, by starting again with the story of one of its members as a child being baptised in a wood at night and attracting RUC helicopter searchlights for their pains.

It moves pretty swiftly on to show the two fully grown lads in the band as party animals, consuming alcohol and drugs and dealing the latter, for instance giving it away free at early gigs to attract an audience, and engendering a hostile attitude to the Peelers (as they refer to the British police).… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Love Lies Bleeding
(2024)

Director – Rose Glass – 2024 – US – Cert. 15 – 104m

****

A small town member of staff at a gym falls hard for a bodybuilding drifter, both unaware that each has baggage which will cause the other considerable grief – out in UK cinemas on Friday, May 3rd

The 1980s. New Mexico. Night. Rising up from a crack in the Earth. Towards the stars. And looking out over the small town, over the Crater Gym. We follow a woman inside. (Who is she? We never find out.) Bodybuilders work out. As Lou (Kristen Stewart) works to unclog a lavatory blocked with something resembling small human body parts (!), she is hassled by Daisy (Anna Baryshnikov) who appears to have been sexually close to her at some time, and possibly still is now only Lou doesn’t care.

Elsewhere in the night, a couple are having sex in a car. He (Dave Franco) is definitely enjoying it; she (Katy O’Brian), it’s hard to tell. She wants to know if she’ll get that job now. He says he’ll sort it. He warns her to be careful where she sleeps; this is a dangerous town. She finds a place at the side of a bridge; in the morning, it’s hot and sunny, she gets up and does her exercises using the edge of the bridge for pull-ups.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

In Broad Daylight
(Bak Yat Ji Ha,
白日之下)

Director – Lawrence Kwan Chun Kan – 2023 – Hong Kong – Cert. 15 – 106m

***1/2

A woman uncovers a catalogue of abuse visited upon the residents of the Hong Kong care home in which her grandfather lives – out in UK cinemas on Friday, January 19th

This opens and closes to the strains of ‘We’ll Meet Again’ and images of Hong Kong buildings reaching towards the sky.

Ling Hu Kay (Jennifer Wu from The Shadows, Glenn Chan, 2020; Tracey, Li Jun, 2018) enters the Rainbow Bridge Care Home in search of her grandfather Chow Kin-Tong (David Chiang from Election, Johnnie To, 2005; The Adventurers, Ringo Lam, 1995; Once Upon a Time in China II, Tsui Hark, 1992; Yes, Madam!, Corey Yuen, 1985; Shaolin Temple, Chang Cheh, Wu Ma, 1976) who she hasn’t visited for a while as she’s been abroad in Canada. He doesn’t remember her. Chow’s roommate is the amiable Shui (Woo Fung). Shocked at finding a dead rat in their room, she finds the manager Cheung Kim-wah (a memorable Bowie Lam The Crossing, 2014; Hard Boiled, 1992, both John Woo) who informs her both that while they are always understaffed, the place is like a family where everyone pitches in.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Your Mother’s Son
(Anak Ka Ng Ina Mo)

Director – Jun Robles Lana – 2023 – Philippines – Cert. none – 100m

****

An intense cocktail of two uneasy, polyamorous relationships erupts into jealousy, betrayal and violence – sexually explicit political allegory of nepotism in Filipino politics plays in the spirit of the Critics’ Picks Competition at the 27th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival

A candidate’s electoral vans belts out loud-hailer exhortations to secure votes in an upcoming election, but no-one in the poor rural locality through which they pass pays any attention. Everyone is struggling to make ends meet. Middle-aged Sarah (Sue Prado) puts all her efforts into both running a laundry business, providing ad hoc employment for much younger Amy (Elora Españo) who lives nearby, and teaching students online. Sarah’s son Emman (Kokoy De Santos) has just lost his job at a restaurant because it closed down. He doesn’t seem to share her work ethic, and would rather lounge around in bed all day than actually have to do anything of an employed nature.

Or, at least, that’s how things appear outwardly.

When his mother finally prises Emman from his bed so that he can go out looking for work – which might include a contact she has who may, possibly, be able to help him – he instead hangs out at the house of Amy who, like his mother, has a strong work ethic, to have sex with her at every opportunity, and do drugs.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Master Gardener

Director – Paul Schrader – 2022 – US – Cert. 15 – 107m

****

Order and chaos. A man works bringing horticultural order to his employer’s garden estate, but the disorder of his past threatens to catch up with him and wreak havoc upon it

Or. A man engaged in sexual relations with his female employer becomes involved with her grandniece, to whom his employer may one day leave her inheritance

Or. A man orders his employer’s garden estate until she ejects him for sleeping with her grandniece, leaving the pair to survive in the tough world beyond – out in UK cinemas on Friday, May 26th

This appears to be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it concerns a man (the central character, the eponymous master gardener) imposing order, but he is a man coming from chaos and at some point that chaos may undo what he has achieved there. On the other, it concerns two women – one his monied, controlling, matriarchal employer, the other her grandniece, from the wrong side of the tracks, who the employer wants to learn the business. The man is initially the lover of the first and, later, becomes the lover of the second, for which the first fires him.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Women Talking

Director – Sarah Polley – 2022 – US – Cert. 15 – 104m

*****

Should we stay or should we go? Following an incident of mass sexual abuse in an isolated religious community, its women debate the question, stay and fight – or leave? – out in UK cinemas on Friday, February 10th

Here’s a film that defies the rule that, by rights, a bunch of people talking to one another in one location ought to make for tedious cinema. (Such outings usually work very well on the stage, a medium about a bunch of people talking in one location.) Yet Sarah Polley’s adaptation of the novel Women Talking proves electrifying. It’s based on a novel by Canadian author Miriam Toews which is in turn based on horrifying real life events (although the book is “an imagined response to real events”, rather than an attempt to actually conjure or describe those events).

Between 2005 and 2009, in an isolated Mennonite community in Bolivia, over a hundred girls and women were raped in their sleep. Their discoveries were initially dismissed by the community’s menfolk until it came to light that a small group of men had sprayed the interiors of the victims’ houses with animal anaesthetic to render them and their families unconscious.… Read the rest

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Animation Features Movies

Belle
(Ryu
To Sobakasu
No Hime,
竜とそばかすの姫)

Director – Mamoru Hosoda – 2021 – Japan – Cert. PG tbc – 121m

*****

A bereaved, teenage girl starts to emerge from her shell when she signs up for a virtual world on her smartphone – out on Blu-ray and DVD from Monday, June 27th and 4K UHD Blu-ray including the soundtrack from Thursday, July 7th

‘U’ is an internet, virtual world of high tech, futuristic architecture. When you sign up, you receive your own personalised avatar built from your biometrics. You have the chance to start over in a new world.

Teenager Suzu (voice: Kaho Nakamura) could do with that chance. She lives with her dad (voice: Koji Yakusho from Mirai, Mamoru Hosoda, 2018; The Third Murder, Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2017; Pulse, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2001; Shall We Dance, Masayuki Suo, 1996; Tampopo, Juzo Itami, 1985) in a small town somewhere in the East of Japan. She doesn’t really communicate with people at her school – not Luka (Tina Tamashiro), the sax player in the school band, not Kamishin (Shota Sometani from To The Ends Of The Earth, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2019; First Love, Takashi Miike, 2019; Foreboding, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2017; The Boy And The Beast, Mamoru Hosoda, 2015; Himizu, Sion Sono, 2011) who set up the canoe club but hasn’t been able to attract any members, not Shinobu (Ryo Narita) who proposed to her – well, told her he wanted to protect her – when she was six.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

The Card Counter

Director – Paul Schrader – 2021 – US – Cert. 15 – 112m

**1/2

Tormented by internal demons relating to his activities in Abu Ghraib, for which he’s served a prison sentence, a card player bides his time on the professional gambling circuit – out in cinemas on Friday, November 5th

I’m an enormous admirer of Paul Schrader as critic, screenwriter and director. I could go through the component parts of this film and extol the virtues of most of them. And yet, somehow, adding all these elements together the end result here is less than satisfying. I left the preview theatre in shock trying to understand what had gone wrong. Was it the film or was it me?

You could have guessed it was Schrader directing one of his own screenplays from the opening shots. In American Gigolo (1980), it’s various angles on the gigolo’s car. In First Reformed (2017) , it’s various angles on the pastor’s church building. Here, it’s various angles on the card counter’s cards spread out on the green beige surface of a playing table.

Self-styled William Tell (Oscar Isaac) is travelling round the US making money from card games having taught himself to read cards whilst in military prison (the USDB in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas – it’s namechecked but not explained in the film and I had to look it up).… Read the rest