Tag: bike

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Features Live Action Movies

Crime 101

Director – Bart Layton – 2025 – US, UK – Cert. 15 – 140m

*****

A high class lone operator thief and the rigorously analytical cop on his trail cross paths with a disillusioned insurance saleswoman to the wealthy – out in UK cinemas on Friday, February 13th

As coloured dots come into focus, they are revealed to be the lights of a Los Angeles freeway upside down, an image which bookends the movie. Davis (Chris Hemsworth) exercise in his sparse apartment before donning a suit. Detective “Lou” Lubesnik (Mark Ruffalo) shaves in his small, untidy bathroom. Sharon Coombs (Halle Berry), in her bathroom, goes through the laborious task of applying make-up.

This is essentially a four-hander – more of the fourth character later on.

Davis is a lone operator who thinks through his proposed robberies beforehand in such a way as to ensure that no-one gets hurt. LAPD investigator Lubesnik has become obsessed with a string of robberies he believes committed by the same person, to the detriment, as his colleagues and superiors see it, of his regular police work. Sharon works for a high end insurance company who have been stringing her along for years with hollow promises of board membership to use her now fading good looks to close sales to wealthy clients.… Read the rest

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Documentary Features Live Action Movies

The Road to Patagonia

Director – Matty Hannon – 2022 – Australia – Cert. 15 – 90m

****

A keen surfer and former ecology student from Australia sets out on a motorbike journey from Alaska down the West coast of the Americas to Patagonia – out on digital on Monday, July 28th

The family of Australian moving picture diarist Matty Hannon moved around a lot during his childhood. He left home as soon as he could, and studied ecology at university, where he became fascinated by the book Shamans of Mentawai about tribes living in Indonesia’s Sumatran Islands. A keen surfer, he went out to one of the islands, rode the incredible waves, embraced a simple lifestyle and felt he’d arrived in a utopia where people lived in harmony with nature, assigning spirit gods to rivers and mountains. He began to wonder if by concentrating on data in his studies, he’d been missing something. He stayed five years, from age 21-26.

On his return to Melbourne, he was hit by culture shock. Everything was commodified. He sat at a computer for work. He was now in a culture that referred to its people as consumers, where national success was measured in terms of how much they bought.… Read the rest

Categories
Documentary Features Live Action Movies

The Road to Patagonia

Directed by Matty Hannon
Certificate 15
90 minutes
Released 27 June

In his mid-20s, former ecology student and keen surfer Matty Hannon returns to Melbourne, Australia. For five years, from age 21 to 26, he has lived alongside one of Indonesia’s Sumatran Island tribes, a utopia where people live in harmony with nature, assigning spirit gods to rivers and mountains. And then there are the waves.

Melbourne hits him with culture shock; a culture that refers to its people as consumers, where national success is measured in terms of how much they buy. Depression is common. Hannon records his response in this documentary as he gets out, takes a tent to Alaska, then… on his motorbike… travels down the West Coast of the Americas to Patagonia… [read the rest in the Issue 4 – 2025 edition of Reform]

[Read my longer review for this site here.]

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Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Fountain of Youth
(2025)

Director – Guy Ritchie – 2025 – US – Cert. 12a – 126m

*

Two estranged, treasure-hunting siblings, with the help of a rich backer, pursue the trail towards the life-giving water source of legend, pursued by forces that want to prevent them from doing so – premieres globally on Apple TV+ from Friday, May 23rd

Films get made in a variety of different ways. According to the press handouts, this one came about initially through producer Tripp Vinson’s research into the legendary Fountain of Youth and the desire to have a globe-trotting hero searching for it. This idea was developed by screenwriter James Vanderbilt (Scream VI, Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Tyler Gillett, 2022; The Amazing Spider-man, Marc Webb, 2012; Zodiac, David Fincher, 2007) into where the hero was not one but two people, an estranged brother and sister. When director Ritchie later came on board, he brought to it the idea of the journey being more important than the destination. This is not, therefore, a director-led project. In the process of making movies, however, it is ultimately the director, once they are on board, who is responsible for the myriad decisions that are taken in putting the film on the screen.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Fishgirl
(Alucina)

Fishgirl - Critics' Picks Special Mention

Director – Javier Cutrona – 2024 – Ecuador – 105m

**

Enter the surreal world of a young woman beset by bizarre visions who believes herself followed and protected by a giant fish – premieres in the Critics’ Picks Competition of the 28th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival

Fairly early on, in a tender, conversational, post-coital scene, her boyfriend José (Lucas Ortiz) draws an additional face on the side of that of Camila (Jessica Barahona). Visually this suggests Cubism, in which a subject’s faces would be painted from different angles simultaneously, but the dialogue between the two swiftly moves on to the subject of a god with two faces possessing the ability to look into the past and the future. (This sounds like the Roman god Janus, but if anyone name-checked him here, I must have missed it.).

The motif is echoed later when her landlord Edmundo (Pablo Aguirre), who runs (owns?) the hotel where she rents a room, is attending to the doll’s house of their rooms and maquettes of all the hotel’s residents he has made. For the maquette of Camila, he grafts an extra face onto the side of hers so that she has two. And towards the end, a shot of Camila cinematographically superimposes a second face on her, a very neat visual trick.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Hani
(Hani)

Director – Hou Dasheng – 2024 – Canada – 73m

*

In a remote, Southern Chinese mountain village, a 14-year-old needs the money for the dowry to buy his 12-year-old sweetheart as a wife – premieres in the Critics’ Picks Competition of the 28th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival

Credited on the Festival’s website as a Canadian production in the Burmese and Chinese languages, this is a Chinese-made film not sanctioned by the Chinese authorities dealing with subject matter which the filmmakers fear would not be passed by the Chinese censor. The caption review suggests that a number of the film’s cast and crew have used pseudonyms to avoid prosecution. The narrative takes place in the mountainous, Southern region of China close to the border with Myanmar, where people are known by their Burmese names, but occasionally refer to other people by their Chinese names. You get the feeling that this area of China has been largely forgotten by the distant Beijing authorities.

The central characters are young teenagers or pre-teenagers, Hani (14; Gao Xiaokang) and his friend Apao (Qian Long), who seems to be frequently seeking advice from others on his mobile phone, and Hani’s longtime sweetheart Pushiha (12; Pu Juan).… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Black Dog
(Gou Zhen,
狗阵)

Director – Guan Hu – 2023 – China – Cert. 12a – 106m

***1/2

An ex-con returns to his home town, which is infested with wild dogs, and befriends a stray – out in UK and Ireland cinemas on Friday, August 30th

Looking down from the edge of a slope towards Gobi Desert scrubland. In the distance, a coach moving along a road. Suddenly, a large pack of wild dogs come out of nowhere and charge down the slope. The startled bus topples over. The dogs are gone, the driver is getting everyone out of the bus. A man complains that his money, his life savings, have gone. He needs that money. Who has taken it? They are about ten miles from Chixia. One of those on the bus is Lang’s son. The police are called, they arrive and help get the bus back upright. Lang Yonghui (Eddie Peng), as required, shows an officer his parole ID. Lang walks behind the slow moving bus as the police escort the coach to Chixia.

As an announcement warns of a black dog seen around the town that may well be carrying rabies, Lang is strip searched at the station while the other passengers wait to be interviewed.… Read the rest

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Animation Movies Shorts

Pachyderm
(Pachyderme)

Director – Stéphanie Clément – 2022 – France – 11m

*****

A nine-year-old struggles with the trauma that befalls her at her grandpa’s – nominated for Best Animated Short at the 2024 Academy Awards, VoD details below review

She’s nine (voice-over: Christa Theret), and in the Summer she goes to stay with granny and grandpa. She plays on a swing, missing mum and dad, she watches a cabbage white butterfly in the garden. The house is tidy, ordered, perhaps obsessively so. It smells of polish; the kitchen smells of bleach. Tomorrow, grandpa will take her to the lake, where he likes to fish. To get to her bedroom, she must pass the big, intimidating horn mounted at the top of the stairs, a hunting trophy from a pachyderm. In her room, she can see eyes watching her from the wood grain of the ceiling timbers. She doesn’t sleep by counting sheep; she kills monsters. As the floorboards creak outside her door, she hides in the wallpaper, in the flowers, in sleep. After all, as grandma says, what could happen?

Before the trip, she accidentally pricks a finger on one of grandpa’s fishing hooks – lures, as they call them – but grandpa kisses the cut better with the kiss that heals all things.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Crazy Thunder Road
(Kuruizaki
Sanda Rodo,
狂い咲きサンダーロード)

Director – Sogo Ishii – 1980 – Japan – Cert. 15 – 97m

*****

Following on from Arrow’s superb BD of Sogo Ishii’s Burst City (1982) comes Third Window’s equally impressive BD release of its predecessor in the Ishii canon Crazy Thunder Road (1980) – on Blu-ray from Monday, February 21st 2022 and, as of January 2024, available to stream on Amazon Prime UK

This was Ishii’s Nihon University student graduation project, his first to be shot on 16mm rather than Super 8, which somehow got picked up for distribution by major Japanese Studio Toei which led to their giving him a budget for Burst City. Tom Mes, who as with Burst City supplies a commentary for the film, describes Crazy Thunder Road as “one of the Holy Grails of Japanese film releases if not the Holy Grail.”

When Toei presented Ishii with what seemed like astronomical funding for Burst City, it led him to overreach himself. In retrospect, he considers Burst City unfinished… [Read the full review at All The Anime]

Crazy Thunder Road was out on Blu-ray in the UK on Monday, February 21st, 2022 and, as of January 2024, available to stream on Amazon Prime UK.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Mission: Impossible
Dead Reckoning
Part One

Director – Christopher McQuarrie – 2022 – US – Cert. 12a – 163m

*****

Tom Cruise’s seventh and director Christopher McQuarrie’s third Mission: Impossible outing delivers globetrotting action and one of the most incredible stunts ever committed to film – out in UK cinemas on Monday, July 10th

It seems almost fatuous to attempt to synopsise this latest Mission: Impossible effort because it basically boils down to various parties including Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his allies chasing after a key which most of them don’t know what it opens. I tell a lie, actually two halves of a key (this sounds a lot like the ancient artefact in this year’s Indiana Jones movie, which I’m sure is pure coincidence) each one of which can be used to verify that the other is the genuine article and not a fake. This MacGuffin, the thing all the characters want and which propels them through the story, in turn provides producer and star Tom Cruise, director Christopher McQuarrie and their collaborators with the excuse for a series of exhilarating, bravura set-pieces.

There’s also the visual pleasure of this franchise’s usual amount of people wearing photorealistic masks to disguise themselves as other people, and later ripping off (or having others rip off) their fake faces to reveal their real ones.… Read the rest