Tag: co-operate

Bad Apples

Bad Apples

Director – Jonatan Etzler – 2025 – US, UK – Cert. 15 – 100m

***

A teacher deals with a disruptive student by kidnapping him and locking him in her basement – out in UK cinemas on Friday, September 18th

A school trip to an apple processing factory goes badly wrong when a trainer shoe appears among the apples on the system of conveyor belts. While the other children tour the factory premises in a comparatively orderly manner under their teacher Miss Spencer (Saoirse Ronan), loner Danny (Eddie Waller) stands at the railing with one trainer missing.

The setting is Somerset. Not that you’d know. A whole potential Somerset metaphor about apples and bad apples and brewing sits in waiting, but that either never occurred to screenwriter Jess O’Kane when adapting the film from the Swedish source, the novel by De Oönskade / The Undesirables by Rasmus Lindgren (2020), or it got abandoned in an early draft. Or perhaps the director Etzler threw it out during shooting. A pity either way, because that idea has real potential.

Back at school, Miss Spencer is hauled over the coals by her superior Sylvia (Rakie Ayola).

At home, Maria Spencer plays video games – her refuge from her job.… Read the rest

Features Live Action Movies

Relay

Director – David Mackenzie – 2024 – US – Cert. 15 – 112m

*****

A corporate whistleblower who has changed her mind hires a fixer to give her the leverage she needs to safely vanish and start a new life, only it doesn’t work out like that – out in UK cinemas on Friday, October 31st

Sometimes companies do bad things, and when you think they couldn’t do any worse, they set out to coerce or intimidate former employees attempting to expose them. How widespread this is in real life is anyone’s guess, but it makes for great copy and feeds into paranoid left wing ideas about the immorality of corporate capitalism. Don’t get me wrong: just because you’re paranoid, as the saying goes, it doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.

To illustrate the point, this narrative opens with Hoffman (Matthew Mayer from Bringing Out The Dead, Martin Scorsese, 1999; Dogma, Kevin Smith, 1999, reissued in cinemas next week (Friday, November 7th); and Funny Pages, Owen Kline, 2022) entering a near empty New York restaurant to surrender a set of incriminating documents to McVie (Victor Garber from Family Law, TV series 2021-2025; Argo, Ben Affleck, 2012; Alias, TV series, 2001-6), safe in the knowledge that another copy of said documents will be mailed to an appropriate recipient should McVie not co-operate and ensure Hoffman’s safety.… Read the rest

Features Live Action Movies

Shayda

Director – Noora Niasari – 2023 – Australia – Cert. 15 – 117m

*****

An Iranian mother and her young daughter, holed up in a women’s refuge in Australia, live in fear of the girl’s estranged father who wants to take them both back to Iran – out in UK cinemas on Friday, August 2nd

A woman is with a mum and her little girl in a shopping mall. The woman tells the little girl to remember the counters, because if daddy brings her here, she must find them and tell the security man nearby who she is. The girl’s mother reminds her that daddy said he’d take her on a plane. The woman tells the mother, she’s done the right thing.

Shayda (Zar Amir Ebrahimi from Holy Spider, Ali Abassi, 2022) and her young daughter Mona (Selina Zahednia) are separated from Shayda’s husband. The other woman is Joyce (Leah Purcell), who runs a woman’s refuge house catering for residents from a variety of ethnic groups. Shayda and Mona, for example, are Iranian. Shayda’s photo album tells the story of her life. In the mid-1980s, she graduated and got married in Iran; in the early 1990s, the couple moved to Brisbane, Australia.… Read the rest

Features Live Action Movies

Shayda

Muslim limbo

Shayda
Directed by Noora Niasari
Certificate 15, 117 minutes
Released 19 July

An Iranian woman, Shayda (Zar Amir Ebrahimi from Holy Spider, Ali Abassi, 2022), is staying with her young daughter Mona (Selina Zahednia) in a woman’s refuge house in Brisbane run by Joyce (Leah Purcell). Shayda’s husband Hossain (Osamah Sami) came to Australia with her before they separated and has been granted visiting rights for Mona. Even though Hossain talks of taking Mona on a plane back to Iran, if Shayda wants full custody, Joyce recommends she allows Hossain the allotted time alone with his daughter in the local shopping mall.

Outside of these handovers, Shayda rarely leaves the women’s refuge… [Read the full review at Reform]

Read my longer review for this site – coming soon.

Trailer: