Tag: competitive

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Documentary Features Live Action Movies

The Balloonists

Director – John Dower – 2025 – UK, Austria, US – Cert. PG – 86m

****

The story of balloonist Bertrand Piccard’s three attempts to circumnavigate the globe in a balloon – out in UK cinemas on Friday, May 22nd

Bertrand Piccard’s house, as his astonished interviewer notes, is a museum, a personal collection of memorabilia from the history of aviation. It grew in a mere 66 years from the Wright Brothers’ pioneering efforts to the Apollo 11 moon landing. His family was in Florida at the time of the Apollo 7-12 launches which he witnessed. Five days before the moon landing, he vowed to become an explorer himself, but then when Armstrong walked on the moon Piccard felt everything had been done. He got depressed.

And then he saw a balloon and discovered that no-one had ever flown round the world in one.

In 1997, His first attempt, the Breitling Orbiter, ditched in the Mediterranean after six hours. Many others tried, including Richard Branson, who knew how to do publicity: in Morocco, Branson’s balloon blew away before it could be launched.

Enter British engineer Andy Elson. But the film switches back to Piccard, whose grandfather was a pioneering balloonist and whose father designed submarines and made a record-breaking dive to the Mariana Trench.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Odyssey
(2025)

Director – Gerard Johnson – 2025 – UK – Cert. 18 – 110m

****

A ruthless London estate agent with mounting debts finds herself at the mercy of criminal backers – out in UK cinemas on Friday, November 7th

This starts off no holds barred with protagonist Natasha (Polly Maberly from Muscle, Gerard Johnson, 2019) having a tooth removed at the dentist’s, then having her card declined as she attempts to pay the £950 bill, going out of the front door after the third failed payment attempt. Throughout what follows, she will consistently receive phone messages about the outstanding amount and ignore them, although you suspect they are slowly eating away at her soul along with most of the other influences in her life. Somehow the incident seems to define her character: a driven, self-made woman – or, more accurately, a self-making one who never quite got there and lives beyond her means to maintain the illusion.

Natasha runs a tight office with right-hand woman Safi (Kellie Shirley), tech guy Spike (Charley Palmer Rothwell) developing a game-changing app for her, and promising new girl learning the ropes Dylan (Jasmine Blackborow). But Natasha is the person in charge of everything, the place where the buck stops, and despite their undoubted talents the other three seem scarcely to matter: it’s all about Natasha as she struggles to see through a hostile takeover, or, as she frames it, merger.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Ferrari

Director – Michael Mann – 2023 – US – Cert. 15 – 130m

*****

As Enzo Ferrari’s racing team takes on a particularly tough race in 1957, the complexities of his private life prove equally challenging – out in UK cinemas on Tuesday, December 26th

You might reasonably expect a movie about legendary driver turned racing car manufacturer Enzo Ferrari to be about motor racing, and while that’s undeniably true of this film, it’s about far more. In essence, it’s a character study about a man’s life focused on a brief period of his career, in which complex professional and personal issues intersect.

Based on a script by the late, great Troy Kennedy Martin (1932-2009 – writer of The Italian Job, 1969; BBC TV series Z Cars, 1962 and Edge of Darkness, 1985), Mann’s film covers four months in 1957 building up to a particularly tough race, the Mille Miglia, the route for which covers 1 000 miles of open country roads.

Alongside the considerable challenges and demands of the race itself, the personal life of Enzo Ferrari (Adam Driver) is nothing if not complex. His marriage to business-savvy Laura Garello Ferrari (Penélope Cruz) is on the rocks thanks to the death from muscular dystrophy in 1956 of their son Dino aged 24.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Sick Of Myself
(Syk Pike)

Director – Kristoffer Borgli – 2022 – Norway – Cert. 15 – 95m

*****

Fed up with the attention her successful artist partner is getting, a woman deliberately consumes dangerous prescription drugs to make herself the centre of attention– out in UK cinemas on Friday, April 21st

Young Oslo couple Thomas (Eirik Sæther) and Signe (Kristine Kujath Thorp from Ninjababy, Ingvild Sve Flikke, 2021; The Burning Sea, John Andreas Andersen, 2022) have an unhealthy relationship. He is a compulsive thief, stealing luxury items such as expensive wine and designer furniture from restaurants and showrooms, respectively. She is a compulsive liar and attention seeker. They somehow co-exist in a state of unstable equilibrium. They are on a collision course because he has a potential celebrity career while she does not. He is an artist having his first show at a major gallery, while she works at an ordinary coffee shop.

At a celebratory gathering with friends, she is constantly belittling him, constantly talking down his achievement through judicious use of fact coupled with any fiction she might care to invent. At a restaurant meal with his gallery owner and assorted invited guests, she invents an allergy, ‘absent-mindedly consumes a small amount of Thomas’ food and suffers an allergy attack, immediately becoming the focus of attention on what should be his evening rather than hers.… Read the rest