Tag: drama

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Killers
Of The Flower Moon

Director – Martin Scorsese – 2023 – US – Cert. 15 – 206m

*****

A returning WW1 veteran marries into Oklahoma’s Osage Indian tribe at the time of the Osage Indian Murders – plays the 2023 London Film Festival which runs from Wednesday, October 4th until Sunday, October 15th, and will be out in UK cinemas on Friday, October 20th

At slightly over 80 years of age, Martin Scorsese has now been making movies for over 60 years. Like his last, fictional, narrative feature The Irishman (2019), this one is pushing three and a half hours. I always have issues with films that long: the vast majority are that way due to director’s ego and / or inability to tell a story concisely. Some of them might have been better suited to a TV mini-series ( a medium in which, incidentally, Scorsese also works). Yet if you try and imagine Killers Of The Flower Moon cut down in length, it’s difficult. Maybe you could take out the frame story – the performance of a crime drama on the radio on the subject of the Osage Indian Murders – but that sets the scene nicely at the start and takes you back out of the movie equally nicely at the end, so it would be a shame to do so.… Read the rest

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The Innocent
(L’innocent)

Director – Louis Garrel – 2022 – France – Cert. 15 – 99m

***1/2

A trusting woman marries a soon-to-be-released convict in prison only for her suspicious son to start following him after the man’s release and soon find himself out of his depth – out in UK cinemas on Friday, August 25th

Warning: plot spoilers.

Sylvie LeFranc (Anouk Grinberg) has fallen big time for Michel Ferrand (Roschdy Zem) and is about to marry him. Her son Abel (Louis Garrel) is less than happy about this, since Michel is the latest convict serving a prison sentence for whom his mother has fallen. He grudgingly attends their prison wedding. Shortly after, Michel is released and the couple embark on their new life together, with Michel promising to go straight and Sylvie, who likes to think the best of people, taking him at his word. She has always dreamed of opening a flower shop, and he gives her the funds to make it happen. They hire premises and start doing it up, getting Abel to help.

Although he can see that the romance is genuine – at least on his mother’s side – Abel understandably doesn’t trust his mum’s judgement and doesn’t trust Michel at all.… Read the rest

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Plan 75

Director – Chie Hayakawa – 2022 – Japan – Cert. 15 – 113m

**1/2

Dystopian drama Plan 75 posits a plan whereby Japanese people can voluntarily have themselves terminated after age 75 and examines some of the resultant social fallout – out in UK cinemas and on Curzon Home Cinema from Friday, May 12th

Sedate classical piano music is playing on the soundtrack. The image – out of focus, could be looking down a corridor. After a long wait, a man in a T-shirt and jeans walks, in focus, into picture foreground. There appears to be blood on his arm and he is carrying a shotgun. Ahead of him, as it now comes into focus, the corridor floor is sparsely scattered with objects: a cup and a bowl, an old person’s walking stick with four legs, something else which we can’t quite make out. He washes at the sink. Another corridor – a fallen walking stick, a pair of slippers, an abandoned bathrobe or perhaps a towel, a collapsed, half-folded wheelchair, wheel still spinning. T-shirt and jeans with shotgun descends the stairs. After a contentious voice over, T-shirt and jeans waits a long while, then points the barrel of the shotgun at his head and uses his feet to pull the trigger.… Read the rest

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Ashes And Diamonds
(Popiół I Diament)

Director – Andrzej Wajda – 1958 – Poland – Cert. 12 – 103m

*****

Two resistance fighters attempt to assassinate a Communist Party official on the last day of the Second World War – plays at the Phoenix Cinema East Finchley in conjunction with the Kinoteka Polish Film Festival at 18:00 on Sunday, March 19th, also on Blu-ray as part of Wajda’s War Trilogy

Made over a decade after not only the historical setting for the events it depicts in 1945 but also the Jerzy Andrzejewski novel on which it is based which was written in 1947 and published in 1948, this condenses that novel’s two weeks into a mere – 24 hours the last day of the Second World War and the evening and night of the victory celebrations that follow plus the subsequent early dawn.

The war is over and the Nazis defeated, but Poland still finds itself the subject of conflict as opposing factions vie for power. On the one hand is the official Party trying to get everything working again and on the other members of the resistance determined to stop them.

The older Andrzej (Adam Pawlikowski) and the younger Maciek (Zbigniew Cybulski) carry out an ordered assassination on Szczuka (Waclaw Zastrzeżyński).… Read the rest

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Like Father, Like Son
(Soshite Chichi
Ni Naru,
そして父になる)

Director – Hirokazu Kore-eda – 2013 – Japan – Cert. PG – 121m

*****

Upper middle class couple Ryota and Midori (Masaharu Fukuyama and Machiko Ono) get a call from the country hospital where their six-year-old son Keita (Keita Nonomiya) was born. Keita might not actually be theirs, but the son of Yodai and Yukari Saiki (Lily Franky and Yoko Maki), the two babies having been switched at birth. The two families are like chalk and cheese… [Read the full review at All The Anime]

On MUBI from Saturday, February 25th as part of Family Matters: A Hirokazu Kore-eda Double Bill; originally reviewed for All The Anime as part of Arrow’s Family Values Blu-ray box set which includes I Wish (2011), Like Father, Like Son (2013) and After the Storm (2016). Also available to rent on Amazon UK, BFI Player and Curzon Home Cinema.

Trailer – Like Father, Like Son (2013):

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Broker
(Beurokeo,
브로커)

Director – Hirokazu Kore-eda – 2022 – South Korea – Cert. 12 – 129m

***

Kore-eda’s second feature outside his native Japan is a curious tale of two traffickers of abandoned babies to childless couples whose business is disrupted by their latest charge’s mother– out in UK cinemas on Friday, February 24th

It’s an intriguing pitch. Kore-eda. the great humanist Japanese director of such extraordinary films as (among others) films After Life (1998), I Wish (2011), Like Father, Like Son (2013), The Third Murder (2017) and the Best Foreign Film Oscar nominee Shoplifters (2018), directs a movie in South Korea. And yet, Broker, like his previous The Truth (2019), similarly made in a country other than his native Japan – in this instance France – is strangely unmoving compared to his home-shot, Japanese work. Although he hasn’t lost his touch as can be seen from some of his work for Japanese TV (A Day-Off Of Kusumi Arimura, 2020).

Whatever the problems are with his working abroad, the the calibre of the cast the director attracts is not one of them. The Truth had Catherine Deneuve, Juliette Binoche and Ethan Hawke, two of the finest living French actresses and arguably one of the best American actors; for Broker, the cast includes top South Korean talent Song Kang Ho and Doona Bae.… Read the rest

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I Wish
(Kiseki,
奇跡,
lit. Miracle)

Director – Hirokazu Kore-eda – 2011 – Japan – Cert. PG – 128m

*****

A broken family consists of father, mother and two pre-teenage boys. Each of the boys is living with one of their parents at opposite ends of Kyushu, Japan’s south-western island: the elder with his mother and grandmother in Kagoshima and the younger with their gigging rock guitarist father in Fukuoka. The two boys keep in touch by mobile phone… [Read the full review at All The Anime]

On MUBI from Saturday, February 4th as part of Family Matters: A Hirokazu Kore-eda Double Bill; originally reviewed for All The Anime as part of Arrow’s Family Values Blu-ray box set which includes I Wish (2011), Like Father, Like Son (2013) and After the Storm (2016). Also available to rent on Amazon UK, BFI Player and Curzon Home Cinema.

Trailer – I Wish (2011):

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After the Storm
(Umi Yori
Mo Mada Fukaku,
海よりもまだ深く,
lit. Even Deeper
Than The Sea)

Director – Hirokazu Kore-eda – 2016 – Japan – Cert. PG – 118m

***

Ryota Shinoda (Hiroshi Abe) juggles child-care issues as a divorced father working for a detective agency which spies on clients’ spouses. A published writer with a single, acclaimed novel to his name, he has a minor gambling problem. Like the wife in I Wish, his ex Kyoko (Yoko Maki) thinks he was too obsessed with his art to spend enough time doing a proper job to provide the wherewithal to look after their family. His gambling scarcely helps.… [Read the full review at All The Anime]

Originally reviewed for All The Anime as part of Arrow’s Family Values Blu-ray box set which includes I Wish (2011), Like Father, Like Son (2013) and After the Storm (2016). Also available to rent on Amazon UK, BFI Player and Curzon Home Cinema.

Trailer – After the Storm (2016):

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Piggy
(Cerdita)

Director – Carlota Pereda – 2022 – Spain – Cert. 18 – 99m

*****

Director – Carlota Pereda – 2018 – Spain – 13m

*****

Fat-shaming, bullying, overbearing mothers, growing up as the local butcher’s daughter, and more – feature based on short is out in UK cinemas on Friday, January 6th

Sara (Laura Galán) is attempting to navigate the difficult waters of adolescence. It isn’t much fun if you’re different and cliques of your contemporaries gang up on you. In Sara’s case, she isn’t just fat, she’s also introverted and shuns people, which compounds the amount she gets teased. She often works in her father’s butchers shop, so bullies can easily put together insults based on fat and flesh and pork and meat. A clique of three, thinner girls – Roci (Camille Aguilar) and Maca (Claudia Salas) and their unwilling hanger-on Claudia aka Clau (Irene Ferreiro) – call her Piggy.

It’s Summer, and everyone is going down to the Madrigal (Waterfall) festivities at the pool on the river, where a mysterious out-of-towner is lounging about, but Sara sneaks down there later for a swim when she hopes nobody is around. She’s just getting into the water when the stranger (Richard Holmes) surfaces innocently, startling her.… Read the rest

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Bergman Island

Director – Mia Hansen-Løve – 2021 – France, Belgium, Germany – Cert. 15 – 112m

First half *****

Second half **

A working, filmmaking couple spend time on the island where celebrated director Ingmar Berman lived, now a niche tourist attraction based around his life and movies – out exclusively on MUBI from Friday, July 22nd

Two writer-directors who are also a couple Chris (Vicky Krieps) and Tony (Tim Roth) fly in to spend time and write at the Bergman Estate on Fårö Island in the Baltic Sea, just off the coast of Sweden. This is the site that legendary Swedish film and theatre director Ingmar Bergman left as a legacy to the world, where people could apply for residencies to help in their creative or academic work, watch his films on 35mm and browse his personal audio, video and book library. Chris and Tony thus find themselves alone in Bergman’s private viewing theatre watching Cries And Whispers (Ingmar Bergman, 1972).

Both are involved with screenplays: when he’s over at the Bergman Centre, she sneaks a look in his large notebook entitled ‘F’ which contains extensive notes and erotic drawings veering towards the sadomasochistic. On a later occasion, she stands him up by not joining the Bergman Safari coach tour around the island, complete with a tour guide describing the site where Through A Glass Darkly (Ingmar Bergman, 1961) plays on a screen.… Read the rest