Tag: evidence

The Lavender Hill Mob

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 26 March 2024
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Director – Charles Crichton – 1951 – UK – Cert. U – 78m

*****

A Bank of England employee stumbles upon the perfect means to rob his employer of the gold bullion he transports there on a daily basis– classic Ealing comedy is back out in a new 4k restoration in UK cinemas on Friday, March 29th

Holland (Alec Guinness) has a lowly job at the Bank of England supervising the transfer of recently minted bars of gold bullion to the bank’s secure vault by security van., He rides in the back and is forever asking the harried driver to check round the corner for suspected cars lying in wait to ambush the van. He is considered an honest nobody, an appearance he has cultivated for the best part of two decades. He has a mind to rob the van, if only he could work out how to smuggle the bullion out of the country.

Fate intervenes in the form of a newly arrived tenant at the downmarket Balmoral Guest House in Lavender Hill, where he lodges. Pendlebury (Stanley Holloway) runs a business selling tourist tat, including lead models of the Eiffel Tour for selling at that Parisian monument. He melts the lead down on his London premises to cast it into the models.… Read the rest

Tags 1950s, Alec Guinness, Alfie Bass, alibi, ambush, Audrey Hepburn, back projection, Balmoral, bank clerk, Bank of England employee and employer, bank vault, breathlessness incompetent police, bureaucracy, burglar, car chase, casting metal, Charles Crichton, collision, comedy, cops and robbers, crime, criminals, crooks, downtrodden, Ealing comedy, Eiffel Tower, England, English schoolgirls, evidence, factory, falling into the river, faux respectability, fugitives, gang, gangster novels, giddy, gold bars, gold bullion, Guest House, heist, honest nobody, humour, industrial process, kaleidoscopic, landlady, Lavender Hill, lead and gold, lodgings, London, melt down, mistaken for a thief; bound and gagged, mob, national newspaper stories, nursery rhyme, Old Macdonald Had a Farm, Paris, plucky little hero, police and thieves, police cars, policemen on the beat, post-war, promotion, pronunciation, pursuit, radio, rebel against the system, rescued, Rio de Janeiro, robbery, safe cracker, salacious, schoolgirls, security van, self-advancement, Sidney James, smelt, smuggle, snatch and grab, spiral staircase, Stanley Holloway, T.E.B. Clarke, the missing piece, the perfect crime, tourist tat, UK, whimsy

Features Live Action Movies

Lost In The Stars
(Xiao Shi De Ta,
消失的她)

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 14 July 2023
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(Xiao Shi De Ta,
消失的她)
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Directors – Cui Rui, Liu Xiang – 2022 – China – Cert. 15 – 121m

*****

A man’s wife vanishes and is replaced by an imposter; when no-one believes him, he hires a hotshot lawyer to find out what’s happening and get his real wife back – out in UK cinemas on Friday, July 14th

He Fei (Zhu Yilong) walks into a police station to ask for help with finding his wife Li Muzi, who has disappeared. The desk sergeant, who has clearly heard it all before, tells him there’s nothing they can do. Outside the station, in the pouring rain, he is approached by Officer Zheng (Du Jiang) who overheard and helpfully tries to calm him. The couple are holidaying in the island of Barlandia, outside of Chinese jurisdiction. He has recurring nightmares of her (Huang Ziqi) calling out his name for help and feels helpless in the face of them.

The next morning, events take a turn for the worse when He wakes up beside his wife Li Muzi (now played by Janice Man), who is not the real Li Muzi but an imposter he’s never seen before. Yet every piece of evidence he can think of to support his story seems to have changed to support hers– her passport seems genuine and shows that she entered the country at the same time as him, she can answer all manner of questions about the couple’s personal life, she has a scar on her upper thigh that no-one but the two of them know about.… Read the rest

Features Live Action Movies

La Syndicaliste
(lit. The Union Rep,
US: The Sitting Duck)

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 30 June 2023
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(lit. The Union Rep,
US: The Sitting Duck)
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Director – Jean-Paul Salomé – 2022 – France – Cert. 15 – 121m

***1/2

After a smart and tough-talking woman union rep in the nuclear power industry is attacked, tied up and raped in her own home, the police suggest she may have staged the attack herself – out in UK cinemas on Friday, June 30th

Or, as its opening title states in the English subtitled print shown to press, La Syndicaliste Based On A True Story. That title comes after an opening in 2012 in which police are called to the home of Maureen Kearney (Isabelle Huppert) where her cleaning lady has freed her from a chair to which she was tied before being raped by an intruder. The forensic team are all over the premises, taking away evidence. At the police station, she requests a pad and pencil to write down the details of what happened. The police will later accuse Kearney of fabricating the whole incident herself.

The next half an hour or so is a flashback leading up to the incident. Immediately after the titles, it sets about establishing its heroine as a tireless campaigner for employee rights at French state-owner nuclear power company Areva, standing up for ruthlessly exploited workers in an Hungarian subsidiary and well in with Anne Lauvergeon (Marina Fois), the one female executive in an otherwise male boardroom who despite her reliability and excellent track record is being forced out, with as she later tells Maureen lots of dirty tricks used against her.… Read the rest

Tags Alan J. Pakula, Anne Lauvergeon, Annecy, Areva, attacked, Based On A True Story, board meeting, boardroom, campaigner, Christian Hecq, cleaning lady, clear your name, company, conflicting flashback, conspiracy, conspiracy thriller, corporate, corporate male, court, courtroom drama, dirty tricks, discredit, employee rights, evidence, executive, exploitation, fabrication, flashback, forced entry, forensics, France, Grégory Gadebois, home, house, husbands and wives, industrial relations, industry, institutionalised male violence, intruder, Irish, Isabelle Huppert, Jean-Paul Salomé, Lake Annecy, lawyer, Marina Fois, Maureen Kearney, mole, nuclear power, Pierre Deladonchamps, police, police station, political, political thriller, rape, real and imaginary, state-owned, thriller, tied up, trade union, tribunal, union rep, Vesailles, whistleblower, Yvan Attal

Documentary Features Live Action Movies

The Other Fellow

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 19 May 2023
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Director – Matthew Bauer – 2022 – UK – Cert. 15 – 80m

**1/2

The name’s Bond. James Bond. This is a look at real life people who share the name of Ian Fleming’s popular spy character – out in UK cinemas and on demand from Friday, May 19th

What’s in a name? When Ian Fleming was looking to name the secret agent he’d written a novel about, he wanted a dull, ordinary name that wouldn’t stand out. On his shelf in Goldeneye, the Jamaican retreat where he wrote the books, was Birds Of The West Indies by James Bond. It was perfect. He stole the name for his character. When the wife of the real James Bond later got in touch by letter, Fleming was concerned they were going to sue. Fleming appears in a film clip from that time, which must be used here two or three times. The author’s wife and the bird book author James Bond himself are here played by actors Tacey Adams and Gregory Itzin.

That’s just one of the stories about identity in this brilliantly conceived documentary about people named James Bond. There’s a Bond family who have been passing the name James down for generations and weren’t going to stop because of Ian Fleming’s character.… Read the rest

Features Live Action Movies

No Bears
(Khers Nist,
خرس نیست)

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 8 October 2022
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(Khers Nist,
خرس نیست)
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Director – Jafar Panahi – 2022 – Iran – Cert. 12a – 106m

*****

An Iranian film director banned from leaving his country rents a house close to the border with Turkey, in which country he is remotely directing a film – available on the following rental streaming services from Monday, March 27th: Amazon Prime, Google Play Movies, YouTube (all £3.49), Apple TV (£4.49), BFI Player (£4.50), and Curzon (£4.99)

In a busy, metropolitian street somewhere in Iran, woman restaurateur Zara (Mina Kavani) is greeted by her partner Bakhtiar (Bakhtiar Panjei), who has secured a fake passport for her. She has only three days to use it before the passport, stolen from a tourist, is stopped. But she doesn’t want to travel outside the country without him: he is the only thing that makes her life bearable.

Then we realise we are watching a movie shoot not in Iran but in neighbouring Turkey. The director is Jafar Panahi (playing himself) and he is not allowed out of Iran, so he is renting a room in an Iranian village not far from the Turkish border and watching the shoot remotely via his computer. He’s been assured that the local internet reception is good, but it isn’t and keeps cutting out, making his job all but impossible, although his first assistant director, cast and crew are doing a good job of getting the shots in the can even when they don’t hear from him.… Read the rest

Features Live Action Movies

No Bears
(Khers Nist,
خرس نیست)

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 1 November 2022
No Comments on No Bears
(Khers Nist,
خرس نیست)
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A repressive Islamist regime

No Bears
Directed by Jafar Panahi
Certificate 12a, 106 minutes
Released 11 November

The Iranian director Jafar Panahi (whose son Panar made the excellent road movie Hit the Road) has been in trouble with the country’s repressive Islamist regime for some time and earlier this year was given six years in prison. The campaign to #freejafarpanahi is worth our support, and this release is timely considering what is happening in Iran now.

In No Bears, Jafar plays a fictionalised version of himself, a film director not allowed to leave Iran… [read the full review at Reform magazine]

Read my alternative, longer review here.

No Bears is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, November 11th following its screening in the BFI London Film Festival 2022.

#freejafarpanahi

Trailer:

LFF 2022 Trailer:

Features Live Action Movies

Memories
Of Murder
(Salinui chueok,
살인의 추억)

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 11 September 2020
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Of Murder
(Salinui chueok,
살인의 추억)

Director – Bong Joon Ho – 2003 – South Korea – Cert. 15 – 131m

*****

Three cops attempt to track down a serial sex killer. Based on a real life, unsolved murder case. With Song Kang-ho – in cinemas and on Curzon Home Cinema from Friday, September 11^th

On one level, there’s nothing remarkable about Memories Of Murder, a crime movie about cops hunting a serial killer. This is a sub-genre done to death in Hollywood and elsewhere. On another level, however, it has the hallmarks of a really rich and strange talent getting hold of a well-worn formula and doing something fresh, new and original with it.

For one thing, it never dwells on the gore or fetishises the detail of the crimes. At the same time, like much Korean cinema, it never shies away from this material either. It’s unafraid to have an autopsy scene in which the pathologist discovers nine pieces of peach inside a corpse’s vagina but feels just as at ease that a testimony from a survivor throws up an important clue like, I didn’t see the killer’s face because if I had looked at him he’d have killed me, but I did notice he had soft hands.… Read the rest