Tag: illustrator

The Wild Robot

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 17 October 2024
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Director – Chris Sanders – 2024 – US – Cert. U – 102m

****1/2

A service robot shipwrecked on a desert island is imprinted as its mother on the mind of an orphaned gosling – out in UK and Ireland cinemas on Friday, October 18th following its screening in the London Film Festival

Waking up on an unknown beach with no idea as to how she got there, ROZZUM Unit 7134 (voice: Lupita Nyong’o) is a Universal Dynamics service robot designed to complete any task assigned to her. Without any such task, she feels completely lost. She wanders around the island, populated only by animals, in search of her owner. Unable to understand all the noises the animals make communicating with each other, she has her translation circuits decode their meaning so that, soon, she is hearing them communicate in English.

She accidentally almost destroys a family of geese but managing to rescue a goose egg. She must protect the egg from the fox (voice: Pedro Pascal) who attempts to steal it to satisfy his hunger. Her robotic rationale for this is to question whether the egg is the fox’s property, A thought process that might make sense in a human environment but makes none at all in this animal one.… Read the rest

Features Live Action Movies

Sting

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 31 May 2024
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Director – Kiah Roache-Turner – 2024 – Australia – Cert. 15 – 91m

***1/2

A girl traps a venomous spider and cares for it as a pet, but as she feeds it, it grows… and grows… and gets out… – onto UK Home Premiere on Monday, July 15th

Helga (Noni Hazlehurst) is hearing strange noises in her Brooklyn apartment. She doesn’t remember so good, however, helpfully pinned to the wall by the phone is her name and address. So when she phones Frank the pest exterminator (Jermaine Fowler), she can read those details to him. It’s probably a rat, he tells her. Soon he is at the door of the block, asking her to buzz him in. But inside the apartment, he realises this particular bug may be more than he bargained for.

Flash back to four days earlier. A hand-sized meteor plunges to Earth to crash through a window into a doll’s house in the same apartment block. It is a tiny pod not unlike the ones in Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979). It opens, hatching a small spider, which looks huge until we realise it’s in a small scale doll’s house, not outside in the apartment proper. The spider is found by Charlotte (Alyla Brown from Furiosa: A Mad Max Story, George Miller, 2024) who empties out her money jar, the one with the screw lid, to make a home for it, feeding it with the roaches that infest the apartment.… Read the rest

Tags Alyla Brown, apartment, apartment block, aquarium, aquarium tank, arachnid, aunt, Australia, babysitting, bark, Brooklyn, brothers and sisters, building superintendent, cocoons, comic, crawlspace, Danny Kim, dementia, dog, doll’s house, doom, feed, first kill, fish tank, fumigate, giant redback spider, girl, grow, illustrator, income, infest, interior base rim, jar, Jermaine Fowler, Kiah Roache-Turner, lid, maze, medical experiments, meteor, miser, moonlighting, mothballs, Noni Hazlehurst, paralyse, Penelope Mitchell, pest exterminator, pet, pet dog, puppet, Richard Taylor, roach, Robyn Nevin, Ryan Corr, screw lid, second kill, sibling, Silvia Colloca, spectacles, spider, stepdad, stepfather, Sting, The Hobbit, underside, unscrew, venomous, ventilation shaft, web, Weta Workshop, working and parenting

Features Live Action Movies

The Shape Of Water

Loving the alien

The Shape Of Water
Directed by Guillermo del Toro
Certificate 15, 123 minutes
Released 14 February 2018

There’s a tradition in horror films and fairytales that the monster is bad. The Shape Of Water is a fairytale that features a monster (Doug Jones) who is viewed very differently by different characters. To the military security man, Strickland (Michael Shannon), it’s an affront to the image of God, in which man is created, which must be brutally subdued. To the scientist and Russian agent, Hoffstetler (Michael Stuhlbarg), he’s an intelligent being from whom our species has much to learn and who should be kept alive at all costs and treated with respect – rather than killed and dissected as the authorities suggest. And to the mute cleaning lady, Elisa (Sally Hawkins), who subsequently falls in love with him, he’s someone who responds to hard-boiled eggs and Benny Goodman records, and sees her for herself rather than for her so-called disability… [read more]

Read the full review in Reform, February 2018.

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