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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

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Features Live Action Movies

Plane

Director – Jean-François Richet – 2022 – UK, US – Cert. 15 – 107m

****

A commercial passenger aircraft flying through bad weather conditions gets into trouble and is forced to land on an island run by military insurgents – out on digital from Monday, March 13th

While this is unlikely to win any Oscars, it’s a shrewdly put together action movie that gets everything right, tells its audience exactly what it’s going to do and then proceeds to do it, wrapping up everything very quickly in about thirty seconds once the narrative is over. That might not sound like much, but most action movies you see fail to meet such criteria. Moreover, a lot of action movies work perfectly well on a small screen, but this one works better if you see it on as big a screen as possible.

Singapore. Scotsman Brodie Torrance (Gerard Butler from 300, Zak Snyder, 2007) is cutting it fine and may be about to be late for work again. Since he’s an airline pilot, that’s quite a big deal. Somehow, he gets to the cockpit of the plane with enough time to introduce himself to his co-pilot Samuel Dele (Yosun An from Mulan) ahead of the pre-takeoff, routine inspection by an aviation official.… Read the rest