Tag: landlady

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Features Live Action Movies

The Tenants
(Se-ip-ja,
세입자)

Director – Yoon Eun-Kyung – 2023 – South Korea – LKFF Cert. 12 – 90m

*****

In a black & white, futuristic Seoul, a tenant who sublets his rental apartment to prevent his eviction finds out that this approach has its drawbacks – from LKFF, the London Korean Film Festival 2024 which runsin cinemas from Friday, November 1st to Wednesday, November 13th

An alluring image turns out to be merely an image on a wall, an artifice rather than the paradise we at first assume it to be. This is an image many filmmakers have used to open their movies and, depending on what they’ve seen over the years, it will conjure different films for different viewers. For this viewer, it conjures what I consider one of the funniest films of recent decades, Quick Change (Howard Franklin, Bill Murray, 1990) where the image is revealed as a tawdry New York subway train ad above a clown who will shortly proceed to rob a bank.

The Tenants may not be a comedy, but it shares with that film a sense of urban malaise, a feeling of being trapped in a grim metropolis where everything about the place conspires to prevent the protagonists leaving.… Read the rest

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The Conversation

Director – Francis Ford Coppola – 1974 – US – Cert. 12a – 113m

*****

A surveillance expert records a conversation between two people, then worries about turning the recording over to his corporate client as contracted – 50th anniversary 4K Restoration is out on UHD, Blu-ray and DVD on Monday, July 15th

There’s nothing else quite like The Conversation in cinema.

Union Square, San Francisco. People milling around. Among them, a couple (Frederic Forrest and Cindy Williams) having a conversation. Also in the square, a man in a plastic mac (Gene Hackman). And another man (Michael Higgins) following them around, holding a bag. And, at two separate windows above the square, two long range microphones.

The first man, Harry, enters a nearby van, inside which is his recording assistant Stan (John Cazale). He’s shortly followed by the other man, Paul, who believes the couple spotted him trailing them.

Harry pays a nighttime visit to his girlfriend Amy (Teri Garr). She wants him to spill his secrets. He claims he has none. He leaves, with her telling him not to bother to come back.

He goes to work in his office, situated at one end of the floor in an otherwise deserted warehouse.… Read the rest

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The Lavender Hill Mob

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

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The House of Us
(Woori-Jip, 우리집)

Director – Yoon Ge-eun – 2019 – South Korea – 92m

***1/2

Prepubescent girl forms a surrogate family, as she watches the relationship between her parents collapse – plays in Korean Film Nights (KFN) Summer Nights at the Korean Cultural Centre (KCCUK) on Thursday, June 9th – free admission

Eleven-year-old Lee Hana (Kim Na-yeon) watches her mum and dad argue. The family should be having breakfast, but instead mum finds ways to berate dad every time he opens his mouth. She has a brother, but doesn’t get on with him especially well. When she gets to school, Hana is as surprised as anyone else that she’s won the Good Classmate Award. Her dad is really pleased. But what she really wants is for her parents to get their relationship back on track. To this end, throughout the narrative, she keeps proposing a family trip to the seaside. But her mum is way too busy with her demanding job to spare a weekend any time soon.

One day in the supermarket, Hana observes nine-year-old Yoo-mi (Kim Shi-a) and her seven-year-old younger sister Yoo-jin (Joo Ye-rim). They seem to be happy as sisters: perhaps their family life is better than hers.… Read the rest

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Finding Angel
(Cheonsaneun Baileoseu,
천사는 바이러스)

Director – Kim Seong-jun – 2021 – South Korea – Cert. 15 – 114m

****

Who is the mysterious so-called ‘Angel’ who every Christmas delivers a box containing a large sum of money to a needy local resident of a small, rural town? – out in cinemas on Friday, November 26th

For the last seventeen years at Christmas, the ‘Faceless Angel’ has visited the town of Rohsong in Jeonju City, South Korea to leave a box containing money for a local person in need. Last year, an old woman received the money she needed for a knee operation. Who this person might actually be has remained a mystery, but the locals are glad the Angel is there doing what he or she is doing.

Wishing to solve the mystery and with the journalist’s scent of a good story, newspaperman Kim Ji-hoon (Park Sung-il from Samjin Company English Class, Lee Jong-pil, 2020) arrives in the town in December as the temperature plummets. He makes enquiries at the town office but the girl on the front desk (Lee Ga-kyung) stonewalls him. His attempts at talking to the townspeople don’t get him very far until he talks to old Miss Ok-bun (Moon Sook) about renting a room and she promptly puts him up in her freezing upstairs bedroom.… Read the rest

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Lucky Chan-sil
(Chansilineun
Bokdo Manhji,
찬실이는 복도 많지)

Director – Kim Cho-hee – 2019 – South Korea – 95m

****

When a film director she’s worked for over several years dies, his film producer has to rethink her life – currently streaming on MUBI as part of their New South Korean Cinema season

Director Ji (Seo Sang-won), his fortysomething producer Lee Chan-sil (Kang Mal-geum) and three or four others are drinking Soju round a table after a hard day’s work on the set. Suddenly, Ji slumps forward. Everyone thinks he’s kidding. He’s not. He’s dead. Unexpectedly dead. Ji makes little independent films in his own highly idiosyncratic style. If he’s no longer there, then the film, too, is dead. And Chan-sil, who has only worked with him, is suddenly out of a job.

With her regular income gone, she downsizes and moves into a cheap flat owned by an ageing live-in landlady (Youn Yuh-jung). It’s near the top of a hill, so other members of the abandoned film production help her carry stuff up there. She sees a lot of her flighty actress friend Sophie (Yeung Soon-ah) for whom she now goes to work as a cleaner. These changes of circumstance give her the both the space and the opportunity to reassess her life.… Read the rest

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Last Night in Soho

Director – Edgar Wright – 2021 – UK – Cert. 18 – 116m

*****

The dream life of a present day fashion student takes her to the Soho of 1965 where a young woman is trying to make it as a singer – in cinemas from Friday, October 29th

Dreaming of being a fashion designer, 1960s-obsessed Eloise (Thomasin McKenzie) leaves the house of her gran (Rita Tushingham) in Redruth, Cornwall after getting accepted as a student at the London College of Fashion. Charlotte Street halls of residence turn out to be an introvert’s nightmare, with parties replacing sleep at night and extrovert roommate Jocasta (Synnøve Karlsen) taking an immediate dislike to Eloise. The morning after spending her first night wrapped in her duvet in the corner of a party room, sleep deprivation almost prevents her getting to roll call on time. As it is, she looks foolish when her name is called, and she asks, “what’s the question?”

Eloise chances on a room to rent notice that’s fallen on the floor below a notice board and secures the room at the top of 8 Goodge Place from eccentric, ageing landlady Miss Collins (Diana Rigg) whose rules include “no smoking, no male visitors”.… Read the rest

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Mrs. Noisy
(ミセス・
ノイズィ)

Director – Chihiro Amano – 2019 – Japan – Cert. 12a – 106m

****

A writer and young mother struggling with an elusive second novel finds herself dealing with a noisy, futon-beating neighbour in a rapidly escalating row exacerbated by viral internet videos – plays online in the Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme 2021 in the UK

Two women neighbours get involved in a petty feud which escalates out of all proportion, fuelled by videos on the internet. While parts of the feud are riotously funny to watch, this is less a comedy and more a warning as to how badly things can go wrong between ordinary people isolated in their separate domestic units in our ever-evolving technological age of phone cameras and social media. The housing block in urban Japan could just as easily be in any city in the UK. It looks all too horribly familiar.

Having published one hugely successful novel, Maki (Yukiko Shinohara) gives birth to a daughter and resolves to use the experience to feed into the next novel. She keeps writing, but her publishers tell her that nothing she’s written is up to par. Six years on Maki, her husband Yuichi (Takuma Nagao) and their small daughter Nako (Chise Niitsu) move into a new flat in a new block hoping that the change of scene will be just what Maki needs to get the writing back up to standard.… Read the rest

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Sócrates

Director – Alexandre Moratto – 2018 – Brazil – Cert. 15 – 71m

*****

In selected UK cinemas and digital rental platforms including Barbican Cinema on Demand, BFI Player, Curzon Home Cinema and Peccadillo Player from Friday, September 4th

It’s morning in coastal São Paulo. Sócrates (Christian Malheiros), 15, goes in to see his mum in her room. But she doesn’t wake up. He is consumed with grief. The lady social worker talks to him, but his emotions are so consuming he can’t hear her. She tells him, if a guardian can’t be found, he’ll be put in a home.

He doesn’t want that, but if he’s to stay where he is, the rent has to be paid. He works his mum’s literally crappy job cleaning lavatories with a co-worker, but the boss won’t give Sócrates his mum’s money, she must collect it in person. He prints out fliers of his resume, negotiating a three payments of 50 cents deal with the shop manageress, and hands them out. He gets a lead on a shop that’s hiring and lies about his age on the form, an untruth that will disqualify him for the job when they fact-check.

A thick, red comb in the bathroom holds some of his mother’s hair.… Read the rest