Tag: landscape

Categories
Animation Movies Shorts

Little Shrew
(Snowflake)

Director – Kate Bush – 2024 – UK – Cert. PG – 4m

*****

As modern warfare decimates a landscape, a shrew crosses countryside and town as a small, spirit-like light falls towards it – short accompanies the UK cinema release of From Hilde, With Love on Friday, June 27th

Musician / songwriter Kate Bush originally recorded the song Snowflake, which appeared on her album 50 Words for Snow (2011), in part to record her young son Albert’s voice before it broke. The creative process is such that people don’t always know exactly why they do what they do, and that is clearly the case with this song, since Kate has returned to it after the event to direct an animated film around it. Animation being a painstakingly slow production process, the soundtrack for the short is an edit of the song, pulling it down from almost 10 minutes to 4 minutes. The 4-minute edit is surprisingly coherent and seems to distil the essence of the piece.

Most of the lyrics are sung by Albert, yet Kate sings the haunting refrain:

The world is so loud

Keep falling

I’ll find you

It’s impossible to listen to this without thinking she is the mother somehow waiting for her falling son, whatever that means.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Red Path
(Les Enfants Rouges,
الذراري الحمر)

Director – Lotfi Achour – 2024 – Tunisia, France, Belgium, Poland, Saudi Arabia, Qatar – Cert. 15 – 100m

*****

When paradise is suddenly taken away from him, a young innocent must come to terms with stark and brutal forces of corruption and death – searing drama is out in UK cinemas on Friday, June 20th

** SPOILER ALERT**

Two boys are herding a flock of sheep cross-country. The older one (Wided Dabebi), who tells the younger not to be scared, but to watch out for mines, knows his way around. The younger one Achraf (Ali Helali) hasn’t told his mother he’s doing this, because he knows she would have forbidden him from coming.

They are navigating the slopes of Tunisia’s Mighila Mountain, which is fabulously beautiful. They find a perfect place to give the sheep a rest, and the older one shows the younger a good spot – they climb to the top of a ridge, with a stunning, panoramic view of the local landscape, and bask on the rock in the sunshine. Life is good. In fact, it is paradise. After some time, they head back down to the watering hole they left earlier, plunge their heads in the cool water.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Shark Skin Man
and Peach Hip Girl
(Samehada Otoko
to Momojiri Onna,
鮫肌男と桃尻女)

Director – Katsuhito Ishii – 1998 – Japan – Cert. 15 – 108m

*****

Arresting and highly inventive thriller is out as a standalone Blu-ray release in the UK from Monday, April 14th 2025, also on digital, having previously appeared as the first disc of the three disc release Katsuhito Ishii Collection from Third Window Films just over a year ago (when the following piece was written for All the Anime).

Deriving its odd title from a literal translation of the leads’ surnames, Katsuhito Ishii’s highly original gangster movie from 1998 is based on a familiar plot: a man runs off with the mob’s money, and a lady companion. Or, as pioneering French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard once put it: all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun.

Shark Skin Man and Peach Hip Girl has much the same strengths as Godard when he’s on form. Ishii demonstrates a similar flair for taking actors or actresses and having them do what they do on camera so that it’s completely absorbing to watch: look no further than the extraordinary title sequence which starts about five minutes in and consists of little more than names and images of all the major cast members against a white background with overlaid black line animation images.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies

Away

Director – Gints Zilbalodis – 2019 – Latvia – Cert. U – 75m
****1/2
From the director of Oscar winner Flow (2024), his debut animated feature Away is exclusively back in cinemas from Friday, March 14th

It originally played in the 2019 Annecy International Animation Festival.

A boy hangs from a tree by a parachute in a wilderness. He wakes. A strange, towering black / grey figure approaches, shining as if metallic or viscous like a solidified, smooth, crude oil or tar. It picks him up. He is in a dark tunnel, light at one end. He goes the other way, is out of the giant’s clutches, runs. It slowly turns and lumbers after him. There are occasional, giant, semicircular hoops in his path. He goes through them, eventually entering a grotto, through which fully circular hoop the giant can’t follow. Welcome to the strange, dreamlike world of Away.

Beyond an abandoned motorbike, in the middle of the grotto, is a lake bordered with orange trees and the ocean. The boy feeds, bathes and makes the acquaintance of a shy, little yellow bird. Finding a key and a map in a rucksack, the boy learns that the semicircular hoops mark a route to a harbour.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies

Giants of La Mancha
(Argentina: Gigantes;
Germany: Das Geheimnis
von La Mancha;
Spain: Los Exploradores;
US: Storm Crashers)

Director – Gonzalo Gutiérrez – 2024 – Argentina, Germany, Spain – Cert. U – 88m

***1/2

The young, present day descendants of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza must save La Mancha from a villainous property developer – animated children’s adventure is out in UK cinemas on Friday, March 7th

(UK cinemas are showing the English language version: further voice credits are given for Spanish and German language versions, where available.)

Alfonso (voice: English: Micke Alejandro Morena Lamprea; Spanish: Patricio Lago; German: Julian Jansson) the great, great, great, great, great-grandson of Don Quixote, lives with his parents in the small Spanish village of La Mancha which is under threat of terrible storms that the occupants attribute to climate change. Like his ancestor, Alfonso misreads things, such as an impending storm which he believes to be a storm monster.

He and his dad Dan Quixote (voice: English: Bradley Krupsaw), who alone among all the characters here speaks in rhyming couplets, and his mum (voice: English: Jennifer Moule; Spanish: Carla Petersen) are both idealists, to the extent that Dan is the one person in the village who has refused to sign his home over to besuited property developer Mr. Carrasco (voice: English: Thomas Harris), whose snake oil salesman charms seem to have convinced all the other villagers to sell up and move out to his development “with children in mind” of Carascoland, towards which they are currently heading in their cars en masse, despite Alfonso’s hurtling around on his bicycle warning everybody of the storm monster heading in their direction.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies

Dragonkeeper
(Gardiana de Dragones)

Director – Li Jianping, Salvador Simó – 2023 – Spain, China – Cert. PG – 98m

****

Faced by powerful forces of empire and a ruthless traitor, a girl must accompany an old dragon to ensure the survival of its egg – out in UK cinemas on Friday, September 27th

Ancient China. As revealed in a voice-over and an ancient, panoramic, wall-hanging scroll, the empire of the humans united with the dragons to successfully defeat necromancy. But then, the Emperor turned on the dragons, hunting them.

A long time after these events have occurred, a hard-nosed trader Master Lan (voice in the English language version: Tony Jayawardena) and his wallas are receiving some goods at a trading post when they stumble upon an abandoned baby girl. One of the wallas notices strange, blue-lit rocks floating near the baby. The group take the girl back across mountain ranges and vast plains to their small town.

Around eight years later, Ping (voice: Mayalinee Griffith) is living in that town, in the care of an old lady Lao Ma (voice: Sarah Lam), and feeding her pet rat Hua Hua (non-dialogue voice: Jonathan David Mellors) who lives in a hole in a storehouse and often goes with her in her jacket or any container or bag she might be carrying.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Hard Miles

Director – R.J. Daniel Hanna – 2023 – US – Cert. 12a – 108m

****1/2

A youth facility social worker takes a group of troubled young men on a transformative team bicycle ride – out on Blu-ray, DVD & Digital Monday, September 2nd

Day-to-day life is one thing after another for Colorado medium-security correction school staff member Greg Townsend (Matthew Modine). He is in court defending, failing to get the court to see one of his charges as a human being rather than someone who committed an offence. Leaving, he finds someone has stolen his bicycle (it later gets found by the police, having sustained only minor damage). He is fielding calls from his prison-incarcerated brother about their father, who is in a care home and may not have much longer to live, and with whom Greg has not had contact for years. He is at the school, pulling boys apart as they attack each other for the most trivial remark.

However, not everything is about work and family responsibility. Greg is a cycling enthusiast, and is looking forward to taking his booked holiday of a week or more off cycling 1 000 (well, 762) miles to the Grand Canyon. Except that his boss Skip (Leslie David Baker) wants him to fill in that week, which Greg isn’t going to do.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Sasquatch Sunset

Director – David & Nathan Zellner – 2024 – US – Cert. 15 – 88m

****

As recreated by actors wearing primate suits, a family of Sasquatches are photographed in the wild over the course of a year – on Blu-ray and Digital from Monday, August 26th, packed with more than three hours of UK exclusive special features

In the US and Canada, the Bigfoot or Sasquatch is a staple of American folklore; a primate alleged to live in various American woodlands habitats, an assertion supported by such dubious artefacts as the Patterson-Gimlin film, amateur footage of a Bigfoot female walking through a forest. It’s far from conclusive, and could well be a man in an ape suit.

There is, however, no doubt whatsoever that the four Sasquatches in Sasquatch Sunset are human beings wearing ape suits. The film doesn’t try to pass itself off as anything other than actors playing a family of the creatures, and uses no narration voice-over to tell the audience what to think. Rather, it follows its creatures through a year of their existence in the wild, from Spring through Winter. It isn’t attempting to prove the existence of these creatures one way or the other; rather, it’s an attempt to imagine what they might look like and how they might behave if they were (or are) real.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Sorcery (Brujería)

Director – Christopher Murray – 2023 – Chile, Mexico, Germany – Cert. 15 – 100m

*****

When the father of an indigenous Christian convert is murdered by her German Christian employer’s dogs, her thirst for justice leads her to employ occult folk magic against his family – out in UK cinemas on Friday, June 14th

1881. Chiloé, the Northernmost island of an archipelago off the coast of Chile. Indigenous, 13-year-old Rosa (Valentina Véliz Caileo) works as a maid for German immigrant Stefan (Sebastian Hülk from All Quiet on the Western Front, Edward Berger, 2022; Little Joe, Jessica Hausner, 2019; The White Ribbon, Michael Haneke, 2009) who together with his wife (Annick Durán) runs a sheep farm. The couple have two young boys, Thorsten (Matías Bannister) and Franz (Iker Echevers). The family are Christians, and Rosa is a convert to that religion.

One day, Stefan’s sheep lie dead in his field, with woven garlands of vegetation round their necks. With tensions understandably high, Rosa’s father approaches Stefan holding a knife, and Stefan releases his two dogs upon him, killing the man. Rosa later places a makeshift cross of two sticks bound together on his basic grave, which she and Stefan’s family visit, Stefan’s wife pointing out that the man wasn’t a Christian.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Kingdom of the
Planet of the Apes

Director – Wes Ball – 2024 – US – Cert. 12a – 145m

*****

The fourth entry in the current franchise reboot takes place several generations after the previous three films when apes live in scattered communities and humans have lost the power of speech – out in UK cinemas on Thursday, May 9th

Noa (Owen Teague) has deep-seated feelings of failure. His father is the head of the Eagle Clan, a tribe of chimps who live in symbiosis with trained eagles, and Noa thinks nothing of scaling the highest local rock face to steal his own eagle egg for later bird rearing. He goes on such quests with his two loyal friends, the male Anaya (Travis Jeffery) and the female Soona (Lydia Peckham). He also values the wisdom of Raka (Peter Macon), an orangutan with considerable knowledge of the generations-old teachings of Ceasar.

Noa spots a human girl (Freya Allan) sneaking around the village and environs. A short while later, all hell breaks loose as a cavalry of masked apes attack and burn the village. Noa resolves to leave the safety of the local valley and venture into the land beyond on horseback, accompanied by Raka. They soon realise the non-speaking girl is following on foot, and no sooner have they coax her into joining their quest than they run into first a herd of humans at a small forest pool, then the mounted masked gorillas from whom they must rescue the silent girl.… Read the rest