Tag: lodgings

The Girl
with the Needle
(Pigen med Nålen)

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 9 January 2025
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with the Needle
(Pigen med Nålen)
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Director – Magnus Van Horn – 2024 – Denmark, Sweden, Poland – Cert. 15 – 123m

*****

A young Copenhagen woman’s attempts to escape poverty following the Great War lead her into a dark nightmare – Denmark’s entry for Best International Feature is out in UK and Ireland cinemas on Friday, January 10th

In the darkness, faces writhing, superimposed on other faces. Katherine (Vic Carmen Sonne from Godland, 2022; Holiday, Isabella Eklöf, 2018), behind on the rent for her room by 14 months, is evicted. She works at a rag trade factory as a seamstress, where the owner Peter (Besir Zeciri) wants to be able to help her but cannot grant her widow’s supplement without proof of death of her husband, who has gone missing in the war. She manages to find herself cheaper lodgings. Sensing something more behind Peter’s kindness and an offer of a shoulder to rest on, Katherine has sex with him in an alley in broad daylight.

One day, her husband Jørgen (Joachim Fjelstrup) returns from the war, his face heavily disfigured. She takes him in but, unable to cope with his recurring nightmares, soon throws him out. Something similar is soon visited on her; Peter agrees to marry her, but when his mother (Benedikte Hansen from Borgen, TV series, 2010) explains that her son can do as he wants, but not with her money or her estate, he changes his mind (this, incidentally, is the same plot that drives Anora, Sean Baker, 2024).… Read the rest

Tags 1919, abortion, Academy Award, Academy Awards, Academy Awards 2024-25, Academy Awards 2025, Ava Knox Martin, Benedikte Hansen, Besir Zeciri, Best International Feature, Best International Feature 2024-25, Best International Feature 2025, black & white, board and lodging, business fee, business owner, casual labour, circus, community, Denmark, destitute, dismissed, eviction, facial disfiguration, factory, factory owner, fairy tale, fired, foster parents, freak show, husbands and wives, Joachim Fjelstrup, knitting needle, lack of social provision, lodgings, M.I.A., Magnus Van Horn, Michal Dymek, mothers and children, Oscar, Oscars, Oscars 2024-25, Oscars 2025, Poland, post-war, proof of death, public bath house, rag trade, recurring nightmare, redundant, rich and poor, sacked, seamstress, social provision, Sweden, sweetshop, Trine Dyrholm, true crime, Vic Carmen Sonne, war, wet nurse, widow, widow’s supplement, women’s health, World War I, World War One, WW1

Features Live Action Movies

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

A Chinese
Ghost Story
(Sien Lui Yau Wan,
倩女幽魂)

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 23 September 2023
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Ghost Story
(Sien Lui Yau Wan,
倩女幽魂)
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Director – Ching Siu Tung – 1987 – Hong Kong – Cert. 15 – 95m

*****

Some of the most seminal offerings of the commercial Hong Kong cinema are the product of creative wizard Tsui Hark. The producer who first gave John Woo his niche as bullet strewn action director on A Better Tomorrow (1986) also ensured director Ching Sui Tung’s place in fantasy film’s Hall of Fame with this stunning little offering.

The Hong Kong supernatural, fantasy genre is itself defined almost single-handedly by Tsui’s groundbreaking epic Zu: Warriors From the Magic Mountain (1983). CGS both typifies the genre and proves one of its finest examples. CGS spawned two sequels for what Tsui describes as “sentimental reasons – when the ghost died at the end, we want her to come back pretty badly.” He admits the sequels weren’t as good, though.

CGS opens in a downpour as a rain sodden Leslie Cheung (known to Western audiences from such diverse fare as A Better Tomorrow and art house hit Farewell My Concubine, Chen Kaige, 1993) watches a grim, head lopping argument between two bandits as he does his cowardly best to look inconspicuous. His work as a debt gatherer suffers something of a setback as he discovers the ink in his books has run with the damp, so once he arrives in the nearby town he’s unable to collect the payments he’d expected.… Read the rest