Tag: London Film Festival

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Wrath Of Silence
(Bao Lie Wu Sheng,
暴裂无声)

Director – Xin Yukun – 2017 – China – 120m

***

Fist of parental fury: mute villager fights hard to find his missing son in rural China, in a film teeming with extraordinary social commentary and… fighting!!! From the BFI London Film Festival 2017

The young boy Zhang Liu tends sheep on a hillside in Northern China not far from a mine where lorries come and go. One day he doesn’t come home. His mother, already in debt for various medical treatments for her swollen legs, is at her wits’ end. The boy’s mute father, the miner Zhang Baomin (Song Yang), has a way of solving problems. Fisticuffs. He beats up people in the local mine. In the village restaurant he plunges a broken meat bone into the eye of the local organiser of signatures to sign away the village mining rights for which he’s holding out but everyone else in the village has signed. He goes around showing a picture of the missing Liu in the hope that someone has seen the boy.

This takes him to a local mining site where he’s inside eating with the foreman when thugs turn up in vans and jeeps to tell the miners a new company has bought out the mine and their service are no longer required.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies

I Lost My Body
(J’ai Perdu
Mon Corps)

Director – Jérémy Clapin – 2019 – France – Cert. 12a – 81m

****1/2
A severed hand searches for its body while a boy searches for the girl who he only knows from the sound of her voice in this French animated feature – from the BFI London Film Festival then in cinemas on Friday, November 22nd and on Netflix from Friday, November 29th

This unique 2D animation opens with a discussion about how to catch a fly before splitting into two parallel narratives. In one, a severed hand goes on a quest in search of the body from which it has become detached. In the other, boy meets girl. This is the boy who at a later point in the film will lose his hand in an accident. The opening fly discussion turns out to be a flashback of the boy.

The hand shows great ingenuity as it escapes rats in a subway, climbs medical skeletons in a storage room and duels with an aggressive pigeon in a roof gutter. It has a pretty hard time of it physically. And when it eventually finds its body, reuniting with it proves far from simple.

The boy, Naoufel (voiced by Hakim Faris in the seen French version and Dev Patel in the upcoming English dub), is working as a pizza delivery boy, a job to which he isn’t particularly suited.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Cam

Director – Daniel Goldhaber – 2018 – US – Cert. 15 – 94m

***1/2

An erotic webcam performer discovers to her horror that her online presence has been hacked by an unknown rival, in a film conceived by a real-life cam artist– from the 62nd BFI London Film Festival and on Netflix from Friday, November 16th 2018

Alice (Madeline Brewer) is in charge of her destiny, or so it seems. From a secret and self-contained, fluffy pink studio set up in her apartment, she promotes herself as her online persona Lola who hosts her own live online erotic shows where enthusiastic fans can encourage her to do specific things by sending her virtual currency. Her goal is to become number one on the site which hosts her and many thousands of other hopefuls, but she seems to have got stuck somewhere around the rank of 60th. What’s a camgirl to do in order to boost her ratings?

Clearly, spicing the sex up with a little violence is a winner, so when one of her admirers encourages her to use a knife, while others egg her on and other still try to talk her out of it, Lola cuts her throat online.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Little Forest
(리틀 포레스트)

Director – Yim Soon-Rye – 2018 – South Korea – 103m

*****

This review originally appeared in DMovies.org.

The passing of the seasons. A young woman finds her true self in the Korean countryside in this adaptation of a Japanese manga; the outcome will make you drool, for more reasons than one – from the BFI London Film Festival (LFF) and the London Korean Film Festival (LKFF)

Raised in the countryside by her mother (Moon So-ri) but dissatisfied with life there, Hye-won (Kim Tae-ri) moves to Seoul and acquires a boyfriend. But after both of them have taken their exams, she returns to the village in which she grew up to get some space and think about her life.

The boyfriend has passed his exams and is hoping she has done the same, leaving messages on her voicemail to this effect, but she’s still waiting for her own result to come through. She doesn’t respond to his messages.

For reasons that aren’t immediately apparent, but which surface to a degree in the course of the narrative, her mother has left, presumably to start a new life now that the job of raising a well adjusted daughter is complete.… Read the rest