Categories
Art Features Live Action Movies

Leonora
in the Morning Light
(Leonora
im Morgenlicht)

Directors – Thor Klein, Lena Vurma – 2025 – Germany, Romania, Mexico, UK – Cert. 15 – 103m

**

In Mexico, France, Spain and the England of her childhood, Surrealist painter Leonora Carrington must confront her personal demons – out in UK and Ireland cinemas on Friday, May 29th

Deserted hillsides, a sliver of a road, eventually a tiny red car moving along it, to the accompaniment of a pulsating electronic score suggesting the present day. Another stretch of road: the car drops off the woman, in stylish trousers and blouse, who smokes observing the landscape. The driver gets out to photograph her, much to her displeasure, but he’s run out of film.

An illustrated title card: Death. Xilitla, Mexico, 1951. The man takes her to the rooming house of Edward (Ryan Gage), leaving her as he promises to look after their son. Outside the window, she can hear the two men discuss all that has happened to her. Her madness.

©Mirjam Kluka, Dragonfly films, Alamode Film

She and Edward are riding with others in the back of a lorry on a road. In Spanish, she asks a woman on the lorry (Yasmira Escárrega) about her amulet – “a sacred stone that illuminated the path through the underworld”.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Live Action Movies

Deep Sea
(Shen Hai,
深海)

Director – Tian Xiaoping – 2023 – China – Cert. PG – 112m

Subtitled ***1/2 / Dubbed **

A girl on a cruise, who never got over her mother leaving, falls overboard into fantastical worlds – out in UK cinemas on Friday, June 7th

A red child’s coat with a hood lies abandoned on the sea bed. A girl’s feet stagger through a blizzard. She calls out for her mama. But her mama (voice: Ji Jing), a swirling mass of dark hair and eyes, is leaving. And now, the girl is lifted above the sea bottom (as we now realise this location to be) by what appears to be swirling red paint. She wakes, in her coat, on the bus. It was a dream.

Her stepmum (voice: Yang Ting) tells Shenxiu (voice: Wang Tingwen) not to mess around on the bus as she starts pulling faces at her little brother (voices: Dong Yi, Fang Taochen). She boards a big cruise ship, looking at texts from her absent mum, who is separated from her dad (voice: Teng Kuixing). Mum told her about the Hyjinx – if you made a wish on your birthday, it would come and make your wish come true.… Read the rest