Tag: missing

Categories
Animation Features Movies

Wallace & Gromit
Vengeance Most Fowl

Directors – Nick Park, Merlin Crossingham – 2024 – UK – Cert. U – 79m

*****

Feathers McGraw returns to wreak havoc with Wallace’s latest invention, robotic garden smart gnomes – out in UK cinemas on Wednesday, December 18th 2024, on the BBC on Christmas Day, and on Netflix from Friday, January 3rd 2025

Opening with the capture, some years ago, of notorious master criminal Feathers McGraw (voice: none) for the attempted theft of the blue diamond, foiled by simple Lancastrian inventor Wallace (voice: Ben Whitehead, doing an amazing job replacing the late Peter Sallis) and his smart pet dog Gromit (voice: none), this second feature sees Wallace inventing furiously, making next to no money and the household bills pile up.

However, all that is about to change with Wallace’s latest gadget, Norbot the Smart Gnome (voice: Reece Shearsmith) who, voice-instructed by his inventor to make Gromit’s carefully tended garden “neat and tidy”, chops down most of the put-upon pooch’s cherished, colourful flowerbeds to replace them with something resembling a Brutalist version of the Gardens of the Palace of Versailles.

This impresses the neighbours and passing tradesman, causing Wallace – a lightbulb sign from a stationery van (hilariously parked behind him) above his head – to realise that he has a potential business startup here.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Johatsu
(Johatsu)

Directors – Lina Lužytė, Nerijus Milerius – 2024 – Lithuania – 83m

***

A woman who checks bodies entering a morgue investigates one that she is convinced has been registered under a false name – premieres in the Critics’ Picks Competition of the 28th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival

The concept of Johatsu or ‘vanished people’ – which is never explained here, merely name-checked in the title – originated in Japan, where it refers to people who vanish from their everyday lives without a trace. One way to achieve that goal would be to fake your own death, which is exactly what Lina (Zygimante Elena Jakstaite) believes she has stumbled upon someone doing as this opens.

Lina works as an orderly in a morgue. When the fresh corpse of a man supposedly blown up in an explosion on a ship is identified as her husband by his widow, Lina becomes convinced that the woman is lying, and that the body is that of someone else entirely. Which begs the question, what happened to the real husband?

First off, Lina takes it upon herself to visit and question the supposed dead man’s wife. Talking to the woman, she discovers that before the body turned up, the husband had already been ‘missing’ for around three years.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Reawakening

Director – Virginia Gilbert – 2024 – UK – Cert. 15 – 90m

***

When a couple’s daughter returns after a decade’s long absence, the husband starts to suspect she is not really their daughter – out in UK cinemas on Friday, September 13th

It’s been ten years since their daughter Clare left home at 14. Not a day has gone by for her parents John (Jared Harris) and Mary (Juliet Stevenson) when they haven’t thought about her. The couple are in touch with the police and give periodic press conferences which have, so far, yielded nothing in the way of results.

Yet John, a self-employed electrician, has never given up hope. On the streets, he looks out for his daughter in the hope that he might one day see her again. And then, one day, he sees her sitting at then getting up from a table outside a café. He runs towards her, nearly getting hit by a car in the process, then follows her only to lose her down a turning.

Every morning at the primary school where she teaches, his wife Mary re-pins the poster of their missing daughter over the top of other bits of posters pinned on top of it to ensure that it can be clearly seen.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

The Wicker Man:
The Final Cut

Director – Robin Hardy – 1973 – UK – Cert. 15 – 94m

*****

A Christian police sergeant investigating a missing child on a remote Scottish island meets a terrible fate – out as a Collector’s Edition UHD / Blu-ray /DVD from Monday, September 25th following its release in UK cinemas in a 4K restoration from Wednesday, June 21st, 2023

(Originally reviewed for cinema release in a 2K restoration on Friday, September 27th, 2013)

Originally released forty years ago in the UK in a cut down version its director disliked, The Wicker Man now reaches our cinema screens in a longer, restored version which he says fulfils his original vision. Its plot is deceptively simple. A Christian police sergeant flies to a remote Scottish island in response to a letter about a missing child. But when he arrives on Summerisle, no-one seems to have heard of that child. It gradually emerges that the policeman has stumbled into an intricate web of lies and deceit wherein a terrible fate awaits him….

Using material from a recently discovered, longer US release print – rechristened The Final Cut by Hardy who assembled this cut in 1979 – it’s a provocative work on a number of levels.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies Shorts

Piggy
(Cerdita)

Director – Carlota Pereda – 2022 – Spain – Cert. 18 – 99m

*****

Director – Carlota Pereda – 2018 – Spain – 13m

*****

Fat-shaming, bullying, overbearing mothers, growing up as the local butcher’s daughter, and more – feature based on short is out in UK cinemas on Friday, January 6th

Sara (Laura Galán) is attempting to navigate the difficult waters of adolescence. It isn’t much fun if you’re different and cliques of your contemporaries gang up on you. In Sara’s case, she isn’t just fat, she’s also introverted and shuns people, which compounds the amount she gets teased. She often works in her father’s butchers shop, so bullies can easily put together insults based on fat and flesh and pork and meat. A clique of three, thinner girls – Roci (Camille Aguilar) and Maca (Claudia Salas) and their unwilling hanger-on Claudia aka Clau (Irene Ferreiro) – call her Piggy.

It’s Summer, and everyone is going down to the Madrigal (Waterfall) festivities at the pool on the river, where a mysterious out-of-towner is lounging about, but Sara sneaks down there later for a swim when she hopes nobody is around. She’s just getting into the water when the stranger (Richard Holmes) surfaces innocently, startling her.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies

Violet Evergarden
The Movie
(Gekijouban
Violet Evergarden,
劇場版 ヴァイオレット
・エヴァーガーデン)

Director – Taichi Ishidate – 2020 – Japan – Cert. 12a – 139m

***1/2

Violet Evergarden struggles to come to terms with the loss of the man she loved in the war… then discovers that he may still be alive – in cinemas for six days from Thursday, July 1st

Being a companion piece / coda to a long-running anime series, it’s possible this may leave the newcomer feeling somewhat adrift, at least for the first reel or so. Young girl Daisy’s grandmother Ann has just died. We learn very little about Ann beyond the fact that she used to regularly receive letters from her own mother beyond her mother’s death.

This was accomplished by Auto Memory Dolls, not as you might suppose some sort of animate toys but rather girl employees of the CH Postal Service who wrote letters for people close to death for their loved ones to receive and read afterwards. That business is on the verge of disappearing as the new technology of the telephone takes hold, wiping out the market for the Dolls’ services.

One such Auto Memory Doll was Violet Evergarden who had previously worked in the war where she was weaponised by Major Gilbert.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Relic

Director – Natalie Erica James – 2019 – Australia – Cert. 15 – 89m

****1/2

A daughter and her mother must look after their ageing grandmother in her house which seems to possess a dark character – in cinemas and platforms including BFI Player from Friday, October 30th and now Shudder UK from Tuesday, 11th May 2021

Driving from Melbourne to visit her grandmother Edna in her house in the country, grown-up daughter Sam (Bella Heathcote) and her mother Kay (Emily Mortimer) get a phone call from the local policeman informing them the old lady has gone missing. When they get to the house and enter via the large cat flap, sure enough grandma is nowhere to be found. It feels lived in though, even though there are rooms filled with boxes of junk she’s never managed to sort out or get rid of. They try and tidy up, but it’s a huge task and they barely make a dent in what needs to be done.

They go out with police combing the local woods, to no avail. Sam runs into friendly next door neighbour with learning difficulties Jamie (Chris Bunton), 18, who lives at home with his father. James has no idea where Edna is either.… Read the rest