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Features Live Action Movies

Bodies Bodies Bodies

Director – Halina Reijn – 2022 – US – Cert. 15 – 94m

*

A make-believe party game of murder turns into horrifying reality when pretend dead bodies turn out to be really dead and the genuine body count continues to mount – out in UK cinemas on Friday, September 9th

Five women, three couples, two exes, one single. Seven people. Six twentysomethings. They gather in the house of one of their number David (Peter Davidson), whose absent parents are rich and the house and grounds reflect that. Sophie (Amandla Stenberg) and Bee (Maria Bakalova) have been together maybe six weeks. David and Emma (Chase Sui Wonders) longer. Alice (Rachel Sennott) and fortysomething Greg (Lee Pace) a mere two weeks. Jordan (Myha’la Herrold) is not coupled.

This is a hurricane party – a party held following a hurricane warning where power outages are likely, so people gather together to pool their perishable resources e.g. food from switched off fridges and avoid the need to travel over several days. The script assumes the audience knows all this, but to people living outside the US this may be a completely new concept; the script here makes much use of power outages but completely fails to exploit the shared resources and lack of travel aspects of the phenomenon.… Read the rest

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Animation Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Free Chol Soo Lee

Directors – Julia Ha, Eugene Yi – 2022 – US – Cert. 12a – 83m

****

Imprisoned for a murder he did not commit, Korean American Chol Soo Lee became a figurehead for a protest movement, something he felt unable to live up to – out in UK cinemas on Friday, August 19th

In San Francisco’s Chinatown in 1973, Korean loner Chol Soo Lee was arrested and subsequently convicted for a gang murder. While it’s true he had foolishly borrowed a gun off a work colleague a few days previously and accidentally discharged it into his apartment wall giving himself a police record, he was not the murderer. He was identified on the flimsiest of premises by unreliable witnesses, possibly not helped by white cops who wanted to convict a felon for the crime and consign the case to history.

On what was to be his last journey through the outside world before many years in prison, he heard the Tower of Power song “You’re still a young man” on a car radio crossing the Golden Gate Bridge. It resonated. As the years passed in prison, his mother abandoned him. He had fallen for a Japanese American girl he’d met Jean Ranko who subsequently told him in a letter that she had no romantic interest in him.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

The Third Murder
(Sandome
No Satsujin,
三度目の殺人)

Director – Hirokazu Kore-eda – 2017 – Japan – Cert. 15 – 124m

*****

For a director usually associated with family dramas like I Wish, Like Father, Like Son and After The Storm, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s The Third Murder might seem like a change of direction. It begins with a murder, and focussed on a lawyer trying to uncover what actually happened, a narrative template familiar from countless films about journalists in search of a story, detectives trying to solve crimes and courtroom dramas of lawyers at work.

Yet there are plenty of Kore-eda concerns evident here. Ambitious young lawyer Shigemori (Masaharu Fukuyama from Like Father Like Son and John Woo’s thriller ManHunt) is a workaholic estranged from his wife. His daughter commits petty offences like shoplifting. His client Misumi (Koji Yakusho) was imprisoned for a murder over thirty years ago, but since his release has confessed to a second murder. He, too, has a daughter, but she wants nothing to do with him.

As for the murder victim, [Read the remainder of the review at All The Anime…]

Trailer: