Tag: outside

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Features Live Action Movies

Riddle of Fire

Director – Weston Razooli – 2023 – US – Cert. 12a – 115m

****

Two siblings and their friend get caught up in a quest through the great hills and woods of Wyoming on their bikes to find a speckled egg so they can bake the boys’ sick mother a blueberry pie – out on Blu-ray and DVD on Monday, July 8th

Wyoming. Young siblings Hazel (Charlie Stover) and Jodie A’Dale (Skyler Peters) along with their slightly older friend Alice (Phoebe Ferro) break into the Otomo warehouse to steal a videogame console so they can play on the TV during the Summer holidays. Alas, they’ve reckoned without the two boys’ mother (Danielle Hoetmer) password protecting the TV. She currently has the worst cold she has ever had and isn’t going to relent on the password for the foreseeable future – it’s a beautiful day, and she wants them outside enjoying themselves, not cooped up in the house – unless the kids go to the store and get her a blueberry pie, the one thing that would make her feel better.

So the three kids set out for the local store on their pushbikes, but on arrival find the place has run out of blueberry pies and the cook is off sick (perhaps there’s a bug going around).… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Movies Shorts

Pachyderm
(Pachyderme)

Director – Stéphanie Clément – 2022 – France – 11m

*****

A nine-year-old struggles with the trauma that befalls her at her grandpa’s – nominated for Best Animated Short at the 2024 Academy Awards, VoD details below review

She’s nine (voice-over: Christa Theret), and in the Summer she goes to stay with granny and grandpa. She plays on a swing, missing mum and dad, she watches a cabbage white butterfly in the garden. The house is tidy, ordered, perhaps obsessively so. It smells of polish; the kitchen smells of bleach. Tomorrow, grandpa will take her to the lake, where he likes to fish. To get to her bedroom, she must pass the big, intimidating horn mounted at the top of the stairs, a hunting trophy from a pachyderm. In her room, she can see eyes watching her from the wood grain of the ceiling timbers. She doesn’t sleep by counting sheep; she kills monsters. As the floorboards creak outside her door, she hides in the wallpaper, in the flowers, in sleep. After all, as grandma says, what could happen?

Before the trip, she accidentally pricks a finger on one of grandpa’s fishing hooks – lures, as they call them – but grandpa kisses the cut better with the kiss that heals all things.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Lucid

Director – Adam Morse – 2018 – UK – Cert. 15 – 86m

***

Available on Sky, Virgin, iTunes, Amazon, Xbox, PlayStation, Microsoft from Monday, September 7th

After his clearly well-heeled mother (Sadie Frost) gives Zel (Laurie Calvert) a thick envelope of notes for the last time, he goes out and gets himself a job as car park attendant at an exclusive members club. This involves sitting in a small booth with a window and making the monied customers feel welcome as they drive in in their flash cars. It also involves putting up with smart-suited but boorish boss Theo (Cristian Solimeno) although the latter’s girlfriend Kat (Sophie Kennedy Clark) proves considerably more friendly.

Meanwhile, Zel has developed a crush on Jasmin (Felicity Gilbert), one of his fellow residents in the block in which his flat in one of the more upmarket bits of Central London is situated, but is too tongue tied to do anything about it. He makes the acquaintance of another neighbour Elliot (Billy Zane), a therapist who offers, for free, to coach him in lucid dreaming, i.e. dreams in which the dreamer is fully conscious. These provide the dreamer with a safe space, for example to talk to a member of the opposite sex they fancy.… Read the rest