Tag: parents and children

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Features Live Action Movies

The End of Oak Street

Director – David Robert Mitchell – 2026 – US – Cert. 12a – 99m

Film ***

Prehistoric Beasts *****

A family in a pleasant American suburb is inexplicably transported to a prehistoric time where dinosaurs and other dangerous creatures roam – out in UK cinemas on Friday, August 14h

A typical family in 1980s American suburbia. At a local community get together, Greg (Ewan McGregor) takes part in a sack race. His wife Denise (Anne Hathaway) takes him aside for a serious conversation about their marriage, which she doesn’t think is working. She is also annoyed that their son Brian (Christian Convery) has bought along their dog Starbuck (played by dogs Buzz and Brisket) who has a habit of getting out of control. Denise is further frustrated when Greg bunks off to do some deliveries (it later transpires that she hates the Pizza Delivery sign he fixes to the car roof when doing his rounds.) The family also has a young teenage daughter Audrey (Maisy Stella).

Denise pays a visit to her elderly friend Mrs. Huddleston (a striking turn form Anne Gee Byrd) who is somewhat perturbed as to the identity of the flower that has sprung up in her garden, growing to about four feet high in two days and resembling a small palm tree or yucca bearing a fruit something like an acorn about the size of a hand.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies

Bouchra

Directors – Orian Barki, Meriem Bennani – 2025 – Italy, Morocco, US – Cert. 15 – 83m

***1/2

A queer artist and filmmaker jackal living in New York desperately wants to come out to her mother back in conservative Morocco – out in UK cinemas on Friday, August 7th

This opens with a lengthy, bravura shot framing a section of a moving carriage on an urban, New York train. Inside, passengers include our main protagonist, the eponymous, anthropomorphised, leather jacket-clad, female jackal Bouchra, standing. The shot is static in the sense that the camera and the train are moving completely in sync, so that the moving carriage, although clearly moving, is motionless relative to the viewer (apart from the occasional judder caused by the travelling of the train).

As the train travels its route, our moving view of the moving carriage is constantly interrupted by objects between us and the carriage – grids of cabling, sections of barrier and other trackside features. This momentarily recalls the similar urban carriage interior early on in Perfect Blue (Satoshi Kon, 1997), although there are no reflections here, merely levels, and any similarity between the two films stops beyond this point.

Bouchra is very different from Perfect Blue in intent, with a narrative – such as it is – that feels as if someone is shooting a documentary within New York’s queer subculture, capturing footage on camera and seeing what turns up, then trying to turn the resultant footage into a film.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Exit 8
(Hachiban Deguchi,
8番出口)

Director – Genki Kawamura – 2025 – Japan – Cert. 15 – 95m

*****

A commuter tries to leave the Tokyo Underground but finds himself retracing his steps within a repeating system from which there is no exit – out on digital Monday, June 8th and Blu-ray Monday, June 29th in the UK and Ireland

A packed carriage on the Tokyo Underground. A commuter (Kazunari Ninomiya from Letters from Iwo Jima, Clint Eastwood, 2006), heading to his first day at a new job, can’t help but notice a young mother whose baby is crying. This is not a situation anyone likes to find themselves in, least of all the young mother. One male passenger takes it upon himself to berate and belittle the woman for selfishly allowing her child to make a noise in such a crowded, public space, inconveniencing everyone present. On one level, is he simply voicing what everyone else in the carriage is thinking? On another, is he completely out of order? After all, the mother is not the child making the noise, and she is doing her best to calm it. The irate passenger is clearly not helping the situation.

Perhaps someone should intervene and tell the man to leave the woman alone.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies

Little Amélie
or
The Character of Rain
(Amélie
et
la Métaphysique des Tubes)

Directors – Maïlys Vallade & Liane-Cho Han – 2025 – France – Cert. PG – 77m

*****

A Belgian diplomat’s baby daughter growing up in Japan comes to realise, by her third birthday, that she is not God – plays in the Annecy International Animation Festival 2026 which runs from Sunday, 21st June to Saturday 27th June.

In the beginning was God. At least, that’s how the new-born Amélie (French language version voice: Loïse Charpentier) sees herself. She is, essentially, a tube which swallows, digests and ejects (as per the film’s French language title). She has a perfect command of verbal language, so sees no need to say anything. That said, she makes great use of voice-over throughout the piece. She remains motionless, practising “the gift of serenity”. “Your child is a vegetable”, proclaims a doctor to the child’s parents. She remains in this state until her second birthday, when life is interrupted by an earthquake – nothing significant in the wider scheme of things, but a momentous event in the interior life of a small child. She attempts to speak, but to her horror the words in her head don’t emerge, only baby noises.

Amelie is the third child of Patrick (French voice: Marc Arnaud) and Danièle (French voice: Laetitia Coryn), and has two older siblings, Juliette (French voice: Haylee Issembourg) and André (French voice: Isaac Schoumsky).… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies

Teenage Mutant
Ninja Turtles
Mutant Mayhem

Directors – Jeff Rowe, Kyler Spears – 2022 – US – Cert. PG – 99m

*****

The much loved comic-generated franchise gets a remarkable reboot in animation that breaks the filmmaking mould to really get under the skin of the teenage experience – plays in the Annecy International Animation Festival 2026 which runs from Sunday, 21st June to Saturday 27th June.

Hollywood animated children’s films since the advent of computer animation. They all look the same. Okay, that’s not entirely fair, but with notable exceptions like the Laika films and the recent Spider-Verse films there’s a definite homogeneity to this output overall, industry wisdom dictating the production parameters and the overall look and feel. There’s a mould there, the films make money and producers are terrified to break that mould. Not so here.

The irony is that the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles property, born out of a late night joke between two comic book artists who never expected to sell more than a one-off issue, has spawned numerous spin-offs in comics, animated TV series, video games and movies. Somehow, the previous six movies – three in the 1990s (including Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Steve Barron, 1990; Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret Of The Ooze, Michael Pressman, 1991), one in 2007, and two more in the last decade following a reboot in 2014 – never quite delivered on the promise of the franchise, as if everyone concerned was too focused on the moneymaking potential and trying to play everything safe, an approach completely at odds with that of the two artists who originated the property and simply thought of it as a fun idea worth developing.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies Music

Köln 75
(Köln 75)

Director – Ido Fluk – 2025 – Germany – Cert. 15 – 112m

*****

How an 18-year-old girl came to stage what would become the biggest selling jazz album in history – narrative feature is out in UK cinemas on Friday, June 5th

At a party honouring her career as a music promoter, 50-year-old Vera Brandes (Suzanne Wolff) is upbraided by her dentist father (Ulrich Tukur from The White Ribbon, Michael Haneke, 2009; The Lives of Others, Florian Henckel Von Donnersmarck, 2006; Solaris, Steven Soderbergh, 2002; Lulu, George Moorse, Peter Zadek, TV movie, 1991) that she never amounted to anything. In a quasi-documentary sequence, she intervenes as narrator to talk about this being a really bad start, and proceeds to play, like a presenter in a music documentary, some music takes abandoned by bad starts from, among others The Cramps and Bob Dylan.

The film starts again, this time with 18-year-old Vera Brandes (Mala Emde) who enjoys hanging out with friends at jazz venues, such as the one where English club owner Ronnie Scott (Daniel Betts from September 5, Tim Fehlbaum, 2024; Alien Romulus, Fede Alvarez, 2024; Allied, Robert Zemeckis, 2016) is playing. Getting his attention by buying him an ice cream cone, Vera chats with him and, by the time she has walked her bicycle with him to his hotel has been commissioned to book him a European tour “because I can’t imagine anyone saying no to you.”… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

We’re Nothing
at All
(Ngo Mun
Bat Si Sam Mo,
我們不是什麼)

Director – Herman Yau – 2026 – China, Hong Kong – Cert. 18 – 128m

*****

A seasoned forensics expert pieces together the story behind a bus bombing as the lives and motives of those responsible is revealed in interweaving serial flashbacks – out in UK and Ireland cinemas on Friday, May 29th

A police procedural but not exactly a thriller. This starts off with an unforgettable sequence as, below us, a bus silently weaves its way through streets. And then, without warning, explodes. You’d be forgiven for thinking that, after this bravura opening, you’re in for yet another Hong Kong cops and robbers action movie. And yet, while this is undeniably a police procedural, and contains enough gore and grisly bits to earn it a BBFC 18 certificate, it’s far from your standard HK action outing. Given that Herman Yau’s previous work has included a thriller about a cannibal serial killer The Eight Immortals Restaurant – the Untold Story aka Bunman – the Untold Story (1993) and cops and robbers bomber thriller Shock Wave (2017), this is something of a surprise.

Rather, it’s a drama. If you will, a police forensics drama. The matter of fact, real time nature of the opening sequence introduces no characters whatsoever.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Father Mother
Sister Brother

© Vague Notion 2024 Yorick Le Saux

Director – Jim Jarmusch – 2025 – US – Cert. 12a – 110m

*****

Three separate stories follow visits by three separate sets of adult siblings to, respectively, an elderly father, an elderly mother, and a deceased parents’ cleared home – streams exclusively on MUBI from Friday, May 29th

This harks back to a couple of earlier Jarmusch movies which similarly consist of a small number of stories: Night on Earth (1991) with five cabbies on one night in different cities and Mystery Train (1989) with its three linked stories set during one night in Memphis. There’s no suggestion that the three stories in Father Mother Sister Brother – set in rural North America, Dublin and Paris – are taking place simultaneously, international time differences notwithstanding, but they could well be, because all three take place in similarly good weather conditions. The first is rural, with snow on the ground, while the latter two are urban.

All three of FMSB’s stories feature similarities which link them beyond the overall siblings / parent(s) theme. These are both expected – car journeys to the home of the parent or parents, time spent in their presence or absence – and unexpected – skateboarders seen from the can en route, a Rolex watch.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Live Action Movies

Godzilla Minus One
(Gojira -1.0,
ゴジラ -1.0)

Director – Takashi Yamazaki – 2023 – Japan – Cert. 12a – 124m

*****

Japan, defeated and demoralised after World War Two, must somehow defeat the seemingly unstoppable menace of Godzilla when it rises from the depths of the ocean – out on Netflix from Sunday, May 3rd 2026

World War Two, Pacific theatre. Unwilling Kamikaze pilot Koichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) feigns engine trouble and lands on an island for aircraft maintenance, where he is grounded. While there, he notices deep sea fish curiously floating on the surface of the surrounding ocean: they presage the arrival of a huge monster, named Godzilla by the locals. With Koichi failing to fire his 20mm aircraft guns at the creature to kill it, almost everyone else on the small island is killed. (Whether his guns would have had any effect in halting the creature’s advance is debatable. They probably wouldn’t have had any effect whatsoever.) The only other survivor, who had previously congratulated Koichi for a near impossible landing on a tiny runway, blames him for the multiple deaths because he didn’t pull the trigger.

In 1945, in the ruins of post-war Tokyo, Shikishima is accused by a survivor – a woman whose children have died – of being a disgrace.… Read the rest

Categories
Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Ada
My Mother the Architect

Director – Yael Melamede – 2024 – US – Cert. 12a – 81m

***1/2

A portrait by her New York-based daughter of top Israeli architect Ada Karmi Melamede – out in UK cinemas on Friday, May 1st

This opens with the filmmaker daughter asking her architect mother if she wants to speak English or Hebrew. The mother is happy to speak both. For the titles, we watch her hands drawing / designing buildings on white paper as we hear various one-liners about her qualities as an architect.

Daughter Yael lists “ a few things you should know about my mother.” Ada Karmi Melamede is eighty and goes to the office every day. She is one of a family of architects who built Israel from the ground up. She left Israel twice, once to study in London and once to spend time in New York, where Yael and her family grew up. She returned to Tel Aviv in 1983 and her career took off: she has been working ever since. The Israel Supreme Court. Airports. Universities.

Architecture seems to be her model for discussing the world. She talks about the importance of roots in buildings, decrying glass towers that have no roots, of which she clearly thinks there are too many.… Read the rest