Tag: parents and children

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Features Live Action Movies

The Killing
Of Two Lovers

Director – Robert Machoain – 2020 – UK – Cert. 15 – 84m

****1/2

A family man separated from his wife who has agreed they can each see other people is consumed with hate for the other man she is now seeing – in cinemas and on Curzon Home Cinema from Friday, June 4th

Morning. She sleeps soundly, a man beside her in bed. A second man stands at the the foot of the bed pointing a revolver at her. The first two are unaware of this. Someone can be heard using the bathroom. The second man leaves through the bedroom window.

Small town America. Welcome to David’s world. He (Clayne Crawford) and wife Nikki (Sepideh Moafi) are experiencing marital problems. They have four kids, a teenage girl and three younger boys. As agreed, David has moved out to live with his infirm, widower dad a hundred yards down the road. The couple have agreed that, while they try and work things out between them, it’s okay for either of them to see other people.

However while David assents to this on an intellectual level, he doesn’t accept it at all on an emotional one. He has discovered his wife is seeing a man named Derek (Chris Coy) and is furious about it.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

A Quiet Place

Director – John Krasinski – 2018 – UK – Cert. 15 – 90m

*****

A family live on an isolated farm on an Earth where alien predators hunt by sound – out on DVD, Blu-ray and selected online services

NB This is the original film, not A Quiet Place Part II currently in cinemas.

The world is a changed place. Civilization as we know it has broken down. Earth’s population has been decimated by alien predators. Evelyn Abbot (Emily Blunt) goes through the meds on a shelf in a deserted store in town where her youngest son Beau (Cade Woodward) becomes attracted to a model spaceship because “that’s how we’ll get away from here”. When his dad Lee (John Krasinski, the film’s co-writer and director as well as Blunt’s real life husband) sees this, he removes batteries from the toy and forbids his son to take it. However, his daughter Regan (Millicent Simmonds) takes pity on Beau and slips it to him when her dad isn’t looking. And in similar fashion, when she isn’t looking the boy also takes the batteries. An act which will have fatal consequences for him and, going forward, a huge impact on the relationship dynamics within this family.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Cruella

Director – Craig Gillespie – 2020 – US, UK – Cert. 12a – 134m

****

A 101 Dalmatians prequel. How a girl named Estella unleashed her darker personality of Cruella de Vil – in cinemas from Friday, May 28th

Disney’s project of mining their pantheon of animated classics for live action feature material continues. Here it’s the turn of Cruella de Vil, the villain from 101 Dalmatians (Clyde Geronimi, Hamilton Luske, Wolfgang Reitherman, 1961), and a very clever reimagination it is too. It commences with her birth and cleverly conceals certain significant details of her upbringing only to reveal them at the tale’s climax and give everything that went before a completely new spin.

Estella (Tipper Siefert-Cleveland) is the daughter of Catherine (Emily Beecham). Befriended at school by Anita Darling (Florisa Kamara) but picked on by bullies, Estella gives as good as she gets, fights back and gets expelled for figuratively blotting her copybook. 

So her mother pays a visit to former employer the Baroness von Hellman (Emma Thompson) seeking help. But thanks to Estella’s refusal to do as she’s told and stay in the car and her dog Buddy’s strikingly similar refusal to obey Estella this plan goes fatally wrong.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Minari

Director – Lee Isaac Chung – 2020 – US – Cert. 12a – 120m

***1/2

The Korean immigrant experience in the US as a nuclear family set up a farm in Arkansas – on VoD from Friday, April 2nd, in drive-in cinemas from Monday, April 12th and cinemas from Monday, May 17th

Jacob (Steven Yeun – Burning, Lee Chang-dong, 2018; Okja, Bong Joon Ho, 2017), Monica (Yeri Han) and their two kids Anne (Noel Kate Cho) and David, 7 (Alan S. Kim), drive out to their new home in Arkansas. She is a little horrified that the home is a trailer on wheels supported by a basic frame, but he is thrilled that they have land with the best dirt (i.e. for growing things) America has to offer. They are surrounded by a vast area of countryside and woodlands. They speak mostly Korean, but are fluent in English and occasionally use it.

Eschewing the advice of a local water diviner, Jacob builds a well in some low ground where trees are nearby, reasoning that there must be water there. “Never pay for anything you can get for free,” he tells the attentive David, reminding him that in California, where they’ve moved from, they had nothing.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Movies Shorts

Snow Kid
(Xue Hai Zi,
雪孩子)

a.k.a. The Snow Child

Director – Lin Wenxiao – 1980 – China – Cert. N/C – 20m

***

A mother and her daughter build a snow child which comes to life and later saves the girl’s life – available to rent online in the UK & Ireland as part of the Shanghai Animation Film Studio Retro in the Chinese Cinema Season 2021 from Friday, February 12th to Wednesday, May 12th

Made a couple of years ahead of the perennial British Christmas TV animated favourite The Snowman (Jimmy T. Murakami, Dianne Jackson, 1982), this similarly has a story of a child making a snowman which then comes to life. A mother rabbit and her daughter live in a small house near the woods. The mother prepares food while her daughter plays with a rocking toy then suggests she and the child make a snowman, so they go outside and do exactly that.

After the mother has coaxed the child into using for the snowman’s eyes two precious longan seeds the child plans to plant next Spring, the girl tries to add a nose, but when her back is turned, the snow child pulls the carrot off and throws it on the ground.… 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

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Ilo Ilo
(爸妈不在家,
lit. Mom And Dad
Are Not Home)

Director – Anthony Chen – 2013 – Singapore – Cert. 12 – 99m

****

A Filipino maid must contend with the unruly son of a working Singaporean couple in a time of economic difficulty – now available to rent online in the new Chinese Cinema Season 2021 in the UK & Ireland as part of the Debut Spotlight strand until Wednesday, May 12th

1997, the Asian financial crisis is looming (see Default, 2018, Choi Kook-Hee) and the Leng family is under pressure. Secretary Hwee (Yeo Yann Yann) works for a shipping company that has hit difficult times: one of her jobs is to type up redundancy letters for staff who are about to be called into the manager’s office. She believes she and her immediate admin colleagues are safe. Her husband Teck (Chen Tian Wen) is a sales executive, but on the evidence of his pitching ‘unbreakable’ glass to a buyer – it breaks – is not that good at it.

The couple are expecting a second child. They’ve been so focused on work, though, that they perhaps haven’t spent as much time as they should with their son Jiale (Koh Jia Ler) who has the worst behaviour record in his school and is frequently the recipient of corporal punishment by the discipline teacher.… Read the rest

Categories
Documentary Features Movies

Bazaar Jumpers
(Pao Ku Shao Nian,
跑酷少年)

Director – Zhiqiang Hao – 2012 – China – Cert. N/C PG – 61m

***

Two Uyghur boys and their parkour team in Northern China hone their skills for an upcoming “China proper” tournament in Beijing – now available to rent online in the new Chinese Cinema Season 2021 in the UK & Ireland as part of the Approaching Reality documentary strand until Wednesday, May 12th

NB.

(1) Please read this review before watching because the recommended N/C PG certificate, while completely legal, perhaps ought to be higher because of one particular sequence (detailed in the final Spoiler Alert paragraph).

(2) The title seems to vary between Bazaar Jumper (singular) and Bazaar Jumpers (plural) on the film’s promotional literature. I’ve gone with the plural as that’s what’s on the film print. The singular is on the trailer below.

Urumqi, Xinjiang, one of the parts of Northern China with a large Uyghur section of the population. That’s not really writ large here, and as I was watching I was wondering what the spoken language was until I worked out it was Uyghur. The film is ostensibly about a group of late teenage, Muslim boys obsessed with parkour (free running), a physical craze in which obstacles such as buildings, walls and street furniture are climbed or traversed rather than gone around.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Movies Shorts

If Anything Happens
I Love You

Directors – Will McCormack, Michael Govier – 2020 – US – 12m

*****

A couple and their spirit selves are haunted by a tragic loss from their family’s past in this beautifully economic, drawn animated short about grief and loss – on Netflix and winner of Best Animated Short at the 2020 / 2021 (93rd) Oscars

Drawn animation. A couple eat at home. Meatballs and spaghetti. Silently. Drawn in stark, gloomy black and white lines. Behind them, in sharply outlined areas of black smudge, the shadows of their spirit selves or perhaps their memories argue. This relationship is in trouble.

They go about the business of everyday living, in empty black and white, trying to snatch moments of individual joy where they can. He wanders round the outside of the house, noticing once again that bit of plasterwork he really should get fixed. She tends the potted plants and takes the laundry out of the machine, picking up the child-sized blue t-shirt. He sits watching the TV with a can of drink. She wanders into the bedroom with the empty bed and somehow the record player and a pop song gets turned on.

Happier times, playing football with their daughter (10) in the garden, the ball taking off a chuck of the wall cladding.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

True Mothers
(Asa Ga Kuru,
朝が来る)

Director – Naomi Kawase – 2020 – Japan – Cert. 15 – 140m

*****

An unmarried mum hands her child over to adoptive parents only to later decide that she wants the child back – Japan’s entry for the 2020/2021 Oscars is screening on Curzon Home Cinema from Friday, April 16th

Naomi Kawase’s new film True Mothers deals with the interface between unwanted teen pregnancy and infertility among married couples and was Japan’s entry for this year’s Best International Feature Film at the Oscars. Sadly, it didn’t make the Academy’s shortlist. However, UK audiences up and down the land will now be able to see it on Curzon Home Cinema. It had a brief UK big screen outing late last year at the London East Asia Film Festival (LEAFF), which, after several months of touch-and-go somewhat incredibly went ahead days before the UK went back into total lockdown.

Former documentarian Kawase has been getting a lot of exposure in the UK in recent years with both Sweet Bean (2015) and The Mourning Forest (2007) released here on Eureka! Video and Still the Water (2014) currently available on MUBI and BFI Player. I like Kawase but I must admit True Mothers sounded like it might be terrible.… Read the rest