Tag: parents and children

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All of Us Strangers

Director – Andrew Haigh – 2023 – UK – Cert. 15 – 105m

*****

A gay Londoner travels by train to visit his parents in Sanderstead, following their deaths in a car crash when he was 12 years old – plays one night only, Sunday, February 8th, 6.45pm, as part of Film Tottenham

He (Andrew Scott) lives alone in a London tower block. Not only is he the single occupant of his flat, there’s almost no-one else in the building. When he goes outside for a breath of fresh air, he sees a guy in the window of one of the other apartments. Later, there’s a knock at his door. It’s the guy (Paul Mescal), who is slightly drunk, comes on strong and tries to get himself invited in. The visitor’s name is Harry. The occupant introduces himself as Adam, but doesn’t let Harry in.

By day, Adam writes screenplays. But he’s got stuck, so after perusing some personal effects, he takes the train to Sanderstead. There, he watches a boy in a window. He follows a man across an area of parkland. Coming out of a shop, the man spots him and asks him to come over. You think it might be a pickup – but no, it’s his dad (Jamie Bell).… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies Music

The History of Sound

Director – Oliver Hermanus – 2025 – UK, US – Cert. 15 – 128m

****

A Kentucky man falls for a music professor in Boston and accompanies him on a field trip recording folk songs – out in UK cinemas on Friday, January 23rd

In 1917, having grown up on a farmstead in rural Kentucky and his remarkable singing voice being noticed by a local schoolteacher, Lionel Worthing (Paul Mescal from Hamnet, Chloé Zhao, 2025; Gladiator II, Ridley Scott, 2024; All of Us Strangers, Andrew Haigh, 2023) gets a student scholarship to Boston’s New England Conservatory of Music. One Saturday evening in a Boston pub with friends, he makes the acquaintance of David White (Josh O’Connor from  La Chimera, Alice Rohrwacher, 2023; Mothering Sunday, Eva Husson, 2021; The Crown, TV series, 2019-20; God’s Own Country, Francis Lee, 2017) who is playing folk songs on the piano and, it turns out, is a tenured academic with an obsessive hobby: travelling around the country collecting, recording and cataloguing folk songs. David has what Lionel describes as the sound equivalent of a photographic memory: he can remember word for word and note for note, any song sung in his presence.… Read the rest

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Hamnet

Director – Chloé Zhao – 2025 – UK, US – Cert. 12a – 125m

*****

An imagining of the story of William Shakespeare’s son Hamnet, whose name gave rise to the play Hamlet – Maggie O’Farrell’s adaptation of her own novel is out in UK cinemas on Friday, January 9th

According to the opening title card, the names Hamlet and Hamnet were regarded as interchangeable in Elizabethan England. This is curious, since the piece’s female lead (Jessie Buckley from Women Talking, Sarah Polley, 2022; Men, Alex Garland, 2022; Misbehaviour, Philippa Lowthorpe, 2020) appears to be variously addressed as Alice, Agnes or Anyes while the male lead (Paul Mescal from Gladiator II, Ridley Scott, 2024; All of Us Strangers, Andrew Haigh, 2023; Aftersun, Charlotte Wells, 2022) is not referred to by name as William Shakespeare until well towards the end. Since this is being promoted as the story of William Shakespeare’s son Hamnet, whose name gave rise to the play Hamlet – as you can see from the trailer below – audiences will enter the film knowing who the Paul Mescal character is as soon as he appears unnamed.

The outdoors, looking up through the trees of a forest.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Hamnet

Directed by Chloé Zhao
Certificate 12A
125 minutes
Released 9 January

Shakespeare’s romantic relationship, family life and the tragedy of bereavement resulted in his writing one of his bestknown plays, Hamlet. In Elizabethan England, we are told at the start of Hamnet, the two names were interchangeable. Adapted from Maggie O’Farrell’s novel, this film is well-served by the landscape-friendly sensibilities of the director Chloé Zhao (Nomadland). [Read the rest at Reform magazine…]

[Read my longer review on this site…]

Hamnet is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, January 9th.

Trailer:

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Features Live Action Movies

Avatar
Fire and Ash

Director – James Cameron – 2025 – US – Cert. 12a – 195m

Immersive Cinema *****

Screenplay ***1/2

Return to Pandora – this time, with a terrifying tribe whose trust in the planet’s spirit has been wiped out by a volcano – second Avatar sequel is out in cinemas from Friday, December 19th

Whatever you think of the Avatar movies – of which this is the third – there’s no denying that audiences love them, and that these films are, for the time being at least, critic-proof. The original Avatar (2009) is a remarkable work, right at the cutting edge of what one might call immersive cinema, with Cameron making superb use of 3D in an industry which long ago decided 3D was a fad useful primarily for jacking up the price of tickets: in Cameron’s hands, however, 3D goes hand-in-hand with artistic intent as he involves you in a planet or a world – Pandora – with its own, unique, eco-system. Having done that, the question is, where can you go. The second film Avatar: The Way of Water (James Cameron, 2022), in this writer’s opinion, is just as impressive as a further piece of immersive cinema; however, while it delivers some extraordinary sequences, it fails to deliver in terms of story in the way that the original did.… Read the rest

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Attending the Festival
at a distance

Oh, What Happy Days!

Health issues prevent Jeremy Clarke from attending the Critics’ Picks at the 29th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, but he manages to watch the films anyway.

2025 has been a strange year for me personally, not least because of my ongoing fight against cancer. Which, I am happy to report, I appear to be winning. To cut a very long story short, for the previous three years I’ve had the great privilege and joy of attending PÖFF, the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival and covering, since its inception in 2022, the Festival’s Critics’ Picks Competition for Dmovies.org. This year, however, I found myself on a five day course of radiotherapy on dates immediately before the Festival. One of the things you learn very quickly when having treatment for cancer is that everybody is different – every body is different – and reactions and side effects can vary enormously from person to person.

Invisibles

The hospital warned me of possible side effects which might kick in anything up to a month after the treatment, and also that I would be very unwise to delay the radiotherapy. That effectively stopped me from leaving the UK around the time of the Festival this year.… Read the rest

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Street Wanderers
(Los Caminantes
de la Calle)

Director – Juan Martin Hsu – 2025 – Argentina, Peru – 90m

*****

Argentinian cops and robbers procedural is set largely in the world of Mendoza’s immigrant Chinese community – premieres in the Critics’ Picks Competition of the 29th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival

2010. Mendoza, Argentina. The family-run, Chinese restaurant of Dageng (Kon Yam Pin) receives telephone threats for protection money. When they don’t pay up within 24 hours, a motorbike with two riders pulls up on at their door which opens onto the main street and fires four shots. So Dageng’s son (Willy Kon Chin Yi) delivers a rucksack containing $50 000 to the gang. But later, the riders complain there was only $30 000 and demand another $20 000.

Lots of similarly threatening phone calls overlap on the soundtrack as we see numerous yellow cables plugged into a telecoms hub, recalling similar motifs in movies as diverse as Three Colours Red (Krzysztof Kieślowski, 1994) and Dial M for Murder (Alfred Hitchcock, 1953).

The prosecutor’s office is monitoring phone calls, but faces challenges. One such is that the calls are in Cantonese so require an interpreter to turn them into intelligible Spanish. Another is illustrated when the current interpreter quits, terrified what might happen to her family if word about the nature of her work gets out.… Read the rest

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Round 13
(13ème Round)

Round 13

Director – Mohamed Ali Nahdi – 2025 – Tunisia, Cyprus, Qatar, Saudi Arabia – 85m

*****

A young boy is diagnosed with a tumour in his arm, and his parents must guide him through his ensuing medical treatment – premieres in the Critics’ Picks Competition of the 29th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival

My third Critics’ Picks entry is another five star movie. Which is great, but once again, I wonder, for how many more films can this last? What IS true is that this is not another ‘urban unease and finding your way in the world’ movie like China Sea (Jurgis Matulevičius. 2025) or Mo Papa (Eeva Mägi, 2025), it’s something altogether different.

Sabri (Hedi Ben Jabouria) is a very ordinary eight-year-old boy who likes boxing. We first meet him out with his dad in the cinema where the pair are watching a black and white movie about boxing. They return home where Sabri looks at his dad’s old photos of his days as a boxer in Rome.

They are interrupted by Sabri’s mum Semia whose name curiously isn’t spoken until about ten minutes before the end of the movie (Afef Ben Mahmoud) and who wants to know why she can never reach Kamel (Helmi Drid), the boy’s dad, on the phone.… Read the rest

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Mo Papa
(Mo Papa)

Mo Papa

Director – Eeva Mägi – 2025 – Estonia – 88m

*****

A young ex-con imprisoned as a teenager for killing his younger brother tries to make his way in present-day Tallinn – premieres in the Critics’ Picks Competition of the 29th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival

I am wary of unscripted feature films. There is a reason why most narrative movies are made working from scripts; actors have lines to speak, to help them get a handle on their characters. Technicians have an idea of what they are realising on the screen or the soundtrack for a director. Without a script, most attempts at making a film are liable to founder. And quite probably result in an indulgent, unwatchable movie.

Mo Papa, according to the Festival’s blurb, was unscripted. On the one hand, I fear the worst. On the other, after three years of watching Critics’ Picks at Tallinn, I know the standard to be generally high, and duff films are happily all too rare. Would Mo Papa turn out to be one of those rare blips?

It’s also an Estonian movie, and because this is an Estonian festival, in a sense that ups the ante. So I’m really hoping it’s going to be good.… Read the rest

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Valley of the
Shadow of Death
(不赦之罪)

Directors – Jeffrey Lam Sen & Antonio Tam – 2024 – Hong Kong, China – Cert. 15 – 84m

***1/2

The lives of a Christian pastor and his wife become intertwined with that of a youth who believes himself responsible for their teenage daughter’s suicide some years ago – out in UK cinemas on Friday, November 14th

For roughly its first half, this delivers a narrative that sits squarely in an evangelical Christian framework. Unable to keep that up, it shifts focus in its second half to fire off in a number of directions.

Pastor Leung (Anthony Wong) and visits an old lady named Chan who is dying in hospital, asking her on her deathbed to accept Jesus as her Saviour. As he’s leaving, the nurse with him spots her grandson coming in, chained between two police officers. His granny is unconscious, and he finds her clasping a crucifix tight in one hand.

Praying alone, the Pastor talks about ”joining in the sufferings of Christ” as well he might: when interviewed by a lady journalist (Amber Van Cheung) about suffering and his experiences, something he is known for speaking about widely, it’s apparent that he and his family – pictured on a cupboard top photo as father, mother and daughter – suffered terrible grief a few years back.… Read the rest