Tag: parents and children

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Animation Features Movies

My Neighbour Totoro
(Tonari no Totoro,
となりのトトロ)

Director – Hayao Miyazaki – 1988 – Japan – Cert. U – 86m

*****

Two young girls, whose mother is hospitalised, move to the country with their dad, where they encounter a friendly tree spirit – one of the greatest movies ever made, animated or otherwise, is back out in UK and Ireland cinemas on Friday, August 2nd

There’s something about rewatching and reviewing a favourite film you’ve watched numerous times because it’s coming out again in the cinema. And so it is that I dug out my Japanese release DVD (containing those all important, on/offable English subtitles), from those far off days when those seemingly few of us who knew about extraordinarily talented filmmaker Miyazaki thought none of his films would ever see a UK release, and rewatched his wonderful film for the umpteenth time.

The deceptively simple storyline involves two girls, Satsuki (10 – Japanese voice: Noriko Hidaka; English voice: Dakota Fanning) and Mei (5 – Japanese voice: Chika Sakamoto, English voice: Elle Fanning) who move with their father (Japanese voice: Shigesato Itoi, English voice: Tim Daly) to the countryside to be near the hospital which is looking after their mother (Japanese voice: Sumi Shimamoto, English voice: Lea Salonga).… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies

Kensuke’s Kingdom

Directors – Neil Boyle, Kirk Hendry – 2023 – UK – Cert. PG – 85m

***1/2

A British boy and his dog are stranded on a desert island alongside a Japanese man looking after a colony of apes – animated adaptation of Michael Morpurgo’s book is out in UK cinemas on Friday, August 2nd

With his parents having lost their jobs, Michael (voice: Aaron McGregor) is sailing round the world with his family. They are somewhere in the Pacific. Mum (voice: Sally Hawkins) is the skipper, with dad (voice: Cillian Murphy), Michael’s elder sister Becky (voice: Raffey Cassidy) and Michael himself as crew. He is homesick, missing his dog Stella. Well, not missing her, actually, because he’s secretly smuggled her on board and has her holed up in the cupboard at the front of the deck. Which is why the ship’s supplies appear to be dwindling – he is sneaking her food out of them.

Michael is the misfit of the crew; you sense that the other three family members are enjoying the experience of the trip, but he’d rather be back at home. Mum and dad try to make him feel better – mum ordering him about as skipper but giving him time with her as “mum” to talk about anything that might be bothering him.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Shayda

Director – Noora Niasari – 2023 – Australia – Cert. 15 – 117m

*****

An Iranian mother and her young daughter, holed up in a women’s refuge in Australia, live in fear of the girl’s estranged father who wants to take them both back to Iran – out in UK cinemas on Friday, August 2nd

A woman is with a mum and her little girl in a shopping mall. The woman tells the little girl to remember the counters, because if daddy brings her here, she must find them and tell the security man nearby who she is. The girl’s mother reminds her that daddy said he’d take her on a plane. The woman tells the mother, she’s done the right thing.

Shayda (Zar Amir Ebrahimi from Holy Spider, Ali Abassi, 2022) and her young daughter Mona (Selina Zahednia) are separated from Shayda’s husband. The other woman is Joyce (Leah Purcell), who runs a woman’s refuge house catering for residents from a variety of ethnic groups. Shayda and Mona, for example, are Iranian. Shayda’s photo album tells the story of her life. In the mid-1980s, she graduated and got married in Iran; in the early 1990s, the couple moved to Brisbane, Australia.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Shayda

Muslim limbo

Shayda
Directed by Noora Niasari
Certificate 15, 117 minutes
Released 19 July

An Iranian woman, Shayda (Zar Amir Ebrahimi from Holy Spider, Ali Abassi, 2022), is staying with her young daughter Mona (Selina Zahednia) in a woman’s refuge house in Brisbane run by Joyce (Leah Purcell). Shayda’s husband Hossain (Osamah Sami) came to Australia with her before they separated and has been granted visiting rights for Mona. Even though Hossain talks of taking Mona on a plane back to Iran, if Shayda wants full custody, Joyce recommends she allows Hossain the allotted time alone with his daughter in the local shopping mall.

Outside of these handovers, Shayda rarely leaves the women’s refuge… [Read the full review at Reform]

Read my longer review for this site – coming soon.

Trailer:

Categories
Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Eternal You

Directors – Hans Block, Moritz Reisewieke – 2024 – US – Cert. – 87m

*****

People deal with bereavement with the help of interactive versions of their deceased, loved ones recreated by AI – out in UK cinemas on Friday, June 28th

In a rare visual shot in this mostly verbally based documentary, an aerial shot of a graveyard, with light creating lots of little blocks of shadow as it falls on the ranks of gravestones, resembles a slice of internal computer electronics. It’s a pertinent pictorial moment that stands out from almost everything else here.

“Is there some reason you wouldn’t believe me?,” a woman asks her boyfriend. “You died,” comes the sceptical reply. Joshua, from Ontario, Canada, had to endure the trauma of watching the life support machines that were keeping her alive being switched off. After she died, about two weeks short of high school graduation which she was expected to pass, he got the school to graduate her. He later explains this by written chat to her interactive AI.

Psychiatrist Sherry Turkle talks about the problems people face coping with grief in the modern world, where they often live on their own following the death of a partner and don’t have an extended network of family around them like they would have done in former times.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

The Crazy Family
Gyakufunsha Kazoku,
逆噴射家族)

Director – Sogo Ishii – 1984 – Japan – Cert. 18 – 105m

*****

After proudly moving into their first home as owner-occupiers, a family go berserk and destroy the building – out on Blu-ray on Monday, June 17th

This seemingly starts out as a conservative family drama. The family in question comprises father Katsukuni Kobayashi (Katsuya Kobayashi in his debut feature role), mother Saeko (Mitsuko Baisho who worked with directors Akira Kurosawa, Shohei Imamura and Kaneto Shindo), elder teenage son Masaki (Yoshiki Arizono from Ichi the Killer, The Happiness of the Katakuris, both Takashi Miike; Electric Dragon, 80,000 V, Sogo Ishii, all 2001) and younger teenage daughter Erika (Youki Kudoh from Typhoon Club, Shinji Somai, 1985; Mystery Train, Jim Jarmusch, 1989; Heaven’s Burning, Craig Lahiff, 1997). The Kobayashis move in to their first home as owner-occupiers which, although it’s a little on the small side, promises an idyllic existence. Father is the breadwinner with a nondescript office job, mother waters the plants and does the cooking and housework, the daughter wants to be an idol singer and the son is spending all his time studying for school and university in his room upstairs.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies

Song of the Sea

Director – Tomm Moore – 2014 – Ireland – Cert. PG – 93m

*****

A family is torn apart after the mother returns to the sea as a selkie – reviewed for Third Way, July 2015

Tomm Moore picked up an Oscar nomination for his medieval Irish animated fantasy The Secret Of Kells (2009). Like that earlier work, his equally impressive Song Of The Sea eschews Hollywood’s headlong rush towards 3D in favour of traditional 2D animation with an emphasis on drawing and visual design – and it’s a real pleasure to watch. A family movie in the best sense – there’s nothing here parents wouldn’t want children to see – it explores difficult issues about parents and children, being set in a family where, effectively, the mother has walked out leaving dad to look after the two kids. The plot employs Celtic folklorish figures of selkies – creatures who periodically change from female seals to human girls or women and back again.

Thus, the reason for the departure of Bronach (voice: Lisa Hannigan) a few minutes into the proceedings is that the sea is calling her to become a seal once again. She leaves behind her lighthouse keeper husband Conor (voice: Brendan Gleeson) and kids Ben (voice: David Rawle) & Saoirse (voice: Lucy O’Connell) to fend for themselves and their beloved dog Cu.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Next Sohee
(Da-eum So-hee,
다음 소희)

Director – July Jung – 2022 – South Korea – Cert. 18 – 134m

*****

A schoolgirl on an internship is appallingly exploited by her employers, and a police detective is called in to investigate – out in UK cinemas on Friday, June 14th

Here’s a film which presents a real problem for reviewers. Something monumental happens in the middle of the film which entirely changes it. It’s a little bit like the shift from the traumatic drama to the police manhunt in High and Low (Akira Kurosawa, 1963) and a bit like the infamous shower scene in the middle of Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960). And yet, the film is like neither of those classics in any other way (except, perhaps, the fact that it’s a remarkable film that will leave you with an indelible impression afterwards). Still, how much can a reviewer give away without ruining the film for audiences?

It’s very much a film of two halves. The first half centres around Sohee (Kim Se-eun), a star pupil at an average secondary school. She is obsessed with dancing, specifically the kind of dance moves associated with K-pop girl- and boy-bands. Among her friends are another former intern from her school who dropped out of her intern position and now spends her evenings getting paralytically drunk.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Freud’s Last Session

Director – Matthew Brown – 2023 – UK – Cert. 12a – 108m

****

Celebrated psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud is visited in the last month of his life, living in Britain, by young Oxford don and Christian apologist CS Lewis – out in UK cinemas on Friday, June 14th

September 1939. Chamberlain has issued his ultimatum to Hitler, and Britain waits to find out whether it will shortly be at war with Germany. Celebrated psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud (Anthony Hopkins), recently moved to Britain from Vienna to escape the Nazis, keeps turning the radio on and off in the hope of an update from the BBC. He is also expecting a visit from a young Oxford don, CS Lewis (Matthew Goode), “the Christian apologist”, with whose views he profoundly disagrees. 

Lewis has written books including a parody of Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress called The Pilgrim’s Regress, which is mentioned here, and the first book in his science fiction trilogy Out of the Silent Planet, which isn’t. He has however yet to either give his BBC broadcasts about the Christian faith, which will later form the basis of his most celebrated apologetic work Mere Christianity, or write his Narnia children’s fantasy novels.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Art Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Exhibition on Screen:
My National Gallery

Director – Phil Grabsky, Ali Ray – 2024 – UK – Cert. U – 98m

*****

Employees, punters and celebrities choose their favourite painting in London’s National Gallery – out in UK cinemas from Tuesday, June 4th

There have been documentary films about the UK’s National Gallery before, notably the wonderful, three-hour-long National Gallery (Frederick Wiseman, 2014), so, in a way, it’s a brave subject for the Exhibition on Screen people to take on. And yet, as a British production company making movies about art in art galleries, it was inevitable that they would tackle the subject sooner or later. Their version commences with a likeable enough establishing montage of what one might call ‘behind the scenes’ and ‘footfall’ – shots of various National Gallery employees at work opening the door, looking after various aspects of the art housed in the gallery and even putting out tasty-looking croissants in the cafeteria.

There are satisfying little touches throughout. A shot of The Feast Day of Saint Roch, Canaletto, with out of focus people passing in front of it, makes it feel like you’re really there in the scene depicted.

Alan Allison, security officer and gallery assistant (pictured on the front of the trailer, below) wears black clothing with a striking, patterned blue tie.… Read the rest