Tag: parents and sons

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Features Live Action Movies Music

Everybody Digs Bill Evans

Everybody Digs Bill Evans

Director – Grant Gee – 2025 – UK / Ireland – Cert. 15 – 102m

*****

Following the unexpected death of his trio’s bass player in a car crash, jazz pianist Bill Evans finds himself incapable of playing – out in UK cinemas on Friday, September 11th

Director Gee has a clear empathy for the worlds of music and musicians, with documentaries Meeting People is Easy (1998), about Radiohead touring to promote their album OK Computer, and Joy Division (2007). The current film represents his first foray into the narrative feature.

It opens with a recreation of a number from Evans’ 1961 New York Village Vanguard gig – the Bill Evans Trio with Evans (Anders Danielsen Lie from The Summer Book, Charlie McDowell, 2024; Bergman Island, Mia Hansen-Løve, 2021; The Worst Person in the World, Joachim Trier, 2021) on piano, Scott LeFaro (Will Sach) on bass, and Paul Motian (Boz Martin-Jones) on drums – two recordings of which were released as the highly regarded LPs Sunday at the Vialllage Vanguard and Waltz for Debby. As reel to reel spools rotate, so too do car wheels, specifically those carrying LeFaro to his death in a car crash 11 days later.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Just an Illusion
(Juste Une Illusion)

Just an Illusion (Juste Une Illusion)

Directors – Eric Toledano, Olivier Nakache – 2026 – France – Cert. 12a – 119m

***

The trials and tribulations of a young French teenager in the mid 1980s – out in UK cinemas on Friday, September 11th

1985. 13-year-old Vincent Dayan (Simon Boubill) is fed up with living at home with his elder brother Arnaud (Alexis Rosenstiehl) who loves listening to new wave music while Vincent prefers funk. Vincent wants his own room, because he can’t do his homework in there with Arnaud playing his music, and Arnaud doesn’t want him putting up his own music posters. The two brothers can be fighting tooth and nail one minute, and relaxing together the next.

Vincent is also fed up with the constant arguing of their parents Sandrine (Camille Cottin from House of Gucci, Ridley Scott, 2021; Call My Agent!, TV series, 2015-2020; Allied, Robert Zemeckis, 2017) and Yves (Louis Garrel from Little Women, Greta Gerwig, 2019; Redoutable, Michael Hazanavicius, 2017; The Dreamers, Bernardo Bertolucci, 2003).

Dad has a run in with neighbour and car park attendant Berger (Pierre Lottin from The Stranger, 2025; When Autumn Falls, 2024, By the Grace of God, 2018; all François Ozon) when he discovers he’s lost his cherished no.… Read the rest

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Animation Documentary Features Live Action Movies

D is for Distance

D is for Distance

Director – Chris Petit, Emma Mathews – 2025 – Finland – Cert. 12A – 88m

****

A diary film about a boy with epilepsy, his interior world, and parenting – out in UK cinemas on Friday, April 3rd

Opening and closing, more or less, with one of the quieter themes from Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone, composer: Ennio Morricone, 1968), and images first of a boy / young man clambering over coastal rocks and finally of the same young man and his father looking out from atop rock formations near “the top of the world”, this fits into the personal diary school of documentary filmmaking.

The two co-directors are life partners Chris Petit (Radio On, 1979) and Emma Matthews; the subject their son Louis, who started having epileptic fits around age 12. Following various NHS misdiagnoses, the family moved to the Netherlands where they could legally get hold of medical cannabis which, it turned out, cured Louis as long as he kept taking it. 

In former times, notes the unseen narrator (Jodhi May from Dune: Prophecy, TV series, 2024; The Last of the Mohicans, Michael Mann, 1992, A World Apart, Chris Menges, 1988), people with this condition would be taken as demon-possessed and burned at the stake, or (under the Nazis) forcibly exterminated.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Starve Acre

Director – Daniel Kokotajlo – 2023 – UK – Cert. 15 – 98m

***

As a couple become mired in grief following the death of their son, their behaviour turns increasingly obsessive, erratic and violent – terrifying and unsettling folk horror is out in UK cinemas on Friday, September 6th and on Blu-ray, DVD and BFI Player from Monday, October 21st

Thinking the fresh air of the countryside will benefit their son’s health, the family of Richard (Matt Smith), Juliette (Morfydd Clark), and their young son Owen (Arthur Shaw) move from their urban home to the wilds of the Yorkshire countryside and the house, named Starve Acre, in which Richard grew up. Owen doesn’t respond too well to the new environment. An unfortunate incident occurs offscreen at a village event, in which an animal gets stabbed in the eye and Owen’s clothing is stained with blood.

His understandably concerned parents take him to Dr. Monk (Roger Barclay) for advice. It isn’t immediately obvious as to what exactly is wrong, and the situation is set to worsen for the couple.

In Richard’s opinion, it doesn’t help that their hardened, elderly neighbour Gordon (Sean Gilder) visits quite often to fill the boy’s head with tales of a mysterious Jack Grey.… Read the rest