Tag: police

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No More Bets
(孤注一掷,
Gu Zhu Yi Zhi)

Director – Shen Ao – 2022 – China – Cert. 15 – 129m

***

A rising star computer programmer and a dropped model are lured into working as forced labour for a fraudulent, foreign online gambling operation – out in UK cinemas on Friday, September 8th

Zhao Dongran (Yong Mei), the knowledgeable head of a well-equipped Chinese police team fighting internet fraud, gives a lecture in which she outlines the story of a top flight programmer lured into the shady world of gambling beyond China’s borders.

The talented Pan Sheng (Lay Zhang), after being passed over for a promotion in favour of a not-especially talented young relative of the boss, opts for his safety net – a job offer from a company in Singapore. Along with a number of other recruits, he boards the plane with company rep Cui (Sunny Sun from The Crossing, Bai Xue, 2018), who is in charge of them, but in Singapore the deal rapidly turns sour when in an alleyway the group are rounded up by thugs with baseball bats to be transported to the corporate compound which amounts to a slave labour camp from which Lu (Eric Wang) runs an online gambling company which is in fact a scam defrauding millions of people, many of them in China.… Read the rest

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Paris Memories
(Revoir Paris)

Director – Alice Winocour – 2022 – France – Cert. 15 – 105m

****

A woman tries to recall her memories of a Paris terrorist attack – out in UK cinemas on Friday, Aug 4th

Were it not for a singularly unconvincing sex scene (as in, why are these two characters having sex?) about ten minutes before the end, this might have been one of my films of the year. That knocks it down from ***** to ****. That gaffe aside – and it’s a monumentally huge one – this is, otherwise, most impressive.

It starts off with Mia (Virginie Efira) in her Paris flat, feeding the cat, dropping and clearing up a glass, and talking with her partner Vincent (Grégoire Colin), a surgeon who heads up a hospital department. She rides her motorbike to her radio station workplace, where she has a gig as a Russian-French translator. Afterwards, in the evening, she meets Vincent in a restaurant for a meal, but he gets a call from the hospital and has to go back in. After a bit, she heads for home, but it’s raining heavily, so she stops off at another restaurant to have a drink and wait out the rain.… Read the rest

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Lost In The Stars
(Xiao Shi De Ta,
消失的她)

Directors – Cui Rui, Liu Xiang – 2022 – China – Cert. 15 – 121m

*****

A man’s wife vanishes and is replaced by an imposter; when no-one believes him, he hires a hotshot lawyer to find out what’s happening and get his real wife back – out in UK cinemas on Friday, July 14th

He Fei (Zhu Yilong) walks into a police station to ask for help with finding his wife Li Muzi, who has disappeared. The desk sergeant, who has clearly heard it all before, tells him there’s nothing they can do. Outside the station, in the pouring rain, he is approached by Officer Zheng (Du Jiang) who overheard and helpfully tries to calm him. The couple are holidaying in the island of Barlandia, outside of Chinese jurisdiction. He has recurring nightmares of her (Huang Ziqi) calling out his name for help and feels helpless in the face of them.

The next morning, events take a turn for the worse when He wakes up beside his wife Li Muzi (now played by Janice Man), who is not the real Li Muzi but an imposter he’s never seen before. Yet every piece of evidence he can think of to support his story seems to have changed to support hers– her passport seems genuine and shows that she entered the country at the same time as him, she can answer all manner of questions about the couple’s personal life, she has a scar on her upper thigh that no-one but the two of them know about.… Read the rest

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La Syndicaliste
(lit. The Union Rep,
US: The Sitting Duck)

Director – Jean-Paul Salomé – 2022 – France – Cert. 15 – 121m

***1/2

After a smart and tough-talking woman union rep in the nuclear power industry is attacked, tied up and raped in her own home, the police suggest she may have staged the attack herself – out in UK cinemas on Friday, June 30th

Or, as its opening title states in the English subtitled print shown to press, La Syndicaliste Based On A True Story. That title comes after an opening in 2012 in which police are called to the home of Maureen Kearney (Isabelle Huppert) where her cleaning lady has freed her from a chair to which she was tied before being raped by an intruder. The forensic team are all over the premises, taking away evidence. At the police station, she requests a pad and pencil to write down the details of what happened. The police will later accuse Kearney of fabricating the whole incident herself.

The next half an hour or so is a flashback leading up to the incident. Immediately after the titles, it sets about establishing its heroine as a tireless campaigner for employee rights at French state-owner nuclear power company Areva, standing up for ruthlessly exploited workers in an Hungarian subsidiary and well in with Anne Lauvergeon (Marina Fois), the one female executive in an otherwise male boardroom who despite her reliability and excellent track record is being forced out, with as she later tells Maureen lots of dirty tricks used against her.… Read the rest

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Spider-Man
Across
The Spider-Verse

Directors – Joachim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, Justin K. Thompson – 2023 – US – Cert. PG – 140m

*****

Assorted Spider-Men and -Women interact across many multiverse worlds as an elite Spider force attempts to prevent their interactions causing disaster – out in UK cinemas on Friday, June 2nd

The first part of a two-part sequel to Spider-Man Into The Spider-Verse (Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, Rodney Rothman, 2018) with the conclusion Spider-Man Beyond The Spider-Verse due for release next year. So be warned: Across ends mid-story with a To Be Continued… legend plastered across the screen.

Having played around with the multiverse concept in Into, Across ramps it up to overload, introducing new worlds with titles that appear on screen before you’ve worked out where you are, making you want to hit pause and stop and take it in. You can’t do that in a public cinema, where the image and sound is sharper than it is in the home but you have no personalised remote control, and that’s a defining characteristic of the theatrical cinema medium.

You can of course go back and see a movie again and again for successive viewings, and I imagine that will be happening a lot with Across during its theatrical run because its visuals are consistently amazing, but once it’s available on a home platform where you can freeze it, go back, look at bits of scenes again, this movie will take on a whole new life as the viewers interact with it at their own pace.… Read the rest

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Mr. Vampire III
(Ling Wan
Sin Sang,
靈幻先生)

Director – Ricky Lau – 1987 – Hong Kong – Cert. 15 – 88m
***1/2
Stunt-filled action comedy in which a travelling con-artist in cahoots with ghosts helps a Taoist priest fight a gang of horse thieves led by an evil sorceress – out on Blu-ray in the UK on Monday, May 22nd as part of Eureka! Video’s Hopping Mad: The Mr. Vampire Sequels

The third ‘official’ Mr. Vampire film (i.e. to be made by Sammo Hung / Leonard Ho’s Bo Ho Films company).

Set in the early twentieth century of the original Mr. Vampire, this once again takes the constituent parts of the original and shakes everything up a bit to come up with something at once different yet recognisably the same.

Taoist priest Ming (Richard Ng) is not terribly good at the job, so is getting by as a con artist going from village to village banishing ghosts for anyone who’ll pay him, the con element being that he has two ghost assistants, the adult Big Pao (David Lui Fong) and the small boy Small Pao (Hoh Kin-wai from Mr. Vampire II) who act out the part of being banished. Real ghosts with a nasty habit of appearing and messing things up force him to move on.… Read the rest

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Mr. Vampire II
(Geung See
Ga Zuk,
殭屍家族)

Director – Ricky Lau – 1986 – Hong Kong – Cert. 12 – 89m

*****

After a professor unearths a family of undead corpses, the child befriends a little girl and the parents go looking for it – out on Blu-ray in the UK on Monday, May 22nd as part of Eureka! Video’s Hopping Mad: The Mr. Vampire Sequels

The second ‘official’ Mr. Vampire film (i.e. to be made by Sammo Hung / Leonard Ho’s Bo Ho Films company).

A professor (Fat Chung) leads his two hapless assistants Chicken (Billy Lau) and Sashimi (Lau Chau-sang) on an archaeological dig, sending them into a cave where they find a family of corpses (father, mother, small boy played by Cheung Wing-cheung, Pauline Wong and Hoh Kin-wai respectively) immobilised by talismans on their foreheads, and take them back to the professor’s workshop. As the professor and Sashimi are driving the child corpse, the talisman comes off, and it comes to life, later escaping to a house where it is found and befriended by a little girl Chia-Chia (Hon Kin-yu), who keeps it hidden in her room from her widowed father Mr. Hu (Woo Fung). She introduces it to her brother (Choi Man-kam) and later to four of their friends.… Read the rest

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Hypnotic

Director – Robert Rodriguez – 2023 – US – Cert.15 – 93m

**

A police detective stumbles upon a conspiracy involving people with mind-bending powers – out in UK cinemas on Friday, May 26th

An underlying insistent rhythm opens Hypnotic, the clicking of a pen in a hand. It belongs to the therapist of Danny Rourke (Ben Affleck) and disturbs his recurring memory. He’s in the park watching his seven-year-old daughter. For a moment, his attention wanders. Then he realises she’s gone. Before that, he saw a man, who he is sure must have kidnapped her. The therapist wants to know, does he feel fit enough for active duty?

Then he’s in the squad car with police partner Nicks (JD Pardo), responding to a tip off about an imminent armed robbery of a safe deposit box in a bank. From the CC TV van at the site, he spots two armed security van guys before panning over to the suspicious man (William Fichtner) speaking to a woman on a park bench. She rises and, suddenly convinced there’s a heatwave, starts peeling off layers of clothing as she walks. He says something to the two van guys. After Rourke has talked his way into the bank vault and discovered a Polaroid of his vanished daughter bearing the name Dellrayne inside the safe deposit box, the suspicious man says something to a bank teller, who admits him and the two van guys to the vault.… Read the rest

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Three Colours: White
(Trois Couleurs: Blanc)

Director – Krzysztof Kieślowski – 1994 – France – Cert. 15 – 92m

****

A Pole down on his luck and facing legal proceedings from his French wife, smuggles himself on a plane from Paris to Warsaw in order to get his life and dignity back – 4K restoration is out in UK cinemas on Friday, April 7th

This represents the second part of a trilogy based on the three colours of the French national flag, with each film representing one of that nation’s three values of liberté, égalité, fraternité (liberty, equality, brotherhood). Or perhaps it’s not as straightforward as that – at least, that’s what actress Julie Delpy suggested when I interviewed her about the film in 1994.

There are some curious editing decisions at the start – bits of stories told in fuller detail later on, such as shots of a suitcase on an airport conveyor belt, and a glimpse of a happy bride (Julie Delpy) in her white bridal dress leaving the church building for the fresh air and bright sunlight outside to meet waiting guests as, in front of her, a host of pigeons take off, an image to which the editing returns several times during what follows.… Read the rest

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Broker
(Beurokeo,
브로커)

Director – Hirokazu Kore-eda – 2022 – South Korea – Cert. 12 – 129m

***

Kore-eda’s second feature outside his native Japan is a curious tale of two traffickers of abandoned babies to childless couples whose business is disrupted by their latest charge’s mother– out in UK cinemas on Friday, February 24th

It’s an intriguing pitch. Kore-eda. the great humanist Japanese director of such extraordinary films as (among others) films After Life (1998), I Wish (2011), Like Father, Like Son (2013), The Third Murder (2017) and the Best Foreign Film Oscar nominee Shoplifters (2018), directs a movie in South Korea. And yet, Broker, like his previous The Truth (2019), similarly made in a country other than his native Japan – in this instance France – is strangely unmoving compared to his home-shot, Japanese work. Although he hasn’t lost his touch as can be seen from some of his work for Japanese TV (A Day-Off Of Kusumi Arimura, 2020).

Whatever the problems are with his working abroad, the the calibre of the cast the director attracts is not one of them. The Truth had Catherine Deneuve, Juliette Binoche and Ethan Hawke, two of the finest living French actresses and arguably one of the best American actors; for Broker, the cast includes top South Korean talent Song Kang Ho and Doona Bae.… Read the rest