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Features Live Action Movies

The End of Oak Street

Director – David Robert Mitchell – 2026 – US – Cert. 12a – 99m

Film ***

Prehistoric Beasts *****

A family in a pleasant American suburb is inexplicably transported to a prehistoric time where dinosaurs and other dangerous creatures roam – out in UK cinemas on Friday, August 14h

A typical family in 1980s American suburbia. At a local community get together, Greg (Ewan McGregor) takes part in a sack race. His wife Denise (Anne Hathaway) takes him aside for a serious conversation about their marriage, which she doesn’t think is working. She is also annoyed that their son Brian (Christian Convery) has bought along their dog Starbuck (played by dogs Buzz and Brisket) who has a habit of getting out of control. Denise is further frustrated when Greg bunks off to do some deliveries (it later transpires that she hates the Pizza Delivery sign he fixes to the car roof when doing his rounds.) The family also has a young teenage daughter Audrey (Maisy Stella).

Denise pays a visit to her elderly friend Mrs. Huddleston (a striking turn form Anne Gee Byrd) who is somewhat perturbed as to the identity of the flower that has sprung up in her garden, growing to about four feet high in two days and resembling a small palm tree or yucca bearing a fruit something like an acorn about the size of a hand.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Live Action Movies

Sister Midnight

Director – Karan Kandhari – 2024 – UK, Sweden, India – Cert. 15 – 110m

***1/2

A young woman in an arranged marriage discovers herself to be a creature of the night… and one of the undead – genre-bender is out on UK digital from Wednesday, June 18th

A young woman travels cross-country by train, face veiled by beaded hangings, to join the arranged marriage husband she has (presumably) never met in their new, urban home. Uma (Radikha Apte) and Gopal (Ashok Pathak best known here from The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, John Madden, 2015) don’t seem to know what to do with each other. Certainly not any sort of sexual congress as they unveil sitting beside one another for the first time. As the tale proceeds, sleeping with him comes to consist of curling up on her own on the other side of the bed from him. Later, her sleeping patterns will start to shift…

Theirs is a pretty basic home – a room with a mattress and a door out onto the bustling, main street outside. Her husband has a job, so goes out in the morning and comes back in the evening, although sometimes he goes out drinking after work and comes back later.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies

Spy x Family
Code: White
(SPY x FAMILY
CODE: White)

Directors – Kazuhiro Fusuhashu, Takashi Karagiri – 2023 – Japan – Cert. 12A – 111m

*****

A spy and an assassin are married to each other, each unaware of the other’s secret career, while neither of them are aware their adopted daughter is a telepath who therefore knows everything they don’t – bonkers anime deploying cookery to prevent Armageddon (!) is out in UK cinemas on Friday, April 26th

An opulent art deco ball. Couples dance. A man connives to be alone with a drunken woman so he can…photograph a file in an office desk. A woman driving a car rips off her face (in the manner of the characters in Mission: Impossible II, John Woo, 2000) to reveal… a man, the spy Loid (voice: Takuya Eguchi). Another woman, Yor (voice: Saori Hayama), is revealed as an assassin when she kills a man who sold industrial secrets. The spy and the assassin are married to one another in a pretend marriage which is a cover for their undercover operations, although neither knows the other is in the spy / assassination game. Their daughter Anya (voice: Atsumi Tanezaki) – adopted to make the bogus marriage look real – is a telepathic orphan who can read minds, so knows about the two secret identities of her ‘parents’.… Read the rest