Tag: prison

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Face/Off

Director – John Woo – 1997 – US – Cert. 18 – 138m

*****

John Woo’s third US film, his strongest to date, has FBI agent John Travolta switching faces with villain Nic Cage – part of Art of Action, a major UK-wide season celebrating the artistry of real action choreography at cinemas across the UK October-November 2024

When screenwriters Mike Werb and Michael Colleary collaborated on original screenplay Face/Off, they had in mind such classic films as post-war gangster tale White Heat (Raoul Walsh, 1949)and identity change outing Seconds (John Frankenheimer, 1966). Only after completing an initial draft did Colleary see a John Woo movie – The Killer (1989) – at which point he immediately knew the pair had found the perfect director for their material.

This was clearly reciprocal – if Woo had already astounded Hong Kong audiences with A Better Tomorrow (1986) and crossed over internationally with The Killer and Hard Boiled (1992), he had yet to win comparable critical acclaim in America, even though his modest budget American debut Hard Target (1993) had had its admirers and his first blockbusting actioner Broken Arrow (1996) had impressed Hollywood with its box office.

These films both felt like the work of a director for hire not an auteur, and while Woo, like numerous Hollywood immigrants before him, could probably have continued in similar vein, the Face/Off script contained exactly the elements the director needed to take up in Hollywood where he’d left off in Hong Kong.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Hard Miles

Director – R.J. Daniel Hanna – 2023 – US – Cert. 12a – 108m

****1/2

A youth facility social worker takes a group of troubled young men on a transformative team bicycle ride – out on Blu-ray, DVD & Digital Monday, September 2nd

Day-to-day life is one thing after another for Colorado medium-security correction school staff member Greg Townsend (Matthew Modine). He is in court defending, failing to get the court to see one of his charges as a human being rather than someone who committed an offence. Leaving, he finds someone has stolen his bicycle (it later gets found by the police, having sustained only minor damage). He is fielding calls from his prison-incarcerated brother about their father, who is in a care home and may not have much longer to live, and with whom Greg has not had contact for years. He is at the school, pulling boys apart as they attack each other for the most trivial remark.

However, not everything is about work and family responsibility. Greg is a cycling enthusiast, and is looking forward to taking his booked holiday of a week or more off cycling 1 000 (well, 762) miles to the Grand Canyon. Except that his boss Skip (Leslie David Baker) wants him to fill in that week, which Greg isn’t going to do.… Read the rest

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The Weak and the Wicked

Director – J. Lee Thompson – 1954 – UK – Cert. 12 – 88m

***1/2

A woman spends 12 months in prison after being convicted of fraud – one of two J. Lee Thompson movies out on UK Blu-ray, DVD and Digital in August, 2024

Jean (Glynis Johns) is marched from her cell and up the stairs into the courtroom to hear the judge’s verdict. She gets 12 months for fraud, and is sent to HM Prison Blackdown. Her crime is detailed in flashback – she has a gambling problem, which costs her her doctor boyfriend Michael Hale (John Gregson) who walks out on her. She pays for chips at a casino with a cheque, for which she hadn’t the funds in the bank. In this office, the owner Mr. Seymour (Edwin Styles) tells her he has his own way of dealing with debts, as she’ll shortly find out.

Her friend Pam (Ursula Howells) gets her a job in a clothing store, but it turns out Pam is actually working for Mr. Seymour and steals a family heirloom from Jean’s handbag the first chance she gets. Jean claims the insurance money only for two policemen to arrest her the day the money comes through, going into her home and finding a pawn ticket for the allegedly stolen item tucked into the back of a mirror.… Read the rest

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Animation Features Movies

The Breadwinner

Afghan life under religious extremism

The Breadwinner
Directed by Nora Twomey
Certificate 12A, 94 minutes
Released 25 May

Parvana (voiced by Saara Chaudry) is one of three girls living with her mum and dad in Kabul, Afghanistan, which is occupied and run by the Taliban. When her father is arrested by the Taliban on account of his intellectual views, the family are put in a difficult position since women and girls aren’t allowed out on the streets alone.

Parvana’s mum nevertheless risks a journey to the prison to ask for her husband’s release, but is beaten up for her pains. So Parvana takes it upon herself to earn some money for the family by disguising herself as a boy and selling items on the street. She makes friends with another girl, Shauzia (voiced by Soma Chhaya) doing the same thing.

It’s rare to see a children’s movie dealing with a subject as tough as… [Read the rest at Reform magazine]

Trailer:

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Cape Fear
(1991)

Director – Martin Scorsese – 1991 – US – Cert. 18 – 128m

*****

A vicious ex-con seeks revenge on the family of the lawyer he sees responsible for his incarceration in prison – review from Strait – the Greenbelt Newspaper, March 1992.

Directed by Martin Scorsese with characteristic and frenetic energy, Cape Fear is his best movie in years. It ranks not so much alongside The Last Temptation of Christ (1988, file under embarrassing personal projects along with Until the End of the World, Wim Wenders, 1991) but rather as a companion piece to early collaborations with actor Robert De Niro like Mean Streets (1973), Taxi Driver (1976) and Raging Bull (1980).

Here, the actor is first glimpsed from behind as a muscled torso tattooed with the Scales of Justice and numerous biblical verses. It’s a foretaste of things to come.

While the original Cape Fear (J. Lee Thompson, 1962) had Robert Mitchum as ex-con Max Cady who terrorises the lawyer (and his wife and daughter) responsible for his prosecution, Scorsese’s remake borrows religious elements from another Mitchum-as-villain vehicle, Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955), in which his character justifies his actions in fundamentalist Christian terminology.

De Niro’s Cady is specifically a self-designated vessel of judgement upon the lawyer and his kin.… Read the rest

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Ghostbusters
Frozen Empire

Director – Gil Kenan – 2023 – US – Cert. 12a – 115m

****

Back in New York, running the family Ghostbusters business out of the old fire station, the Spenglers must thwart an evil entity who possesses the power to freeze things – out in UK cinemas on Friday, March 22nd

This sequel to Ghostbusters Afterlife (Jason Reitman, 2021), written by the same three-man writing team of father and son Ivan and Jason Reitman and Ghostbusters geek Gil Kenan, picks up and runs with some of the strengths of its predecessor even as it dispenses with others. One thing it dumps is the previous entry’s completely out-there originality; instead, it follows the time-honoured principle of Hollywood movie sequels: go out and make the first movie again.

It’s basically a rehash of the original Ghostbusters (Ivan Reitman, 1984) with the younger generation of Spenglers standing in for the old, and with Winston Zeddemore (Ernie Hudson), Ray Stantz (Dan Ackroyd), Janine Melnitz (Annie Potts) and Peter Venkman (Bill Murray) from the original helping the newer characters out. There is not, perhaps, as much of Bill Murray as one would like, and his heart doesn’t seem to be in it. Otherwise, though, fans of the franchise will probably be happy.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Eileen

Director – William Oldroyd – 2023 – US – Cert. 15 – 97 m

***** Most of the film

* The last five minutes

NSFW

In the 1960s, the life of a young woman working in a Boston boys’ correctional facility is turned on its head by the arrival of a radical, young woman prison psychologist from New York – out in UK cinemas on Friday, December 1st.

I don’t usually start with the ending of the film – and I’m not about to deliver a spoiler – but the ending of Oldroyd’s otherwise enthralling drama (if that’s the right term – I’m not sure it is) takes everything that has gone before which appeared to be building up to something and unceremoniously dumps it, as if there were another twenty minutes that had been written but not shot and an unsatisfactory ending had been tacked on.

There’s always that feeling with a truly extraordinary movie when you watch it for the first time that you don’t want the filmmakers to screw up and let go of whatever it is that’s working. Well, this one is extraordinary right up to the last five minutes, when it completely loses it. Prior to that, it starts out as one thing, turns into something else then swerves and moves about all over the place, taking the viewer with it on a strange, unpredictable journey.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

The Innocent
(L’innocent)

Director – Louis Garrel – 2022 – France – Cert. 15 – 99m

***1/2

A trusting woman marries a soon-to-be-released convict in prison only for her suspicious son to start following him after the man’s release and soon find himself out of his depth – out in UK cinemas on Friday, August 25th

Warning: plot spoilers.

Sylvie LeFranc (Anouk Grinberg) has fallen big time for Michel Ferrand (Roschdy Zem) and is about to marry him. Her son Abel (Louis Garrel) is less than happy about this, since Michel is the latest convict serving a prison sentence for whom his mother has fallen. He grudgingly attends their prison wedding. Shortly after, Michel is released and the couple embark on their new life together, with Michel promising to go straight and Sylvie, who likes to think the best of people, taking him at his word. She has always dreamed of opening a flower shop, and he gives her the funds to make it happen. They hire premises and start doing it up, getting Abel to help.

Although he can see that the romance is genuine – at least on his mother’s side – Abel understandably doesn’t trust his mum’s judgement and doesn’t trust Michel at all.… Read the rest

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Let it Ghost
(Meng Gui 3 Bao,
猛鬼3寶)

Director – Wong Hoi – 2022 – Hong Kong – 100m

***

Three unlikely ghost stories from Hong Kong: an actor shoots a ghost scene with a real ghost, a young man’s girlfriend is possessed by a ‘horny ghost’, and a sweet romance develops as a cute little girl haunts a shopping mall – plays at the NFT on Friday, July 14th at 8.30pm as part of Focus Hong Kong 2023 at BFI Southbank which runs from Wednesday, July 12th to Saturday, July 15th

A ghost story shot anywhere else would probably set out to scare and unsettle, but in Hong Kong they have never hesitated to mix up their horror with other, seemingly incompatible genres. The first entry in this compendium of three ghost stories plays with notions of truth, reality and artifice through the time worn device of a film within the film, the second is a lightweight, gender-fluid, sex comedy while the third is a sentimental tale about a cute child and the passing of the era of the 1990s shopping mall.

In the first story, Scary Prison, a real ghost gets involved in the shooting of a TV series episode involving a ghost. The series is The Incarcerated Detective, set in a prison where the eponymous policeman investigates and apprehends evildoers among the inmates with his catchphrase, “Justice… always stands on the side of… Justice.”… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

The Flash

Director – Andy Muschietti – 2023 – US – Cert. 12a – 144m

*****

Tormented by the death of his mother, The Flash goes back in time to try and save her – out in UK cinemas on Wednesday, June 14th

Barry Allen (Ezra Miller) is running late for work again. The girl that usually makes his special sandwich at the shop near his workplace isn’t in today, so instead he has to deal with someone who needs to be talked through the order. On top of that, he gets a call from Alfred (Jeremy Irons) at the Batcave because no other Justice League superhero is available: could The Flash please attend to rescuing staff and patients from the explosives-rigged Gotham City Hospital?

So he races over there and while Batman (Ben Affleck) pursues criminals on the Batbike. Barry / The Flash, a superhero with the ability to move at incredible speed, saves falling babies and their ward sister from a collapsing, high-rise, maternity ward. The pursuit is mostly over when Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) turns up at a fight on at a bridge to save the day and wield the Lasso of Truth.

Barry has parental issues: specifically, he is trying to get his wrongly convicted father Henry (Ron Livingstone) exonerated for the crime of killing Barry’s mother (Maribel Verdú from Pan’s Labyrinth, Guillermo del Toro, 2006; Y Tu Mamá También, Alfonso Cuarón, 2001) in their home when, as he claims, he was out buying a can of tomatoes at the time.… Read the rest