*****

A Belgian diplomat’s baby daughter growing up in Japan comes to realise, by her third birthday, that she is not God – plays in the Annecy International Animation Festival 2026 which runs from Sunday, 21st June to Saturday 27th June.

In the beginning was God. At least, that’s how the new-born Amélie (French language version voice: Loïse Charpentier) sees herself. She is, essentially, a tube which swallows, digests and ejects (as per the film’s French language title). She has a perfect command of verbal language, so sees no need to say anything. That said, she makes great use of voice-over throughout the piece. She remains motionless, practising “the gift of serenity”. “Your child is a vegetable”, proclaims a doctor to the child’s parents. She remains in this state until her second birthday, when life is interrupted by an earthquake – nothing significant in the wider scheme of things, but a momentous event in the interior life of a small child. She attempts to speak, but to her horror the words in her head don’t emerge, only baby noises.

Amelie is the third child of Patrick (French voice: Marc Arnaud) and Danièle (French voice: Laetitia Coryn), and has two older siblings, Juliette (French voice: Haylee Issembourg) and André (French voice: Isaac Schoumsky).… Read the rest

***

Three separate journeys beneath the Earth’s surface in the company of an archaeologist, a particle physicist and an urban explorer – had its sold out UK Premiere at the Barbican on Tuesday, March 24th and is out in UK cinemas on Friday, March 27th

Why do we seek the void, asks a narrator (Sandra Hüller from Project Hail Mary, Phil Lord, Christopher Miller, 2026; The Zone of Interest, Jonathan Glazer, 2023; Anatomy of a Fall, Justine Triet, 2023) as the camera descends into an Academy 4:3 image of an orifice within an ash tree, a portal to the world below. In a letterboxed image, we’re in a car passing the garish lists of Las Vegas entertainments, then on to breach a wire fence on the outskirts of that city. Then with a group of women cavers in a jungle, possibly South America somewhere, near a tree on the edge of a vast hole in the ground. Another group of cavers stand around in a room in readiness. A further caver walks down an urban street and starts to lift a manhole cover.

In terms of following what’s going on, apart from the idea of people in different places possessed of a desire to penetrate the Earth’s surface, and exciting, pulsating music by Hannah Peel, all this is really hard to follow; the viewer’s brain is overloaded.… Read the rest

****

A chapel interior is repurposed as a reflection on how personal tragedy can awaken empathy, mercy and collective care – exhibition / installation at Fitzrovia Chapel from Friday, March 6th to Wednesday, March 25th

It’s a strange phenomenon when you attend an exhibition / installation and the unfamiliar venue is, to you, as exciting as the event itself. Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard’s new outing isn’t a film, but an exhibition, the second of three they’ve created in this particular space as it turns out. And the space they’ve deployed is fabulous, a new one on me. 

The Byzantine-inspired Fitzrovia Chapel, as the name implies, is situated in the heart of Fitzrovia, the area of London North of Oxford Street between Regent Street and Tottenham Court Road. It’s the chapel of the former Middlesex Hospital, one of London’s flagship NHS teaching hospitals, which was closed in 2006. You may be familiar with the chapel from King Charles’ 2024 Christmas broadcast.

The venue is open on particular days, often Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, but not every week, and opening times can vary if the space is hosting an exhibition.

What can present challenges is if, as this writer did, you attend a show without being familiar with the space as it normally appears to visitors outside of exhibitions / installations. … Read the rest

***1/2

NSFW

Emily Brontë’s beloved fantasy romance gets a modern makeover with lashings of sex including some S&M – out in UK cinemas on Friday, February 13th

The late eighteenth century. A man is publicly hanged in a town square, with crowds in attendance. Among the onlookers, in a scene unlike anything else that follows it in terms of its scale (a cast of hundreds of if not thousands) is young urchin Cathy Earnshaw (Charlotte Mellington), relishing the spectacle alongside the other kids present.

Cathy lives with her father (Martin Clunes) and servants including young servant / companion Nelly (Vy Nguyen) in the family home Wuthering Heights on the Yorkshire Moors exposed to its treacherous weather of near constant rain, fog or snow. One night, father returns from the pub with a young boy he has rescued from being thrown out on the street by another customer. With the boy hiding in one of the upstairs bedrooms, Cathy goes to look for him only to be unexpectedly dragged under the bed in a moment invoking any number of horror movies. Under the bed, in the dark, she meets the boy (Owen Cooper).… Read the rest

****1/2

After her undercover cop husband is killed by a gang, Nami infiltrates the gang and suffers much abuse as she attempts to identify and take her revenge on his killer – out on Blu-ray as part of the Takashi Ishii: 4 Tales of Nami limited edition digipack set (2000 copies) 

A compelling yet initially indecipherable image is slowly revealed, as we pull out, to be a pink marker pen colouring the handle of a black pistol in the hands of a girl wearing the pyjama top of the man against the side of whose bed she is sitting. He, it turns out, is Mitsuru (Toshiyuki Nagashima from Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla, Miyagawa, 2002; Godzilla vs. Biollante, Seiichi Yamamoto, 1989; Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, Paul Schrader, 1985), an undercover cop; she is Nami (Yui Natsukawa from I Wish, Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2011; Still Walking, Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2008; Zatoichi: The Blind Swordsman, Takeshi Kitano, 2003), and she’s fed up with his lack of contact while he’s on the job. As they embrace, she pleads with him, “Don’t do it!… Read the rest

*****

The woods. A faun is born, looked after by its mother, and learns to fend for itself – remarkable live action adaptation of Bambi, shot with real live animals, is out in UK cinemas on Friday, August 15th

It’s inevitable that any film adaptation of Austrian writer Felix Salten’s novel Bambi: a Tale of Life in the Woods will conjure the spectre of Disney’s groundbreaking, animated Bambi (David D. Hand, 1942). However, this French live action film (which opened in that country last year) takes interesting decisions from the get go. For a start it’s live action, so straight away we’re in the quasi-documentary area of animals being photographed, and it’s unclear to what extent these performers or their environments are being augmented by computer animation. (A couple of wide, establishing drone shots in the opening minutes, too far away to show animals, looked to this writer to incorporate CGI. But perhaps that’s just my imagination, and there’s little or perhaps no computer animation here.)

Then we have the addition of a narrator (this is the English language version, so the narrator (NAME) speaks in English – one would hope that the French soundtrack with on / off-able subtitles would be included on any forthcoming Blu-ray or DVD release, which perhaps might even have an option to switch the voice-over off altogether and just play the sound effects and the music, or even better, have a music only track available as well.)… Read the rest

*****

The lives, loves and challenges of three women working in a hospital in Mumbai – on UK Blu-ray/DVD (Dual Format Edition) from Monday, March 3rd, on BFI Player from Monday, February 17th, and on iTunes and Amazon Prime from Monday, March 17th

Mumbai. Opening with serial, engrossing tracking shots showing first men working throwing goods onto lorries, then men in traffic riding in the open boot of a car, then people riding on the urban rail system, all to the accompaniment of soundtrack vox pops of men and women talking about their lives and how the city helps you forget, All We Imagine as Light is, among other things, a paean to the city of Mumbai.

On a typical working day in the hospital, Nurse Prabha (Kani Kusruti from Girls Will Be Girls, Shuchi Talati, 2024) explains to a doctor why an old lady refuses to take her pills (she’s seeing visions of the torso of her late husband) and opts out of going out to see the latest action blockbuster featuring dreamy male stars with her fellow nurses. She talks about helping with free legal advice to kitchen worker Pavarty (Chhaya Kadam from Sister Midnight, Karan Kandhari, 2024; Laapataa Ladies, Kiran Rao, 2023; Bombay Rose, Gitanjali Rao, 2019) who is having problems with intimidation by thugs to move out of her home.… Read the rest

****

A Japanese widower comes to England to scatter his late wife’s ashes at Lake Windermere – out in UK cinemas on Friday, February 14th

Kenzaburo (Lily Franky from Shoplifters, 2018; After the Storm, 2016; Like Father, Like Son, 2013, all Hirokazu Kore-eda), on occasion abbreviated to Ken, seems somehow lost as he wanders around Tokyo, looking out over a cityscape of roofs, travelling in passenger train carriages, wandering round a food market in search of octopus for he and his wife’s anniversary meal. 

He wistfully observes a live specimen in a tank. It’s not yet in season and the prices are ridiculous, so he shoplifts a packet, taking it to the restaurant where he and his wife Akiko had their first date all those years ago. She (Yuri Tsunematsu from Wife of a Spy, 2020; Before We Vanish, 2017, both Kiyoshi Kurosawa) comes in young as ever, as is he (Kosei Kudo), that pendant on her neck. He ignores the question from the present day chef (Hiroshi Okawa) as to how she’s doing.

Back at his flat, his panicking, besuited son Toshi (Ryo Nishikido) gets him ready for the funeral.… Read the rest

***1/2

A cop determinedly pursues a gangland killer in a city where, since he committed the murder for which he is bing hunted, it always appears to be heavily raining – plays in Echoes In Time | Korean Films of the Golden Age and New Cinema which runs from Monday, October 28th until the end of 2024 at BFI Southbank

Effectively a four-hander – an impulsive detective, his partner on the force, a ruthless killer gangster and his long-suffering girlfriend. Like a slobbish, South Korean version of Chow Yun-fat without the charm, Park Joong-Hung is the Oriental action movie homage-named Inspector Woo, who before the titles have rolled has pursued a black-clad gang into an underground train for a machete fight, shot in stylish, bleached black and white for no apparent reason.

The ground is covered in Autumn leaves, recalling The Conformist (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970). The downtown location of public stairway 40 Steps has a schoolgirl look up and see it begin to rain, the torrential downpour continuing for the two months and more of the remainder of the narrative. A man leaves his car to ascend the steps; halfway up, he approaches another man (Song Young-chang) and kills him, even as the victim stretches out his hand in a futile attempt to keep his murderer’s knife at bay.… Read the rest

*****

An army sergeant is caught attempting to escape from North to South Korea, but then a second chance presents itself – played as the Opening Gala at the 2024 London East Asia Film Festival (LEAFF) which runs from Wednesday, October 23rd to Sunday, November 3rd

North Korea. Sgt. Lim Kyu-nam (Lee Je-hoon) is stationed at the edge of the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) separating North from South Korea, a smart but frustrated soldier who knows he’s never going to rise up the chain of command riddled as it is with nepotism and privilege. Nights, when the rest of his unit is asleep, and inspired by his treasured book of the explorer Edmund Amundsen, he sneaks out of the barracks to map a section of the minefield in the DMZ.

His plan is to escape through that minefield and reach South Korea to defect before the monsoon arrives in four days time and the water moves all the mines around, making his map useless. Then he learns that the bad weather is coming two days earlier than expected. So he must move the date of his escape forward.… Read the rest