Tag: river

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Movies Features Live Action

The Accordion Door
(아코디언 도어)

The Accordion Door (아코디언 도어)

Director – Son Kyeong-su – 2025 – South Korea – Cert. 12a tbc – 115m

*****

A boy loses his memories at age nine, wins prizes as a writer, and falls for the new girl at school who plays football – from LKFF, the London Korean Film Festival 2026 which runs in cinemas from Monday, November 2nd to Tuesday, November 16th

A high school drama of sorts, this starts and ends with the national youth essay competition on the subject of ‘waves’. The lad at the back of the class writes, “I was destined to be unremarkable anyway.” On his paper, he adds, am I a cloud? As a child in a flashback, Lee Ji-soo can barely master the simplest of concepts. His mother (Ok Ji-young) pays attention to him while his dad (Park Jong-hwan from Concrete Utopia, Eom Tae-hwa, 2023) is on his mobile phone.

The teenage Ji-soo (Moon Woo-jin) wipes his eyes and repeats, from the exercise he failed, “rain, river, ocean, clouds.” A cloud hovers near him, sprouts a tendril, and pokes him in the eye against a gentle guitar lament that turns into a thundering rock lament.… Read the rest

Categories
Art Exhibitions Movies Features Live Action

Exhibition on Screen
James McNeill Whistler

Courtesy of Exhibition on Screen

Exhibition on Screen: James McNeill Whistler

Director – David Bickerstaff – 2026 – UK – Cert. U – 90m

*****

A look at the work of 19th Century painter Whistler, seen through the lens of the 2026 Tate Britain exhibition – out in UK cinemas from Tuesday, 15th September

Before watching this latest Exhibition on Screen feature, I was able to visit Tate Britain’s stunning James McNeill Whistler show, which sits very much at the film’s core. The film had the effect of making me want to go back for further visits.

Exhibition on Screen’s film opens with shots of a Victorian concert hall interior where the unseen Whistler (voice: Bret Jones) is addressing the room with his spoken lecture on art, something the film will return to towards its close. After a montage of brushes, painting surfaces and palettes, establishing shots of Tate Britain take us straight into the current Whistler show. “People sometimes think of Whistler as being based in French art, and sometimes as being based in British art,” explains Carol Jacobi, Curator of British Art 1850-1915, Tate Britain, “whereas…he was very much an independent…and very much leading the avant-garde in both those countries.”

Susan Grace Galassi, Curator Emeritas, The Frick Collection, New York, who considers Whistler one of the greatest American artists, notes that he didn’t distinguish between fine or applied art, that he was as great a painter as he was a printmaker.… Read the rest

Categories
Movies Animation Shorts

Flesh Of God
(Carne de Dios)

Flesh Of God (Carne de Dios)

Director – Patricion Plaza – 2022 – Argentina, Mexico, Columbia – France 16+ – 21m

*****

When a travelling monk falls prey to a fever, the folk remedy administered by an old woman causes him to experience bizarre hallucinations – plays in the Annecy International Animation Festival 2026 which runs from Sunday, 21st June to Saturday 27th June

(Warning: not suitable for work or for those of a sensitive disposition. Potentially offensive to religious i.e. Christian viewers. Also, spoilers.)

In a prologue, a young girl races through a field of crops but runs into a monk, who squishes the mushrooms she’s carrying in her bag with his foot, feels her face and checks out her teeth before she flees.

Some time later (or perhaps some time earlier), the profusely sweating monk falls off on his donkey beside his walking guide and wakes in a nearby hovel, or it might be a church, tended by an old woman muttering unintelligible rituals as she attempts to heal him. The perpendicular bars of the roof’s sole window form a makeshift cross on which hangs a Christ figure, but when mushrooms resembling the ones trampled at the start are placed in the initially reluctant monk’s mouth, glowing sprites exit his body and enter the Christ figure, which assumes a monstrous aspect and attacks him.… Read the rest

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Movies Features Live Action

A Pale View of Hills
(Toi Yamanamino Hikari,
遠い山なみの光)

A Pale View of Hills (Toi Yamanamino Hikari, 遠い山なみの光)

Director – Kei Ishikawa – 2025 – UK, Japan, Poland – Cert. 12a – 123m

From the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro

***1/2

An aspiring journalist in 1982 England delves into her mother’s past life in 1952 Nagasaki and unearths dark family secrets – out in UK cinemas on Friday, March 13th

As will be seen from the above logline description, this essentially plays out in two timelines.

One is in Nagasaki, Japan in 1952, less than a decade after the dropping of the atomic bomb, where the married and barely visibly pregnant Etsuko (Suzo Hirose from Lupin III the First, Takashi Yamazaki, 2019; The Third Murder, Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2017; The Boy and the Beast, Mamoru Hosoda, 2015; Our Little Sister, Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2015) befriends Sachiko (Fumi Nikaido from River’s Edge, Isao Yukisada, 2018; Himizu, Sion Sono, 2011), the mother of local waif Mariko (Mio Suzuki), who lives in an isolated shack near the river and plans to emigrate to the US with a man named ‘Frank’.

The other is in a town in England somewhere near Greenham Common, Berkshire, in 1982, where aspiring journalist Niki (Camilla Aiko from Dr.… Read the rest

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Movies Animation Documentary Features Live Action Music

It’s Never Over,
Jeff Buckley

It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley

Director – Amy Berg – 2025 – US – Cert. 15 – 106m

***1/2

A look at the life of the hugely talented singer / songwriter whose career in the 1990s was cut short by his untimely death – out in UK cinemas on Friday, February 13th

It’s tempting to place Jeff Buckley among the all too long list of rock and roll music casualties who killed themselves via a mixture of excessive lifestyle and drug abuse, a list which includes Jeff’s absent, singer / songwriter father Tim, who died of a morphine and heroin overdose at age 28.

This documentary charts its subject’s life chronologically and thus doesn’t get to the issue of Jeff’s death until late on. Following his early years as a young hopeful living in New York City, Jeff Buckley relocated to Memphis where one day, aged 30, he swam out into the Wolf River (a tributary of the Mississippi) and was never seen alive again. The autopsy, which was pretty much open and shut, recorded that he had one beer in his system. Nothing else. The river at this location had a powerful undertow, so Buckley’s untimely death can be put down to a tragic combination of ignorance and misjudgement.… Read the rest

Categories
Movies Features Live Action

Invisibles
(Invisibles)

Invisibles (Invisibles)

Director – Junna Chif – 2025 – Canada – 94m

****1/2

A sex worker turned exotic dancer starts providing sexual services to disabled people – premieres in the Critics’ Picks Competition of the 29th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival

“Blow jobs are real jobs – and real jobs suck” reads a slogan held by three boisterous young women on a protest march. In a nightclub, we watch one of them perform a burlesque striptease to rapturous applause from the audience, seated in male and female blocks. ‘Ella’ (Nadia Essadiqi from Incendies, Denis Villeneueve, 2010) later gets an email from the disabled brother of a friend stating he is now “ready for full sexual intercourse”.

She decides to meet the challenge, so the sender turns up in a van with his carer Marco (Victor Andres Turgeon-Trelles) who hoists him onto the bed, then departs for an hour leaving a contact number. Floyd (Floyd Lapierre-Poupart) can’t move much and has club hands and feet, and their initial encounter proves less than successful, resulting in his premature ejaculation. You sense that the whole exercise is way outside both their comfort zones. In the tense exchange that follows with Marco, he emphasises that the correct term is “people with a disability, Miss” and she retorts with, “sex workers, Sir.”… Read the rest

Categories
Movies Animation Features

Flow
(Straume)
(2024)

Flow (Straume) (2024)

Director – Gints Zilbalodis – 2024 – Belgium, France, Latvia – Cert. U – 84m

*****

A cat must survive rising water levels as they engulf both the countryside and cities – remarkable, dialogue-free, computer animated feature is out now on 4K UHD, Blu-ray and DVD

Like his earlier Away (2019), Zilbalodis’ new CG animated movie features characters who don’t speak. The central character is a cat, and you’d be forgiven, after years of animated films about cats in which they talk, for expecting the same here, but Zilbalodis isn’t interested in anthropomorphised talking animals. He’s clearly interested in animals, and in characters, but the cat here has been derived from watching and studying cats in real life and their behaviour in the real world. There’s a long history of this in drawn animation, typified by the classic Disney films, where it was all about what you could achieve with a paper and pencil, studying from life, making drawings of characters move.

These days, the medium has moved on, and unless one is being purist and working with pencil and paper for the sake of making drawn animation the way it was made roughly a century ago (and there’s nothing whatsoever wrong with doing that), you would use computers as Zilbalodis does.… Read the rest

Categories
Movies Documentary Features Live Action

Riefenstahl

Riefenstahl

Director – Andres Veiel – 2024 – Germany – Cert. 15 – 115m

*****

An unsettling, deep dive into the indisputable artistic talent, evasive personality and self-reconstructed memory of Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl through her personal archive of some 700 boxes – out in UK cinemas on Friday, May 9th

Sepia / yellow images. A woman walking by the sea. Incidental music suggesting a reaching, a striving. Out of focus images of crowds lining the streets, coming into focus to proclaim, “Heil, mein Fuhrer.” The lighting of the Olympic flame, the firing of a gun at a track event. Leni Riefenstahl, as a young woman, examining hanging strips of 35mm film at the editor’s bench. And then an extract from a talk show: would she do it differently if she could live her life again? What were her mistakes? Her close association with Hitler? She hesitates – you can almost feel her squirming, trying to find a way round the question. She starts talking about her first film as director, The Blue Light (1932), a mountaineering picture in which she did all the rock climbing stunts herself. She didn’t know of Hitler at this point, she says. “If the Fascists saw you”, she was told, “you would become their hero.”… Read the rest

Categories
Movies Animation Features

Spirited Away
(Sen
to Chihiro
no Kamikakushi,
千と千尋の神隠し)

Spirited Away
(Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi, 千と千尋の神隠し)

Director – Hayao Miyazaki – 2001 – Japan – Cert. PG – 125m

****1/2

(A shorter version of this review was originally published in Third Way for UK release date 12/09/2002. At which point, hardly anyone in the UK outside of anime fandom knew who Miyazaki was.)

In director Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, a ten-year-old girl must survive a bathhouse run by demons after her parents are turned into pigs – back in UK cinemas from Thursday, December 26th 2024

To discover the films of Hayao Miyazaki – and those of his company Studio Ghibli (pronounced “Jib-Lee”) – is like suddenly being exposed to those of Disney without prior knowledge of their sheer number or quality. In Miyazaki’s native Japan, Spirited Away shattered box office records to succeed Titanic (James Cameron, 1997) as the most lucrative movie of all time. In the US, it won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature while making only modest inroads into the marketplace. Britain, however, is not the US, and it may well fare better here than it did there.

Previous Miyazaki outings have covered children’s experience of the countryside (My Neighbour Totoro, 1988; one of this writer’s favourite films of all time), a young girl’s learning to find her way in the world (Kiki’s Delivery Service, 1989) and conflicting loyalties among pilots in interwar Europe (Porco Rosso, 1992).… Read the rest

Categories
Movies Features Live Action

Only the River Flows
(He Bian de Cuo Wu,
河边的错误,
lit. Mistake (or Mistakes)
By the River)

Only the River Flows (He Bian de Cuo Wu, 河边的错误,
lit. Mistake (or Mistakes) By the River)

Director – Wei Shujun – 2023 – China – Cert. 15 – 101m

**

A cop must solve a complex murder mystery his chief believes to be an open and shut case – out in UK cinemas on Friday, August 16th

A small boy with a toy gun plays cops and robbers in a deserted building, He opens doors like the protagonist of a Hollywood cop movie, looking for an armed criminal. And then he opens the door at the end of the corridor to reveal… a drop. The edge of a half demolished building, a building site with diggers.

This bravura opening is the high point of a film that combines a number of disparate elements in an attempt to construct a gritty police procedural murder mystery. However, it gets rather too caught up in many of these elements, and they swamp the narrative, which becomes incredibly tough to follow as a result. (This reviewer went back a second time to see if he liked it more on second viewing. He didn’t.)

A police chief (Tianlai Hou), who is also a keen table tennis player, encourages his force to get their merit recommendations in.… Read the rest