Tag: road movie

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Features Live Action Movies

Typist Artist Pirate King

Director – Carol Morley – 2022 – UK – Cert. 12a – 106m

****1/2

Road movie in which her psychiatric nurse drives an artist with mental health issues from London to an open entry exhibition in the North – in cinemas on Friday, October 27thfollowing premieres in the premieres in the 2023Raindance Film Festivaland 2022 Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival

In these days of US-style promotion, branding and media, it’s easy to think of artists as high profile, rich and successful. While some are, that’s not what an artist is: an artist is, quite simply, someone who makes art. (If they’re a good artist, they make good art. Whatever that is.) The subject of Morley’s new road movie is the artist Audrey Amiss (1933-2013) who, although she exhibited her work an number of times during her lifetime, received scarcely any recognition in that period. She suffered from mental health issues and was in and out of mental hospitals throughout her life.

Audrey (Monica Dolan) is regularly visited in her London flat by psychiatric nurse Sandra (Kelly Macdonald). One day, she asks Sandra to drive her to an exhibition which has an open call for artists, as she’s never exhibited and feels the time has come.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Monsters

Director – Gareth Edwards – 2010 – UK – Cert. 12 – 90m

*****

Gareth Edwards’ remarkable feature debut is like nothing you’ve ever seen – out on DVD Monday, April 11th 2011 following its release in UK cinemas on Friday, December 3rd, 2010

An extraordinary film defying easy classification, Monsters looks from the outside like a cheap District 9 (Neill Blomkamp, 2009) but is actually something else entirely: a sci-fi road movie, a romantic drama, radical and inventive like nothing you’ve ever seen. Made on a shoestring in and around Mexico with a four-man crew and a two-man cast (plus anyone else who was around at the time), it’s the brainchild of former BBC CG FX maestro Edwards, who added all the creature effects himself in post-production in his living room. A remarkable, transcendent work, it hits DVD with scads of extras.

Pre-emptive titles inform us that a returning space probe broke up over Mexico scattering alien samples gathered during its voyage, resulting in part of that country’s being declared an ‘Infected Zone’, a no-go area for mankind populated by giant monsters. Some years later, Mexico-based photojournalist Kaulder (Scoot McNairy from In Search Of A Midnight Kiss) gets a call from his US-based boss to bring home the latter’s daughter Sam (Whitney Able).… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Joy Ride

Director – Adele Lim – 2023 – US – Cert. 15 – 95m

***1/2

A Chinese-American corporate lawyer visiting China to close a business deal for her boss finds herself on a road trip with three friends which turns into a search for her birth mother – raunchy, gross-out comedy is out in UK cinemas on Friday, August 4th

TL;DR: good fun and occasionally hilarious – provided you don’t watch the trailer first.

White Hills, Seattle. Little girl Audrey Sullivan (Lennon Yee), a Chinese adoptee with white parents, hits it off with new girl in town of the same age Lolo Chen (Chloe Pun) when at a local playground, the latter sees off a white racist boy bully on her behalf. Growing up, the pair become inseparable, yet they are very different characters, with Audrey being the school yearbook’s “most likely to succeed” while Lolo is “most likely to be arrested”. Five minutes into the film, Audrey (Ashley Park) is a highly regarded and highly paid corporate lawyer on the verge of being while Lolo (Sherry Cola) is a struggling artist making sex-positive art (i.e. it centres around representations of male and female genitalia). Audrey is letting the impoverished Lolo stay at her upmarket house.… Read the rest

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Animation Features Movies

Suzume
(Suzume
No Tojimari,
すずめの戸締まり,
lit. Suzume’s
Locking Up)

Director – Makoto Shinkai – 2022 – Japan – Cert. PG – 122m

***1/2

Aided by a man turned into a mobile, talking, three-legged chair, a schoolgirl must prevent giant, freak weather ‘worms’ from devastating Japan with earthquakes – anime feature is out in UK and Irish cinemas on Friday, April 14th

Prompted by a question from a man she meets on a road in her hometown, 17-year-old schoolgirl Suzume visits an abandoned hot springs facility in which is situated a door in a free standing door frame. She opens it only to find she can’t enter. Shortly after this, in school, she notices smoke in a gigantic, red and black worm-like form rising from the hot springs facility.

At the same time, everyone around her receives earthquake warnings on their smartphones, but no-one else can see the rising form. She goes back to the facility to find the man she met trying to close the door and cut off the incoming smoke, something she helps him to do. They do not close the door in time to prevent the red and black form falling onto the land and an earthquake resulting. The man locks the door using a key on his person.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

EO
(IO)

Director – Jerzy Skolimowski – 2022 – Poland – Cert. 15 – 88m

*****

Forced to leave his home in the circus, a donkey undergoes a series of adventures – on BFI Player as a Subscription Exclusive along with three other Skolimowski titles on Monday, April 3rd, following its release in UK cinemas on Friday, February 3rd

After an absence of some seven years from the cinema, Skolimowski has chosen to make a movie with an animal as its central character rather than a human being. EO is a donkey (played by some six donkeys over different parts of the film) who undergoes a series of adventures as things happen around him. He starts out as a performer in a circus with a girl called Kasandra (Sandra Drzymalska), who takes good care of him and treats him with genuine affection.

Life is good. But then he finds himself co-opted by (and Kasandra arguing with) another circus person Wasyl (Maciej Stepniak) who uses a whip on him to get him to drive a cart of rubbish to the local tip. These two episodes set the tone for what is to follow: while all the humans here use the animal for their own ends, some treat him with kindness while others don’t, rather using him as a means to an end without any sense of his being a conscious creature.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

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

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Animation Features Movies Shorts

Memories
(Memorizu,
メモリーズ)

1/ Magnetic Rose (Kanojo no Omoide, 彼女の想いで)

2/ Stink Bomb (Saishu Heiki, 最臭兵器)

3/ Cannon Fodder (Taiho no Machi, 大砲の街)

Directors

– 1/ Koji Morimoto, 2/ Tensai Okamura, 3/ Katsuhiro Otomo

– 1995 – Japan – Cert. 12 – 113m

*****

Executive producer Katsuhiro Otomo’s anime anthology adapts three of his dystopian-themed manga stories into animation – out on Blu-ray from All The Anime, Monday, 12th September, details below review

The film that made Otomo’s name and the one with which he’s most frequently associated is Akira (1988). It wasn’t his first film, though. Previously, he was one of nine directors who collaborated on the uneven portmanteau Robot Carnival (1987), a compendium of different animated stories based around robots of various types. One of the other directors was Koji Morimoto.

Memories is loosely similar – it only has three stories (and three directors), allowing each of the segments a bit more room. Its three episodes are very different yet perfectly complement each other. Otomo directed the third section Cannon Fodder.

Parts of the roughly two hour Akira drag, while Otomo’s later Steamboy (2004) gets lost within a massive set piece after a near perfect opening first reel or so.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Paris, Texas

Director – Wim Wenders – 1984 – US – Cert. 15 – 145m

*****

A constantly inventive movie in which a man returns after four years’ absence to bond with his seven-year-old son and seek out his disappeared wife – back out in cinemas on Friday, July 29th

Travis (Harry Dean Stanton) stumbles out of the desert in Southern Texas having disappeared to Mexico for four years following the collapse of his marriage. During this time, the estranged couple’s seven-year-old son Hunter (Hunter Carson) has been living with Travis’ brother Walt (Dean Stockwell) and wife Anne (Aurore Clement) who he understandably thinks of as his parents. Walt coaxes Travis into re-establishing his paternal relationship with the boy. When Travis decides to track down disappeared wife Jane (Nastassja Kinski), who has been sending Walt and Anne money for the child from a bank in Houston, the child talks him into letting him tag along.

Although it starts with Travis walking, and much of the early part of the film takes place in and around Walt and Anne’s home, it’s very much a road movie with a great deal of the narrative taking place in cars and pickup trucks.

The film caused a sensation when it came out in the UK over 35 years ago.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Hit The Road
(Jaddeh Khaki,
جاده خاکی)

Director – Panah Panahi – 2021 – Iran – Cert. 12a – 93m

****

Four in a car. An Iranian family drive across Iran towards the Turkish border, for reasons that will only later become clear – out in cinemas on Friday, July 29th

A family of four – dad (Hassan Madjooni), mum (Pantea Panahiha), elder son (Amin Simiar), younger son (Rayan Sarlak) plus family dog Jessy – are driving across Iran towards the Turkish border. Actually, when we first meet them, they’ve stopped at a lay-by. That opening, combined with the title, doesn’t leave you in much doubt that this is going to be a road movie. We take an instant shining to the younger son, an irrepressible six-year-old who plays air piano on the keyboard drawn on the plaster cast around his sleeping father’s leg.

A bit of a rogue, this one: mum and dad have left their mobile phones at home as instructed, but six has brought his with him (he denies it, but the ringtone is a giveaway: it turns out he’s hidden it in his underwear and we should probably be thankful the director didn’t make this film in Odorama). Mum takes the phone away and buries it, but later on in the journey, he’s trying to buy another one.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Pixie

Director – Barnaby Thompson – 2020 – Ireland – Cert. 15 – 93m

***1/2

A free-spirited, rule-bending Irishwoman takes on a world of small-time gangsters from the inside – in cinemas from Friday, October 23rd

The West of Ireland. Fergus (Fra Fee) and Colin (Rory Fleck Byrne) have received a tip-off about a shipment coming to a country church. Colin has recently split with longtime girlfriend Pixie. Entering the vestry and presumably expecting gangster types, the pair are surprised to find four priests, two who are visiting from Afghanistan “to discover the lessons we’ve learned from dealing with the IRA”. Our two protagonists, suspicious that Catholics don’t exist in Afghanistan, find themselves in a shoot out. After which, they discover the bag containing the drugs shipment.

We’ve not even met the central character yet. Pixie (Olivia Cooke) adores and dotes on her gangster stepfather Dermot O’Brien (Colm Meaney) but hates and distrusts her quick-tempered stepbrother Mike. She heads out to drink tequila in a bar where, coincidentally, Frankie (Ben Hardy) and Harland (Daryl McCormack) are picking up pills from Daniel (Chris Walley). Frankie always fancied Pixie and, encouraged by Daniel’s lewd, drugs-fuelled suggestions regarding Pixie’s sexual proclivities, Frankie, with Harland in tow, drives out to Pixie’s remote house at two in the morning.… Read the rest