Tag: rural and urban

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Features Live Action Movies Music

The History of Sound

Director – Oliver Hermanus – 2025 – UK, US – Cert. 15 – 128m

****

A Kentucky man falls for a music professor in Boston and accompanies him on a field trip recording folk songs – out in UK cinemas on Friday, January 23rd

In 1917, having grown up on a farmstead in rural Kentucky and his remarkable singing voice being noticed by a local schoolteacher, Lionel Worthing (Paul Mescal from Hamnet, Chloé Zhao, 2025; Gladiator II, Ridley Scott, 2024; All of Us Strangers, Andrew Haigh, 2023) gets a student scholarship to Boston’s New England Conservatory of Music. One Saturday evening in a Boston pub with friends, he makes the acquaintance of David White (Josh O’Connor from  La Chimera, Alice Rohrwacher, 2023; Mothering Sunday, Eva Husson, 2021; The Crown, TV series, 2019-20; God’s Own Country, Francis Lee, 2017) who is playing folk songs on the piano and, it turns out, is a tenured academic with an obsessive hobby: travelling around the country collecting, recording and cataloguing folk songs. David has what Lionel describes as the sound equivalent of a photographic memory: he can remember word for word and note for note, any song sung in his presence.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Marty Supreme

Director – Josh Safdie – 2025 – US – Cert. 15 – 149m

*****

In the 1950s, a young New Yorker with the odds against him is determined to become a top table tennis player – in cinemas from Friday, December 26th

Manhattan’s Lower East Side, the 1950s. Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet) has a dream. It is, admittedly, a pretty odd dream which involves him rising to the top of a sport to which no-one in his native America currently pays any attention: table tennis. Also, he is possessed of the quintessentially New York sensibility of the street smart hustler who can, he believes, sell anything to anyone. A mere 23 years of age, he is naive and optimistic, but if you think that means the hard realities of day-to-day living are about to grind him down, you’ve got another think coming. For Marty is nothing less than a force of nature, blessed with unshakeable self-belief. And he needs it, because in this seriocomic rollercoaster of a sports drama, the odds seem to be increasingly stacked against him at every turn.

On top of all this, Marty is at once the person who through shrewd manoeuvring on the one hand makes his own luck and slowly builds his own destiny, and through hubris on the other has an unfortunate tendency to shoot himself in the foot..… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Blitz
(2024)

Directed by Steve McQueen
Certificate 12a
120 minutes
Released 1 November

People just getting on with life in dire circumstances, doing what they have to do. A mother searches for her lost son. An 11-year-old embraces his black identity. Women work in munitions factories. Thieves take advantage of death and devastation to turn a profit. And, unexpectedly, a spiritually dark place produces an impassioned plea for the virtues of Christianity.

This is London during the Nazi bombings of the Second World War. Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave, the Small Axe TV series) and his collaborators have done remarkable historical and visual research, so that the historical situation seeps into you. McQueen’s way in was a photograph of a young black boy, around whom he has woven a story of an evacuee jumping from the train to return to his mum.

In a remarkable performance, 11-year-old Elliot Heffernan plays the boy… [Read the rest at Reform magazine]

Read my longer review on this site here.

Trailer:

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Features Live Action Movies

Starve Acre

Director – Daniel Kokotajlo – 2023 – UK – Cert. 15 – 98m

***

As a couple become mired in grief following the death of their son, their behaviour turns increasingly obsessive, erratic and violent – terrifying and unsettling folk horror is out in UK cinemas on Friday, September 6th and on Blu-ray, DVD and BFI Player from Monday, October 21st

Thinking the fresh air of the countryside will benefit their son’s health, the family of Richard (Matt Smith), Juliette (Morfydd Clark), and their young son Owen (Arthur Shaw) move from their urban home to the wilds of the Yorkshire countryside and the house, named Starve Acre, in which Richard grew up. Owen doesn’t respond too well to the new environment. An unfortunate incident occurs offscreen at a village event, in which an animal gets stabbed in the eye and Owen’s clothing is stained with blood.

His understandably concerned parents take him to Dr. Monk (Roger Barclay) for advice. It isn’t immediately obvious as to what exactly is wrong, and the situation is set to worsen for the couple.

In Richard’s opinion, it doesn’t help that their hardened, elderly neighbour Gordon (Sean Gilder) visits quite often to fill the boy’s head with tales of a mysterious Jack Grey.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Blitz
(2024)

Director – Steve McQueen – 2024 – UK, US – Cert. 12a – 120m

*****

As the Germans bomb London in WW2’s Blitz, a boy evacuated by his mother as per government instructions refuses to stay on the train and finds his way back to London – from the BFI London Film Festival 2024 which runs from Wednesday, October 9th to Sunday, October 20th in cinemas and on BFI Player and then out in UK cinemas on Friday, November 1st

(This review is a piece of writing currently in progress. Please bookmark and return to this page to see the whole review in due course.)

A five-star review (and I’m unrepentant) for a film that’s less than perfect. It gets the five stars because of the incredible things it gets right.

Blitz promises two things: one, an immersive experience of the London Blitz, and two, the mother and son story of a woman sending her son out of London in the mass child evacuation and the child’s refusal to follow the plan, complicated with the racial tension of the child’s having a black father (who is absent) and a white mother.

Writing these lines, the film’s potential problem is evident; the immersive experience is probably a movie in itself, and this side of things is brilliantly realised without the need for narrative coherence.… Read the rest

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Animation Features Movies

Boonie Bears Time Twist
(Xiong Chu Mo
Ni Zhuan Shi Kong,
熊出沒·逆轉時空)

Director – Lin Huida – 2024 – China – Cert. PG – 105m

***1/2

The Boonie Bears’ friend Vick is tricked into giving up his memories of the bears in exchange for working at an office job far away in the city – in a dubbed format for family audiences – out in UK and Ireland cinemas on Friday, September 13th

Although it works perfectly well as a standalone film, Time Twist is an odd place to start for anyone new to China’s long-running Boonie Bears franchise because the Boonie Bears are here relegated to secondary character status in a story about their friend Vick (once again voiced in the English language version by Paul ‘Maxx’ Rinehart). Here he’s introduced as ‘the logger’ who first fell in and became friends with the Bears (in what those already familiar with the franchise will know as their Pine Tree Mountain forest / national park home) before becoming, as a slogan hand-stamped on the image puts it, a ‘Certified Loser’.

He boards the bus to nearby Shen City, after momentarily looking wistfully at a flier on a telegraph pole reading ‘Lumberjacks / Hiring’. There, he picks up a job as an intern in an office, where his computer keyboard skills and overall ingenuity get his ‘intern’ tag replaced by one for ‘engineer’.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Luminous Woman
(Hikaru Onna,
光る女)

Director – Shinji Somai – 1987 – Japan – Cert. 15 – 118m

*****

A Hokkaido farmer comes to Tokyo in search of his vanished fiancée but finds a world he has not expected – on Blu-ray from Monday, Monday, May 20th

At a rubbish tip on the outskirts of Tokyo, a barefoot man (Takeiji Muto) in cheap trousers and top encounters a suave-looking sophisticate (Kei Suma) and a woman opera singer (Michiru Akiyoshi), the latter performing gracefully atop the rubbish heap. The woman is dependent on the sophisticate. The barefoot man has travelled from Hokkaido to find his fiancée Kuriko Sakura, who was supposed to return after studying accounting to help him run a farm.

The sophisticate knows someone of that name, and drives the barefoot man into the city. In his nightclub, he offers the outsider a deal – if he’ll fight the club’s pro-wrestler for ¥100 000, the other will tell him where to find Kuriko. However, she may not be the person he seeks. Out of her boss’ earshot, the woman warns the outsider that the wrestling may be to the death.

In the club she plays the piano while another woman sings opera and, on the circular dias bordered by a water pool, a challenger fights the incumbent wrestler and loses.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

The End We Start From

Director – Mahalia Belo – 2023 – UK – Cert. 15 – 102m

***1/2

As parts of the UK are flooded and submerged by an ecological disaster, a woman births a baby she must then bring up – on Digital from Monday, March 4th following its release in UK cinemas on Friday, January 19th

On the one hand, this starts off with a woman (Jodie Comer) giving birth and then experiencing the process of being a new mother, with all the joys and stresses that entails. On the other, this shows the UK being overtaken and flooded by an eco-disaster, and how people respond to that situation both individually and en masse. The second scenario is reminiscent of any number of disaster and / or science fiction movies about flooding, apocalypse or dystopia (When Worlds Collide, Rudolph Maté, 1951; Children of Men, Alfonso Cuarón, 2006; Waterworld, Kevin Reynolds, 1995): if you approach this movie expecting something like that, you’re going to be disappointed, because although that element is very much present in the film, it’s little more than the backdrop.

It plays more like a road movie, in which the heroine – the husband having dropped out of the narrative towards the end of the first reel – meets a series of people on her travels, each of whom offer their own individual insight into the state of things and how the new mother might move forward.… Read the rest

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Animation Features Movies

The Boy And The Heron
(Kimitachi Wa
Do Ikiru Ka,
君たちはど
う生きるか,
lit.
How Do You Live?)

Director – Hayao Miyazaki – 2023 – Japan – Cert. 12a – 124m

*****

During WorldWar Two, a boy bereaved of his mother moves to the countryside with his businessman father where a heron lures him into another dimension to rescue his vanished stepmother – out in UK cinemas on Friday, December 26th

Directors, eh? They make their last film, then, some time later, they go and make another one. The Wind Rises (2013) was supposed to be Hayao Miyazaki’s last film, but three years later, he was working on his next one. And seven years further on, The Boy And The Heron hits cinemas. The Japanese title How Do You Live? comes from a popular children’s novel, a copy of which appears in the film, rather than the film being an adaptation of the novel.

Three years into World War Two, young boy Mahito (Japanese dub: Soma Santoki; English dub: Luca Padovan) loses his mother in a Tokyo hospital fire. Four years into the war, his father (Japanese dub: Takuya Kimura; English dub: Christian Bale) – a businessman who manufactures aircraft cockpits for the war effort – decides to move both his factory and his son out of Tokyo to the countryside where he plans to marry his late wife’s younger sister Natsuko (Japanese dub: Yoshino Kimura; English dub: Gemma Chan).… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Cairo Conspiracy,
(original title:
Boy From Heaven,
Walad Min Al Janna,
صبي من الجنة)

Director – Tarik Saleh – 2022 – Sweden, France, Finland – Cert. 12a – 126m

***

A naive, young, Egyptian student at a top Islamic university is recruited as a spy for the secret police – out in UK cinemas on Friday, April 14th

Adam (Tawfeek Barhom), a bookworm born and raised in rural Egypt where he works as a fisherman like his father before him, visits the local mosque where his trusted Imam gives him a letter informing him he’s been accepted into Cairo’s prestigious Al-Azhar University, the top seat of Sunni Muslim learning and thought. He’s worried his widowed father won’t let him go, but his father fatally accepts it as the Will of Allah. In his university dorm, Adam finds his bed taken by fellow student Raed (Ahmed Laissaoui) and winds up in the bunk below. (The university is for men only: no women. At least, we see none here.)

Unexpectedly, the Grand Imam, the head of the university, dies and a successor must be chosen. At the security forces building, the General (Mohammad Bakri) listens to the analysis by Colonel Ibrahim (Fares Fares) of the possible candidates, throwing all files on the floor except one – the one with whom the President’s views align, the candidate who must win.… Read the rest