Tag: school

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Animation Features Movies

The Glassworker
(Sheesha Gar,
شیشہ گ)

Director – Usman Riaz – 2024 – Pakistan, Spain – Cert. 12a – 98m

*****

The son of a pacifist glassblower learning his father’s trade falls for the violin-playing daughter of an army colonel in wartime – complex, anti-war drama from the 2024 Annecy International Animation Festival in the Contrechamps section, released in Pakistan on Friday, 26th July 2024 and out in UK cinemas on Friday, September 19th

If you knew nothing about this animated film beforehand, you’d assume it to be Japanese. Love it or hate it, most animation made in Japan falls within very distinctive, stylistic, visual parameters. According to the press blurb, director Riaz is an admirer of Studio Ghibli directors Miyazaki and Takahata as well as more recent directors Mamoru Hosoda and Satoshi Kon. Visually, the film feels more like a Miyazaki than anything else, and of comparable quality too. Yet it’s also highly original, and Riaz, here directing his first feature after a number of shorts, clearly has his own voice.

It opens with a frame story about youthful glassblower Vincent Oliver (voice: Sacha Dhawan) who, with the help of his father, is preparing for the opening of his debut glassware exhibition. He rereads a letter from a girl which his father (voice: Art Malik) had told him years ago to destroy in their workshop’s furnace.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Happyend
(HAPPYEND) 

Director – Neo Sora – 2024 – Japan – Cert. 12a – 113m

***

Two schoolboys play a prank on their despotic principal, who turns it into an excuse to introduce a high tech surveillance system – out in UK and Irish cinemas on Friday, September 19th

In a future dystopian Kobe, Japan, that looks remarkably like the present day Kobe, Japan, a group of highschoolers fail to get past the tough, power-dressed, Chinese lady bouncer to a club because they’re underage. A couple of the boys, Yuta (Hayato Kurihara) and Kou (Yukito Hidaka), wandering down a nearby back alley, notice a man in a dark vest taking a crate of beer into the building, strip off their white shirts to reveal similar dark vests underneath, and use crates of beer to gain back door access. Inside, the DJ is electrifying, the beat is strong and the gig is everything they had hoped. There is a police raid, but Kou can’t get Yuta to leave. Somehow, they and the DJ end up being the only ones there, and he gives them a talisman as a mark of respect and tells them to come back for the second set, which is better. But they don’t chance their luck.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Hidden
(Caché)

Director – Michael Haneke – 2005 – Austria, France, Germany – Cert. 15 – 117m

***1/2

Covertly delivered VHS videotapes suggest to an upper middle class family that they are being watched, and begin to tease out guilt for an incident in the husband’s past – the closing film of Complicit: A Michael Haneke Retrospective, in UK cinemas from Friday, June 20th and on BFI Player from Thursday, September 11th 2025

A lengthy, locked-off camera shot of a street. A woman (Juliette Binoche) leaves the house through a full body height metal gate that seems to serve a security function, although the street seems largely quiet and unremarkable. Then the image starts to rewind in the manner of a videotape; what we are watching is a recording in the videotape player of a couple Georges and Anne Laurent (Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche), who are discussing its contents. The tape has been left outside their front door for reasons that are not immediately obvious and by person or persons unknown.

This opening shot is mirrored by another static shot at the end taken from outside the school of their son Pierrot (Lester Makedonsky) as pupils leave, in which… well, you’ll have to see for yourself, and director Haneke doesn’t make it easy to see what it is he wants you to see, so you’ll have to work at it… and even then, you may miss it.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Weapons

Director – Zach Cregger – 2025 – US – Cert. 18 – 128m

****

One night, all but one of the children in one class in the town school disappear into the dark, leaving the townsfolk baffled as to what happened to them… – Fortean-sounding mystery is out in UK cinemas on Friday, August 8th

One night at 2.17am, the 17 other kids in Alex’s class got up out of their beds, went downstairs, opened their front doors, and ran out into the night. As a child relates the incident, we observe it in flashback. The kids run with arms half outstretched at an angle, as if playing at being aeroplanes in the school playground. If you’ve seen the film’s poster, this strange angle of the arms is also apparent. As it also is in the film’s trailer, which starts with this flashback. But what is in the mind of these kids? Where are they going? To what purpose?

For that matter, why the title Weapons? I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that you’ll know the answer once you’ve seen the film.

Thus begins one of the most intriguing cinematic mysteries of recent years. To unpack his prologue, writer-director Cregger opts for an astute, six-part, character-based structure.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies

Savages
(Sauvages)

Director – Claude Barras – 2024 – Switzerland – Cert. PG – 87m

French with English subtitles.

*****

An indigenous pre-teenage girl stands up to loggers destroyingthe local rainforest – stop-frame animated feature from the director of My Life as a Courgette is out in UK cinemas on Friday, August 1st

From its opening moments in darkness following unsettling creature noises suggesting a jungle forest, followed by jungle forest establishing shots – a frog jumping across a river via a series of stones, a snake slithering around a tree, a baby orangutan (non-verbal voice: soundtrack composer and co-sound editor Charles de Ville) swinging on a branch – it’s clear that this has high ambitions indeed. All the above would be one thing to execute in live action – a few location natural history shots… possibly library footage. In model – or stop-motion – animation, you need to physically build everything in terms of miniature model sets, so to achieve such images is a major undertaking.

Having already set the production bar high, this then pushes it up further with the rasping sound of a chainsaw, as the tree heights on which the baby orangutan and its mother (voice: de Ville again), who has just rescued the infant from the attentions of the deadly snake, are resting suddenly topples into a camp of workers who are going about their allotted task of destroying the creature’s natural habitat.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Blue
is the Warmest Colour
(La Vie d’Adèle)

Director – Abdellatif Kechiche – 2013 – France – Cert. 18 – 180m

UK release date 22/11/2013;

Review originally published in Third Way magazine, November 2013.

A loose adaptation of Julie Maroh’s graphic novel Le Bleu est une Couleur Chaude, this is one of the most touching films about romantic love (and physical passion) ever. Be warned, it contains some pretty explicit, real rather than simulated, sex scenes (there’s good reason for the 18 certificate) but these appear in a wider, character-driven context.

Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos) and her mainly girl peer group at school spend much time discussing boys. She sleeps with but feels no real connection to a boy who’s a “sure thing”. While this romance is going nowhere, she exchanges glances with an unknown blue-haired girl on the arm of another woman on the street and is completely smitten. Seeing her emotional turmoil, she’s dragged off for a drink by her confidant, a boy she’s unaware is gay until they’re together in a gay bar, from which she makes her excuses and somehow winds up alone in an all-girl bar where Emma (Léa Seydoux), the girl with blue hair, chats her up. From there, to the confusion of her straight peers, a relationship slowly blossoms into full-blown passion.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies

The First
Slam Dunk

All images: © I.T. PLANNING, INC. © 2022 THE FIRST SLAM DUNK Film Partners

Director – Takehiko Inoue – 2022 – Japan – Cert. 12a tbc – 124m

*****

A high school basketball team sets out to defeat the seemingly unstoppable league champions – on 4K UHD + Blu-ray Collector’s Edition, Steelbook, Blu-ray, and DVD on 24th March following its debut in the 2023 Annecy International Animation Festival from Wednesday, June 14th; Edinburgh Film Festival from Wednesday, August 22nd-23rd; out in cinemas in the UK and Ireland on Wednesday, August 30th

The coastal town of Shohoku. 11-year-old Ryota Miyagi (voice: Miyuri Shimabukuro) lives in the shadow of his 14-year-old, elder brother and school basketball star Sota (voice: Gakuto Kajiwara). One evening, Sota takes his younger sibling out for a practice at the local court, playing as hard as he can to push Ryota, which makes the youngster want to push himself harder still. Sota then alienates Ryota by going on a fishing trip with his peer group rather than respond to Ryota’s demand to extend their practice session. When his elder brother is tragically killed at sea, Ryota must both step into both the role of man of the house and prove himself in the school basketball team.

By the time Ryota is 17 (voice: Shugo Nakamura), he is one of the players on the Shohoku school basketball team which itself faces challenges: specifically, if it is to win the national championships, it must defeat the the seemingly unstoppable reigning champions the Sannoh school basketball club and their star player Masashi Kawata (voice: Mitsuaki Kanuka), Ryota’s opposite number (both wear their team’s no.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Brief History of a Family
(Jiating Jianshi,
家庭简史)

Director – Jianjie Lin – 2024 – China – Cert. 15 – 99m

****

A boy from a broken home starts spending more and more time with the family of a schoolmate, where the family isn’t quite as perfect as it initially appears… – out in UK cinemas on Friday, March 21st

A boy is doing pull-ups in the school gym. A basketball hits him on the head. He falls. (All in one highly striking shot looking from behind at the back of his head.) He’s on the floor. A nurse patches him up in the san. Going home, he has a minor altercation with a boy who surprises him. But, actually, the boy just wants to know if he’s okay.

Next day, the same boy – driven by guilt, perhaps? – gives him a ride over to his own house on his bicycle. It’s a nicer place than the first boy is used to: the calming sound of bubbles through water can be heard from the fish tank; the whole place seems light, airy, pleasant. The other boy’s choice of music stands in sharp contrast to this – he listens to rap. The pair play videogames until his parents, Mr.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

The Substance

Director – Coralie Fargeat – 2024 – US – Cert. 18 – 140m

****1/2

An aging movie star takes a wonder treatment which splits her into her current self and a much younger version – in cinemas in the UK on Friday, September 20th.

Hollywood star Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) hosts a network TV keep fit show, but she’s getting on in years – and so is her audience. The show’s producer Harvey (Dennis Quaid) has decided that younger talent is needed in order to attract a younger audience, and gives her the elbow. By a quirk of fate or screenplay, a mailshot about something called The Substance arrives in her penthouse apartment. It’s some sort of beauty product, although the high-end design of the blurb doesn’t explain exactly what it is or what it does. There’s a phone number.

Elizabeth’s identity is bound up with the former show. She calls the number. She engages in conversation with the unseen voice on the other end of the phone. She decides to give The Substance a try. She is told to write down an address. Later, she is sent locker card key number 503 and instructed to collect her package from that address.… Read the rest

Categories
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