Tag: servant

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Features Live Action Movies

Wuthering Heights
(2026)

Director – Emerald Fennell – 2026 – UK – Cert. 15 – 136m

***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

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Oh, What Happy Days! (Ah Che Roozhayeh Khoshi Bood,
آه، چه روزهای خوشی بود. )

Director – Homayoun Ghanizadeh – 2025 – Iran, USA, France, Canada – 107m

*****

On a video phone network, a woman is caught between her well-off family and their former servant’s wronged son – premieres in the Critics’ Picks Competition of the 29th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival

Facing us, photographed in black and white, an old man hangs up, revealed by his offline screen to be Mr. Farrokhi (Ali Nassirian) in Los Angeles, as a woman rails to camera, hurling obscenities at him as at the viewer. Her screen enlarges as it moves to centre screen. He and she, like the other characters who appear in this drama, is wearing what looks like a prison uniform with a designation tab above the right breast.

As the piece proceeds, you start to get a handle on the ground rules: this is a film that owes much to communications technologies like Zoom. Characters only ever appear here within a Zoom type box in black and white, slowly morphing into colour for moments when they relax or are less guarded and more openly themselves. Sometimes there is only a single box with its one character filling the screen; this shifts to two, three – or, in two rows, four or five – boxes side by side.… Read the rest

Categories
Art Documentary Exhibitions Features Live Action Movies

Exhibition on Screen:
Vermeer
the Greatest Exhibition

)

Director – David Bickerstaff – 2023 – UK – Cert. PG – 90m

****

A tour around the Rijksmuseum’s current, sold out Closer to Johannes Vermeer exhibition, with comments from museum staff members and an art critic – out in cinemas both in the UK and around the world from Tuesday, April 18th

The latest instalment in producer Phil Grabsky’s excellent Exhibition On Screen series about art might be seen as something of a blockbuster: its subject is at once a famous artist and the current unprecedented, likely never to be repeated, comprehensive exhibition of that artist’s work. This allows the film to navigate the painter’s entire career in a chronological journey both through his images and, in a secondary, incidental journey, through the gallery itself. The latter journey is just there, visible but never described. Visitors tends to go to an art gallery to see its contents, or as in this case, a particular exhibition, not the gallery itself.

The blockbuster is the current exhibition at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, entitled Closer To Johannes Vermeer, which runs from Friday, February 10th to Sunday, June 4th 2023 and is completely sold out. Vermeer (1632-1675) lived in the Dutch town of Delft, and in his active years as an artist painted only two or three pictures a year.… Read the rest