Tag: sibling

Alien
Romulus

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 16 August 2024
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Romulus
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Director – Fede Alvarez – 2024 – US – Cert. 15 – 119m

*****

A group of young people escape from a planet housing a repressive, corporate mining colony in search of something better … only to find something worse… – latest SF horror franchise entry is out on digital on Friday, October 18th following its release in UK cinemas on Friday, August 16th

The Alien franchise, after quite literally bursting onto cinema screens with Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979), then having lost its way somewhat on Alien³(David Fincher, 1992), picked up again somewhat on Prometheus (Ridley Scott, 1979), and now settled title-wise into the sensible enough format of Alien: Ship’s Name, delivers a new entry made by a writer-director, Fede Alvarez, who understands the franchise enough to both put in everything required of it and throw in some innovative ideas without compromising its essence.

The first 20 or so minutes, arguably the best thing here, could equally easily have opened a science fiction epic unrelated to the franchise. A young woman Rain (the terrific Cailee Spaeny from Civil War, Alex Garland, 2024) is trapped on a planet where the sun is permanently hidden owing to pollution caused by the corporation’s mining operation.… Read the rest

Tags abandoned, access, acid, acid blood, action, adopt, adopted, adoption, Aileen Wu, airlocks, alien, Alien franchise, android, antigravity, Archie Renaux, birth, bottom floor, burst, care, carer, cat and mouse, clone, colony, company android, corny jokes, corporation, corridor, counter admin staff, creature, creature feature, credits, cryogenic, Daniel Betts priority, David Jonsso, decaying orbit, deep space travel, directive, doors, drug, emotionally damaged, escape plan, expectations, face-huggers, fantasy, Fede Alvarez, floor, franchise, freedom, frozen, fuel, get away, global warming, horror, Ian Holm, identification, insert finger, intruders, Isabella Merced, life support, lift shaft, maw, metaphysics, mining, mining colony, monster, motherhood, nurturing carer, outer space, peers, persona, planet, planet’s rings, pollution, pregnant, preservation, programme disc, programmed, purge, raise the temperature, reboots, Remus, repair, research and development, Romulus, Rosie Ede, salvage, Saturn, scanned actor, sci-fi, science fiction, security clearance, SF, SF horror, shallow water, sibling, Sigourney Weaver, slavery, space station, spaceship, Spike Fearn, storage facility, sun, survival, swim, time is running out, trash, trauma, unethical employment practices, US, vaginal, vulnerable, xenomorph, young generation, younger brother

Features Live Action Movies

Sting

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 31 May 2024
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Director – Kiah Roache-Turner – 2024 – Australia – Cert. 15 – 91m

***1/2

A girl traps a venomous spider and cares for it as a pet, but as she feeds it, it grows… and grows… and gets out… – onto UK Home Premiere on Monday, July 15th

Helga (Noni Hazlehurst) is hearing strange noises in her Brooklyn apartment. She doesn’t remember so good, however, helpfully pinned to the wall by the phone is her name and address. So when she phones Frank the pest exterminator (Jermaine Fowler), she can read those details to him. It’s probably a rat, he tells her. Soon he is at the door of the block, asking her to buzz him in. But inside the apartment, he realises this particular bug may be more than he bargained for.

Flash back to four days earlier. A hand-sized meteor plunges to Earth to crash through a window into a doll’s house in the same apartment block. It is a tiny pod not unlike the ones in Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979). It opens, hatching a small spider, which looks huge until we realise it’s in a small scale doll’s house, not outside in the apartment proper. The spider is found by Charlotte (Alyla Brown from Furiosa: A Mad Max Story, George Miller, 2024) who empties out her money jar, the one with the screw lid, to make a home for it, feeding it with the roaches that infest the apartment.… Read the rest

Tags Alyla Brown, apartment, apartment block, aquarium, aquarium tank, arachnid, aunt, Australia, babysitting, bark, Brooklyn, brothers and sisters, building superintendent, cocoons, comic, crawlspace, Danny Kim, dementia, dog, doll’s house, doom, feed, first kill, fish tank, fumigate, giant redback spider, girl, grow, illustrator, income, infest, interior base rim, jar, Jermaine Fowler, Kiah Roache-Turner, lid, maze, medical experiments, meteor, miser, moonlighting, mothballs, Noni Hazlehurst, paralyse, Penelope Mitchell, pest exterminator, pet, pet dog, puppet, Richard Taylor, roach, Robyn Nevin, Ryan Corr, screw lid, second kill, sibling, Silvia Colloca, spectacles, spider, stepdad, stepfather, Sting, The Hobbit, underside, unscrew, venomous, ventilation shaft, web, Weta Workshop, working and parenting

Features Live Action Movies

The Crazy Family
Gyakufunsha Kazoku,
逆噴射家族)

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 20 April 2024
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Gyakufunsha Kazoku,
逆噴射家族)
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Director – Sogo Ishii – 1984 – Japan – Cert. 18 – 105m

*****

After proudly moving into their first home as owner-occupiers, a family go berserk and destroy the building – out on Blu-ray on Monday, June 17th

This seemingly starts out as a conservative family drama. The family in question comprises father Katsukuni Kobayashi (Katsuya Kobayashi in his debut feature role), mother Saeko (Mitsuko Baisho who worked with directors Akira Kurosawa, Shohei Imamura and Kaneto Shindo), elder teenage son Masaki (Yoshiki Arizono from Ichi the Killer, The Happiness of the Katakuris, both Takashi Miike; Electric Dragon, 80,000 V, Sogo Ishii, all 2001) and younger teenage daughter Erika (Youki Kudoh from Typhoon Club, Shinji Somai, 1985; Mystery Train, Jim Jarmusch, 1989; Heaven’s Burning, Craig Lahiff, 1997). The Kobayashis move in to their first home as owner-occupiers which, although it’s a little on the small side, promises an idyllic existence. Father is the breadwinner with a nondescript office job, mother waters the plants and does the cooking and housework, the daughter wants to be an idol singer and the son is spending all his time studying for school and university in his room upstairs.… Read the rest

Tags a place to live, accommodation, armour, baseball bat, basement, bicycle, biker gang, bravado, breadwinner, build, building work, catalyst, Chinese, coffee, defensive, derelict, digging, drama, drill, failure, family, family unit, father, floor, flyover, grandfather, hand-held, head of the family, Hitoshi Ueki, home, horror, house implosion, housewife, housing, husbands and wives, idol singer, intimacy, intimate, Japan, Japanese cinema, JG Ballard, Katsuya Kobayashi, killing, kitchen implements, living room, living room floor, Mitsuko Baisho, mother, naive, nuclear family, office job, one-piece swimsuit, outer space, owner-occupiers, parents and children, pixelation, poison, power tool, primal types, public housing, rape, rape as weapon of war, room, run, salaryman, school, Second Sino-Japanese War, SF, sibling, sick, social breakdown, societal norms, Sogo Ishii, soldier, streets, studying, suburbia, sword, teenage, threat, train, turmoil, uniform, university, upstairs, warrior, weapon of war, white ant, World War Two, Yoshiki Arizono, Youki Kudoh

Animation Features Movies

Max Beyond

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 26 April 2024
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Director – Hasraf Dullul – 2024 – UK – Cert. 15 – 88m

****

Leon fails to rescue his adoptive brother Max from a corporate, experimental facility, so Max starts to move around the multiverse to find the world in which he succeeds – animated SF thriller is out on digital from Monday, April 22nd in the UK and Tuesday, April 23rd in the US

Facing very specific health challenges, eight-year-old Max (mo-cap/voice: Cade Tropeano) has been signed over to the Axion corporation and is living inside their high-tech, tower block complex where he is undergoing complicated, experimental, medical treatment under the supervision of Dr. Ava Johnson (mo-cap/voice: Jane Perry). Max’s elder brother Leon (mo-cap/voice: Dave Fennoy), a dishonourably discharged war veteran, is none too happy about this and, as protesters hold placards denouncing Axion outside the building, takes it upon himself to enter the premises, find his brother and rescue him from his oppressors, as he believes them to be.

Despite warnings from Dr. Ava over the intercom that there is no way out for Leon, he at first appears to be in control of the situation, a one-man army flooring all comers, but as his corporate security adversaries, culminating a sword-wielding man or robot (it’s never clear which) called The Sync, become increasingly impossible to defeat, it becomes clear that Ava’s predicted warning is accurate.… Read the rest

Features Live Action Movies

After Yang

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 22 September 2022
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Director – Kogonada – 2022 – US – Cert. PG – 96m

****1/2

In the distant future, a couple must come to terms with the loss of the eldest child, actually an A.I. purchased as an ethnically programmed companion for their adopted South East Asian daughter – SF mystery drama is on Sky Cinema from Thursday, September 22nd

Memory is one of the great themes of cinema because when you point a moving image camera at someone, you capture and preserve their moving image for posterity. (Something similar happens when you record the sound of someone’s voice. Or even if you write down their words on paper, a simpler, more primitive form of recording.) Memory is also one of the elements which defines us as human beings.

Full marks, then, to director (actually writer, director, editor) Kogonada for taking the short story Saying Goodbye To Yang by Alexander Weinstein and expanding it into a feature. As described in the parlance of the distant future world in which this is set, Yang is a technosapien (i.e. a robot), a purchased elder sibling of a family comprising father Jake (Colin Farrell), mother Kyra (Jodie Turner-Smith) and daughter Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja).

Mika is adopted, and her ever so Hollywood liberal parents – he a white man who has built a business around his passion for tea, she a black woman who is a hard-working, highly motivated high-flier in a demanding corporate business that’s never really defined – are concerned that she connect with her South East Asian heritage.… Read the rest

Tags A.I., academic, Alexander Weinstein, artificial intelligence, audiovisual memory, brothers and sisters, budget, business, car journey, charge, charge fee, charge sum, Clifton Collins Jr., Colin Farrell, computer tech, conspiracy theory, core, corporate business, corporation, cultural heritage, disaster, ecological collapse, ecology, electric car, ethnicity, exhibition space, family, family portrait, future, garden, GIFs, Haley Lu Richardson, high-flier, home, home computer, image, Jodie Turner-Smith, Kogonada, law, legal, Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja, memory, moving image, museum, next door neighbour, owner, parents and children, park, policy, post-disaster, reboot, recorded voice, refurbish, resolve issue, retail outlet, Ritchie Coster, robot, Sarita Choudhury, school run, sci-fi, science fiction, self-driving car, SF, shut down, sibling, software, software reader, South East Asia, spyware, tea, tech, technician, technosapien, upward mobility, won’t reboot, workbench, workshop