Tag: stalking

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Shayda

Director – Noora Niasari – 2023 – Australia – Cert. 15 – 117m

*****

An Iranian mother and her young daughter, holed up in a women’s refuge in Australia, live in fear of the girl’s estranged father who wants to take them both back to Iran – out in UK cinemas on Friday, August 2nd

A woman is with a mum and her little girl in a shopping mall. The woman tells the little girl to remember the counters, because if daddy brings her here, she must find them and tell the security man nearby who she is. The girl’s mother reminds her that daddy said he’d take her on a plane. The woman tells the mother, she’s done the right thing.

Shayda (Zar Amir Ebrahimi from Holy Spider, Ali Abassi, 2022) and her young daughter Mona (Selina Zahednia) are separated from Shayda’s husband. The other woman is Joyce (Leah Purcell), who runs a woman’s refuge house catering for residents from a variety of ethnic groups. Shayda and Mona, for example, are Iranian. Shayda’s photo album tells the story of her life. In the mid-1980s, she graduated and got married in Iran; in the early 1990s, the couple moved to Brisbane, Australia.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Live Action Movies

Stopmotion

Director – Robert Morgan – 2023 – UK – Cert. 18 – 93m

***1/2

The bereaved daughter of a stop-frame animator attempts to complete her late mother’s last film – out on Shudder UK, Ireland, US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand from Friday, May 31st

Let’s get the bad news out of the way first: this is not what it says on the tin. Anyone expecting another Mad God (Phil Tippett, 1987-2021, and a long-standing Shudder favourite) or Junk Head (Takahide Hori, 2021) is going to be disappointed. This is not a stop-motion film; it’s a stop-motion / live action combination film, with the physical stop-motion component of the production forming maybe a tenth of the whole.

Unless, of course, you’re looking only at story or script. In which case, this film is all about stop-motion animation and obsession. But executed in live action. Because, after all, who would want to spend all their time moving a puppet a bit, then shooting a frame, then moving it a bit more, and taking another frame, and so on when you can shoot live action and capture a shot of whatever length on film? (The answer is, anyone who loves animation generally and stop-motion animation in particular.)… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Drift

Director – Anthony Chen – 2023 – Singapore, UK, France, US – Cert. 15 – 93m

****

A Liberian woman and former London student from a privileged background has lost everything and lives on her wits in a Greek holiday resort until she makes a connection with a tour guide – out in UK cinemas on Friday, March 29th

A T-shirt-clad back sits on the beach, facing away from us, looking out to a calm, blue sky and sea. A figure of indeterminate gender at this point. In an isolated, unpopulated landscape. However, as this young black woman (Cynthia Erivo) starts to make her way around the place, elements of both are gradually revealed to us. She travels on a bus with white tourists to a small, sleepy town where Greek lettering on the shop signs gives us some idea of where we are. Later, she takes the return journey and is back on the beach. She washes her underwear (she appears to only have the one pair) and T-shirt in the sea, letting them dry in the sun while she shelters in a cave. She momentarily panics at the sight of a coastguard vessel before realising it’s merely a small fishing skiff.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Men

Director – Alex Garland – 2022 – UK – Cert. 15 – 100m

***

An urban woman dealing with separation and bereavement encounters several men with the same face in an English village – out in cinemas on Wednesday, June 1st

A face passes before the eyes of Harper (Jessie Buckley) as her husband James (Paapa Essiedu) falls to his death from the balcony above their London flat. It’s the Spring. She drives to a house in the country – strictly speaking, in a small rural village – which she’s rented for two weeks to get away from it all.

There, she meets well-to-do landlord Geoffrey (Rory Kinnear) who shows her round the property and hands over the keys. He’s an affable and chivalrous sort of chap who insists of bringing her bags in from the car and can’t stop talking; he might have walked straight in from the previous century or even the one before. He mentions that the TV reception can be a bit iffy, especially when it’s raining, and also recommends a visit to the village pub.

She’s glad when he’s left and promptly calls her partner Riley (Gayle Rankin), who she will be in touch with this way on and off throughout the narrative and who will eventually drive over to see her, the only time we ever see Riley in the flesh.… Read the rest