Tag: tragedy

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Red Cliff
(Chì Bì,
赤壁);
Red Cliff II
(Chì Bì
Jue Zhan Tian Xia,
赤壁（下）)

Director – John Woo – 2008, 2009 – China, Hong Kong – Cert. 15 – 139m + 135m

*****

As a warlord seeks to crush opposition in Southern China, its two kingdoms join forces to defeat him, with the deciding battle taking place at Red Cliff – plays as part of Art of Action, a major UK-wide season celebrating the artistry of real action choreography at cinemas across the UK October-November 2024

China, 208 A.D., around the end of the Han Dynasty. With the puppet Emperor more interested in talking to birds than the nitty-gritty of ruling his kingdom, his Prime Minister Cao Cao (Zhang Fengyi) talks him into a commission to subdue the rival Southern warlords Liu Bei (You Yong) and Sun Quan (Chang Chen).

After a battle against the former’s forces in which his a loyal soldier is unable to prevent Liu’s wife getting killed but manages to get their baby to safety by strapping it on his back prior to single-handed combat, Liu’s advisor Zhuge Liang (Takeshi Kaneshiro) sets out to persuade Sun Qian to join them in an alliance against the aggressor.

Despite unanimous opposition from his ministers, who would prefer to surrender to keep the peace, Sun agrees to fight along with his frontline commander Zhou Yu (Tony Leung Chiu-wai) and, because she insists on joining them, his tomboy sister the Princess Sun Shangxian (Zhao Wei).… Read the rest

Categories
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

Categories
Documentary Features Live Action Movies

The Princess

Director – Ed Perkins – 2022 – UK – Cert. 12a – 109m

**

The story of Princess Diana told entirely through archive footage – out in cinemas on Thursday, June 30th

The strange thing about watching this documentary about the fairytale turned tragedy of Princess Diana, if you’re old enough to remember it unfolding over several decades, is that it takes you back to the news coverage removed from everything else that was happening in the world (or for that matter in your own life) at the time. To some extent, that’s a necessity of both storytelling and cinematic narrative.

At this point in the review, I could rehash the story as a synopsis of greater or lesser length. However, since rehashing the story is primarily what the film itself does, there seems little point in such an exercise. If you want to see this, you want to see this and little I can say about it will deter you.

What Perkins has done is to assemble a version of the story solely from archive footage: no vox pops from the great and the good to explain what was happening (although he does include the occasional piece of archive interview footage from Diana, Charles, or both together) or offer ‘expert’ or other insight.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

The Northman

Director – Robert Eggers – 2022 – US – Cert. 15 – 136m

*****

A 10th Century Viking prince vows revenge on his father king’s killer and sees it through to death – out in cinemas on Friday, April 15th

Young Viking Prince Amleth (Oscar Novak from The Batman) is thrilled when his warrior father King Aurvandil War-Raven (Ethan Hawke) returns with a line of prisoners in two to his fortified stronghold and Queen Gudrún (Nicole Kidman). Father and son are devoted to each other, participating in a private ritual involving bodily sounds and consumption of an hallucinogenic liquid that causes the boy to experience a vision of his family line: a tree of life where the trunk is a spine and branches are umbilical cords attached to grown kings as the viewpoint pans up reveal the boy attached to the highest cord. He is now prepared to take over the rule of the kingdom when his father dies.

He doesn’t seem to get on quite so well with his mother, who warns him never to enter her room unannounced. At a banquet in honour of Aurvandil, his dour brother Fjölnir (Claes Bang from The Square, Ruben Östlund, 2017) takes exception to court jester Heimir the Fool (Willem Dafoe).… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies Music

Annette

Director – Leos Carax – 2021 – France, US – Cert. 15 – 141m

****1/2

Musical conceived and composed by Sparks plays out as a very dark opera ending in tragedy – on MUBI from Friday, November 26th

Although billed as a musical, this may actually be closer to opera given that even though it starts as a story about two people deeply in love, it veers into very dark territory.

And yet framing all that, and underscoring it throughout, is the sheer pleasure of writing / composing songs… and, for that matter, performing them. The opening song is So May We Start while the closer, as the credits roll, is It’s The End. (For added enjoyment, watch 90% of the audience leave before the last song starts. Or in my case, 10% of my fellow critics.)

The former starts with the band, the brothers Mael (singer Russell and keyboard player / composer Ron, profiled in recent documentary The Sparks Brothers, Edgar Wright, 2021) and a backing band in a recording studio in an invitation for the proceedings to get going, swiftly joined by the film’s two leads, while the latter ends with seemingly the entire movie cast and crew walking through the countryside hoping we’ve enjoyed the show and asking us to tell our friends if we did so.… Read the rest

Categories
Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Sound Of Nomad:
Koryo Arirang

Director – Kim So-young (as Kim Jeong) – 2017 – South Korea – 87m

****

How an indigenous theatre company kept the culture of the Koryo people alive after they were deported by the Soviet authorities from Far East Russia to Kazakhstan in 1937 – in the documentary season: Korean Film Nights: In Transit presented by LKFF, the London Korean Film Festival

The Beijing Treaty (of 1860 although the date isn’t mentioned) ceded to Russia the so-called Maritime Province – an area of land stretching down to Vladivostock. The territory bordered on the Northwestern tip of Choson (Joseon), today’s Korea, and Chosons stated migrating into the Maritime Province, calling themselves the Koryo people. In late 1937, the Soviet authorities decided that the Koryos could potentially be Japanese spies and deported them in boarded up trains to Ushtobei, Kazakhstan, Central Asia.

The journey took two days and many children died, their corpses thrown unceremoniously out of the train at night. After the journey, the deportees faced a harsh winter, the eventual death toll rising to 40 000.

This story has been documented in Korea, but little else about the Koryos has. The first Kazakhstan Koryo settlement in Ushtobei is today marked by a memorial.… Read the rest