Tag: transgression

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Features Live Action Movies

Things Will Be Different

Director – Michael Felker – 2024 – US – Cert. 15 – 102m

****

A brother and sister go through a portal into the past, are trapped there by an unseen adversary, and must wait for a mysterious visitor – out in UK cinemas on Friday, October 4th

This movie is different. It’s about philosophical ideas. It would work very well as a piece of writing (a short story? a novella?), it would work as a radio drama, and – yes – it works very well as a movie. Because what’s compelling about it is not what you see with your eyes or hear with your ears, it’s the implications of it all, the stuff that goes through your head as you’re watching the movie. Welcome to the Cinema of Ideas.

Early one bright and sunny Summer morning, Sidney (Riley Dandy) enters the diner where her brother Joseph (Adam David Thompson), who she’s not seen for a while, is having breakfast. She has the rifle. He has the two bags with the money. As arranged, they go through the woods, across the high cornfields towards the house. There are people in the woods, which are supposed to be deserted. She is concerned.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Movies Shorts

Flesh Of God
(Carne De Dios)

Director – Patricion Plaza – 2022 – Argentina, Mexico, Columbia – France 16+ – 21m

*****

When a travelling monk falls prey to a fever, the folk remedy administered by an old woman causes him to experience bizarre hallucinations – from the 2023 Annecy International Animation Festival in the Official Competition section

(Warning: not suitable for work or for those of a sensitive disposition. Potentially offensive to religious i.e. Christian viewers. Also, spoilers.)

In a prologue, a young girl races through a field of crops but runs into a monk, who squishes the mushrooms she’s carrying in her bag with his foot, feels her face and checks out her teeth before she flees.

Some time later (or perhaps some time earlier), the profusely sweating monk falls off on his donkey beside his walking guide and wakes in a nearby hovel, or it might be a church, tended by an old woman muttering unintelligible rituals as she attempts to heal him. The perpendicular bars of the roof’s sole window form a makeshift cross on which hangs a Christ figure, but when mushrooms resembling the ones trampled at the start are placed in the initially reluctant monk’s mouth, glowing sprites exit his body and enter the Christ figure, which assumes a monstrous aspect and attacks him.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Infinity Pool

Director – Brandon Cronenberg – 2023 – Canada, Hungary, France – Cert. 18 – 117m

*****

WARNING: NSFW

A man holidaying abroad at a resort with his wealthy wife is lured into a series of crimes, punishable locally by death unless you’re rich enough to buy your way out – in UK cinemas from Friday, March 24th

An infinity pool is a swimming pool designed so that at least one edge appears to go on forever, blending into a seascape or waterscape such as an ocean or lake. It’s limitless. One character in this film once installed such a pool for a local hotel, but that’s really not the point. Which is, something that has no boundary, that appears to extend into infinity. Like the moral transgressions in this film, once the preventative edges of incurred punishment are removed from the perpetration of criminal acts, for which the idea of the infinity pool stands as a metaphor. This may not make sense now, but it will once you’ve watched the film and thought about it.

James (Alexander Skarsgärd) and Em (Cleopatra Coleman) Foster are holidaying at a resort. To date, he is a one-book writer: his book was published to rotten reviews and sank without trace and he can’t seem to find an idea for the second one.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Emily

Director – Frances O’Connor – 2022 – UK – Cert. 15 – 130m

varies between ** and ****

An imagined account of how Emily Brontë wrote Wuthering Heights – out in UK cinemas on Friday, October 14th

The three Brontë sisters Charlotte (Alexandra Dowling), Emily (Emma Mackey), and Anne (Amelia Gething) live with their brother Branwell (Fionn Whitehead) and their chapel minister father Patrick (Adrian Dunbar) in the large parsonage in the West Riding of Yorkshire’s village of Haworth. The three girls have a lively, literary imagination, make up numerous stories for their own amusement, and spend much time outside in the landscape of the moors. A young curate Weightman (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) arrives in the village, piquing the girls’ interest, and Charlotte soon departs for a distant teaching post. Emily likes her own company and spends much time alone on the moors.

Branwell is accepted by the Royal Academy to study painting, but drops out and returns to the village, where he and Emily get into mischief together, chiefly by spying on one of the neighbours at night through their window and getting chased off the premises several times by dogs before Branwell eventually gets caught and has to endure punishment from father.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

The Ice Cream Truck

Director – Megan Freels Johnston – 2018 – US – Cert. 15 – 96m

**1/2

A housewife newly moved in to a suburb is unnerved by the creepy, local ice cream man and van… with good reason, as it turns out – on VoD and DVD from Monday, March 1st

Having just moved back into the neighbourhood where she grew up, Mary (Deanna Russo) should probably be worried that it looks a lot like the location of classic shocker Halloween (John Carpenter, 1979) with its pavements bordering lawns and hedges around residential houses. (There’s now prowling, gliding camera here though – the shots are mostly static.)

The locality also now boasts the traditional American ice cream truck, a simple, slow moving van which still serves exactly the same traditional ice cream that it has for generations. The ice cream man himself (Emil Johnsen) seems almost a parody of his profession, addressing both children and adults alike with archaic lines like, “hello there, young fellow.”

She takes an immediate dislike to nosy next-door neighbour Jessica (Hilary Barraford) but nevertheless accepts an invitation to a barbecue where it’s promised drink will flow celebrating the recent graduation of local couple’s son Max (John Redlinger – who feels a lot older than 18) who she meets on her way to the party as he hangs out with his girlfriend Tracy (Bailey Anne Borders) to smoke pot.… Read the rest