Tag: trust

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Movies Features Live Action

Wild Horse Nine

Wild Horse Nine

Director – Martin McDonagh – 2026 – US – Cert. 15 – 118m

*****

Two Santiago-based CIA operatives travel to to Easter Island prior to the 1973 coup in Chile; one of them is dying – out in UK cinemas on Wednesday, November 4th

In 1973, Shortly before the CIA’s destabilisation of Chile, two of its operatives travel from Santiago to Easter Island. The terminally ill Chris (John Malkovich) wants to see the Big Heads (the island’s famous indigenous statues) before he dies, and his colleague Lee (Sam Rockwell) – possibly his only friend – has agreed to accompany him.

Their Santiago-based boss MJ (Steve Buscemi) is concerned; Chris has a habit of shooting his mouth off and saying things he shouldn’t, as evidenced in the airport when Chris starts to chat with two attractive female Chilean students Monica (Mariana di Girolamo) and Alicia (Ailín Salas) and he states, after bringing up the subject of “destabilising your country”, that “we ARE the CIA, actually,” leading to furious denials of the fact by Lee. Both girls are horrified.

Chris has an agenda beyond seeing the Big Heads – as he later confides to Lee, when you’ve seen one Big Head, you’ve seen them all.… Read the rest

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Movies Features Live Action

Father Mother
Sister Brother

© Vague Notion 2024 Yorick Le Saux

Father Mother Sister Brother

Director – Jim Jarmusch – 2025 – US – Cert. 12a – 110m

*****

Three separate stories follow visits by three separate sets of adult siblings to, respectively, an elderly father, an elderly mother, and a deceased parents’ cleared home – streams exclusively on MUBI from Friday, May 29th

This harks back to a couple of earlier Jarmusch movies which similarly consist of a small number of stories: Night on Earth (1991) with five cabbies on one night in different cities and Mystery Train (1989) with its three linked stories set during one night in Memphis. There’s no suggestion that the three stories in Father Mother Sister Brother – set in rural North America, Dublin and Paris – are taking place simultaneously, international time differences notwithstanding, but they could well be, because all three take place in similarly good weather conditions. The first is rural, with snow on the ground, while the latter two are urban.

All three of FMSB’s stories feature similarities which link them beyond the overall siblings / parent(s) theme. These are both expected – car journeys to the home of the parent or parents, time spent in their presence or absence – and unexpected – skateboarders seen from the can en route, a Rolex watch.… Read the rest

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Movies Features Live Action

H is for Hawk

H is for Hawk

Director – Philippa Lowthorpe – 2025 – US, UK – Cert.12a – 115m

*****

An academic grieving her recently deceased photojournalist father buys and trains a goshawk then turns in on herself – adaptation of bestselling memoir is out in UK cinemas on Friday, January 23rd

Helen (Claire Foy) phones her dad to tell him she’s just seen a pair of goshawks. Her dad (Brendan Gleeson), with whom she would often venture out into the English countryside, is a top photojournalist who has made a career out of waiting with his camera – for hours sometimes – to catch just the right moment to tell a story. Technically, he is retired, but still carries on working. And then a few days after Helen sees the goshawks, her mum (Lindsay Duncan) phones. Dad died, suddenly, unexpectedly. He’s gone. Except that, in the manner of the bereaved, he’s still there. Everywhere Helen goes, she remembers flashes of him from the past, things they did together. They were very close.

She works as an academic, teaching science at Cambridge, and not unusually is disenchanted with her students, wishing they’d show a bit more interest. She has been invited to apply for a position in Berlin, and as her best friend Christina (Denise Gough) says, if she applies she’ll probably get it, so they go out to celebrate.… Read the rest

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Movies Features Live Action

Silver Apricot
(Eunbitsalgu,
서울독립영화제)

Silver Apricot (Eunbitsalgu, 서울독립영화제)

Director – Jang Man-min – 2024 – South Korea – Cert. 12 – 121m

***1/2

A Seoul woman in need of funds to buy a condo returns to her childhood coastal town to get the alimony payments her estranged father never stumped up – from LKFF, the London Korean Film Festival 2025 which runs in cinemas from Wednesday, November 5th to Tuesday, November 18th

Tormented by dreams set at night in which sometimes she herself and sometimes people she knows are vampires preying on others, which inspires her to draw a webtoon series, 32-year-old Kim Jung-seo (Na Ae-jin) has moved to Seoul and bought into the corporate dream, agreeing to split the cost of a condo, the right to buy for which she won on a lottery, with her fiancé Park Gyeong-hyun (Kang Bong-seong).

The only problem is, she has just been refused a permanent position at the graphic design company which employs her, so doesn’t have the money. So she resolves to visit her estranged father and pick up the alimony he never paid her mother Choi Mi-yeong (Park Hyun-sook) after their divorce. Jung-seo regularly visits the latter, who also lives in Seoul, whereas it’s been years since she was in the coastal town where her father lives with his new family.… Read the rest

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Movies Features Live Action

Mongrel
(Baiyi Cang Gou,
白衣蒼狗)

Mongrel (Baiyi Cang Gou, 白衣蒼狗)

Director – Chiang Wei-liang – 2024 – Taiwan, Singapore, France – Cert. 15 – 128m

****1/2

An immigrant caregiver is caught between the demands of his exhausted, needy clients on the one hand and his profit-oriented gangster taskmasters on the other – out in UK cinemas on Friday, May 23rd

This gets straight in there with a taboo-breaking shot of a human bottom covered in excrement, something familiar to anyone who has worked as a carer for an incontinent person but a bit of a shock to the rest of us. A hand bearing a cloth comes into shot and wipes the excrement off. When we eventually see the carer’s head, he is wearing earphones as he does the work. All his male client is doing is wordlessly moaning. We watch the carer lift the man, reassuring him, and deposit him in an offscreen chair. An elderly woman dozes on the sofa. He wipes her brow with a fresh towel. She takes it from him and wipes her face. He tells her he’s fed and bathed Hui (i.e. the son, played by Kuo Shu-wei who has cerebral palsy).

The carer goes outside in the rain. In the cab of his truck, his boss asks, what the hell took you so long?… Read the rest

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Movies Features Live Action

Stuntman
(Mou Tai Do,
武替道)

Stuntman (Mou Tai Do, 武替道)

Directors – Albert & Herbart Leung – 2024 – Hong Kong – Cert. 15 – 114m

****

20 years after a stuntman on his team was hospitalised when a stunt went wrong, an action choreographer takes on his first stunt job since the tragic incident – out on digital from Monday, 12 May 2025

This opens with a terrific cops and robbers fight in a shopping mall at the top of an escalator bearing remarkable resemblance to (and just as exciting as) the one towards the end of Police Story (Jackie Chan, 1985). However, while this might be an obvious homage to that film specifically and 1980s Hong Kong action cinema generally, it’s far from a mere attempt to retread the same ground: we suddenly cut from the cops and robbers scenario to reveal a film crew of that period shooting an action movie.

There is a particularly dangerous stunt coming up. A (stunt)man must jump off a bridge onto a lorry as it passes below, with a car immediately behind. (Again, this is remarkably similar to the stunt in Police Story II (Jackie Chan, 1988) where Chan leaps off a balcony onto a lorry passing in the street.)… Read the rest

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Art Movies Features Live Action

Nobody Likes Me
(Nikdo Mne Nemá Rád)

Nobody Likes Me (Nikdo Mne Nemá Rád)

Directors – Petr Kazda, Tomáš Weinreb – 2024 – Czechia, Slovakia, France – 105m
*****

The female gaze. An introvert woman finds love in an unlikely place where, it turns out, there are catches – premieres in the Critics’ Picks Competition of the 28th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival

A figure stands in interior darkness. Watching. She moves forward. She lies down on the bed. She sits up. She makes and eats a simple breakfast. She stands on a moving tram; the brown autumn leaves behind her. At her desk, wearing her military uniform, Sarah (Rebeka Poláková) details to the Commander his itinerary for the day, and fields requests from others for his attention. She seems content in her work.

One evening, Sarah sees a woman across the street in physical difficulty. Perhaps she should help but, frozen on the spot, she stares. The woman starts to throw up – presumably she’s had too much to drink. A man appears from nowhere and comes to the woman’s aid. Sarah can’t take her eyes off him. The female gaze. He looks back at her. She looks back at him.

She gets on well with her dad, a doctor, who she regularly visits at his surgery for health check-ups.… Read the rest

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Movies Features Live Action

The Weak and the Wicked

The Weak and the Wicked

Director – J. Lee Thompson – 1954 – UK – Cert. 12 – 88m

***1/2

A woman spends 12 months in prison after being convicted of fraud – one of two J. Lee Thompson movies out on UK Blu-ray, DVD and Digital in August, 2024

Jean (Glynis Johns) is marched from her cell and up the stairs into the courtroom to hear the judge’s verdict. She gets 12 months for fraud, and is sent to HM Prison Blackdown. Her crime is detailed in flashback – she has a gambling problem, which costs her her doctor boyfriend Michael Hale (John Gregson) who walks out on her. She pays for chips at a casino with a cheque, for which she hadn’t the funds in the bank. In this office, the owner Mr. Seymour (Edwin Styles) tells her he has his own way of dealing with debts, as she’ll shortly find out.

Her friend Pam (Ursula Howells) gets her a job in a clothing store, but it turns out Pam is actually working for Mr. Seymour and steals a family heirloom from Jean’s handbag the first chance she gets. Jean claims the insurance money only for two policemen to arrest her the day the money comes through, going into her home and finding a pawn ticket for the allegedly stolen item tucked into the back of a mirror.… Read the rest

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Movies Documentary Features Live Action

Hollywoodgate

Hollywoodgate

Director – Ibrahim Nash’at – 2023 – US, Germany – Cert. 12a – 89m

****

A Western documentary shot with the approval of the Taliban showing the eponymous air base in which the Americans abandoned large stocks of military hardware – out in UK cinemas on Friday, August 16th

An extraordinary exercise in both journalism and historical, socio-political filmmaking. A few days after the US military pulled out of Afghanistan in 2021, fearless, former journalist Nash’at entered the country as, to all intents and purposes, a one-man film crew. At first, it was a fruitless exercise, but then he somehow managed to get in with a soldier about to be deployed on a big airport.

Negotiating with Afghanistan’s airforce to be allowed to shoot documentary footage, Nash’at secured himself permission to follow and shoot not just the lieutenant, M.J. Mukhtar, but also the new head of the airforce, Mawlawi Mansour, with the proviso that anything Nash’at was told not to film, he was not to film and anytime he was ordered to stop filming, he had to stop filming. Refusal to do either would have meant big trouble. He played along, shooting whatever he could without breaking the air force head’s trust, knowing that the Taliban would have no control whatsoever over the footage when he left the country to edit what he’d shot.… Read the rest

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Movies Features Live Action

A Fugitive from the Past
(Kiga Kaikyo,
飢餓海峡)

A Fugitive from the Past (Kiga Kaikyo, 飢餓海峡)

Director – Tomu Uchida – 1965 – Japan – Cert. 15 – 183m

*****

Voted third in Kinema Junpo magazine’s 1999 list of the greatest Japanese film of all time, Tomu Uchida’s A Fugitive From The Past (1965) is the pinnacle of a directorial career that also includes Bloody Spear At Mount Fuji (1955) and The Mad Fox (1962). In the poll, it was beaten by Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954) at number one and Mikio Naruse’s Floating Clouds (1955) at number two, For the record, the fourth title was Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story (1953) while the fifth was Yuzo Kawashima’s Bakumatsu Taiyoden / The Legend Of The Sun-Tribe From The Bakumatsu Era (1957). While four of those titles were made in the mid-fifties, often considered the golden age of classical Japanese cinema, Fugitive dates from the mid-sixties, allowing it to look at Japan’s post-war period from a greater distance.

Uchida’s film, which spans the decade 1947-57, covers a colossal amount of subjects in its first 50 minutes…

[Read the full review at All The Anime.]

A Fugitive from the Past is released on Arrow Blu-ray.

Trailer: