Tag: uncle

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Features Live Action Movies

Sky Peals

Director – Moin Hussain – 2023 – UK – Cert. 12a – 91m

****

When his estranged father dies after leaving him an answering machine message, a motorway service station employee starts to question the identity of his father and, by extension, of himself – out in UK cinemas on Friday, August 9th

Adam (Faraz Ayub) receives an answerphone message from his father Hassan (Jeff Mirza) who he’s not seen for years; his father hasn’t much time left, is currently near Adam’s home and wants to meet up and talk. Like the answerphone message left by her soon-to-be deceased husband for the heroine of After Love (Aleem Khan, 2020) – is a British subgenre emerging here with Muslims and bereavement? – the recording plays on Adam’s mind at his workplace, the Sky Peals motorway service station, where he does the night shift preparing burgers in the kitchen and keeps himself pretty much to himself. He complains to his superior that the system isn’t working and customers aren’t getting served their orders, but the old manager has left, and the new one doesn’t start ’til Monday. Meanwhile, people aren’t getting their orders.

The police find a dead body in a car in the service station car park.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Perfect Days

Director – Wim Wenders – 2023 – Germany, Japan – Cert. PG – 123m

*****

A cleaner for The Tokyo Toilet Company takes great pleasure in his everyday routine – out on UK Blu-ray and DVD from Monday, June 10th

There is a pecking order in society. Right at the lowest level is anything to do with human waste. Nowhere is this more evident than towards the end of this film when his sister, who drives a large, impressive looking car and is making a rare visit to her sibling, asks, incredulously, “are you really cleaning toilets?”

In this remarkable film, Wenders turns this notion on its head. Welcome to the world of Hirayama (Koji Yakusho), employee of The Tokyo Toilet Company, who has been doing the job for five or six years and takes great pride in it. He is part of a two-person detail, however his young co-worker Takashi (Tokio Emoto) doesn’t share his enthusiasm, often arriving late for his shift and looking at his mobile phone on the job.

Hirayama drives a small van and has invested in various tools to help him carry out the job; Takashi rides a motor scooter. Hirayama takes great pleasure in his audio cassette collection (The Animals, Lou Reed, Patti Smith) which he listens to on his van’s cassette player driving to and from work.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Mob Land

Director – Nicholas Maggio – 2022 – US – Cert. 15 – 110m

****

Needing money to pay off debts, a family man, mechanic and racer gets sucked into a robbery by his uncle, then finds himself working alongside a mob killer hired to clean up the loose ends of the crime – out in UK cinemas on Friday, August 25th

A small. rural town in the Southern States. Shelby Conners (Shiloh Fernandez) completely in love with wife Caroline (Ashley Benson) and devoted to young daughter Mia (Tina DeMartino), pops pills to get through the day and hasn’t yet told his wife about the mounting household bills. His uncle Trey (Kevin Dillon), the proud owner of an expensive, lurid lime green, Japanese car, offers him a way out in the form of a sure fire robbery about which Shelby is less than sure.

There’s this pills / meds store called the Happiness Pain Centre which, Trey explains, is turning over a huge amount of money a day and is only guarded by a couple of hicks, so it would be a pushover. And all Shelby needs to do is drive the car, something both men know he’s really good at, especially as Trey can provide the car to Shelby’s specification.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

You Can Live
Forever

Directors – Mark Slutsky, Sarah Watts – 2022 – Canada – Cert. 15 – 96m

***

A not especially religious 17-year-old sent to live with her Jehovah’s Witnesses uncle and aunt becomes smitten with a devout Witness girl her own age – out in UK cinemas and on SvoD and EST streaming platforms from Friday, June 16th

Following the breakdown of her mother (who we never see), 17-year-old Jaime (Anwen O’Driscoll), pronounced Jamie, is sent to live with her aunt Beth (Liane Balaban) and uncle Jean-Francois (Antoine Yared). She’s the sort of girl who wears Siouxsie And The Banshees or New Order t-shirts, prompting a remark by her uncle that he went to see the former many years ago, but these days he doesn’t do such things. That’s because the couple are Jehovah’s Witnesses (JWs) and consider such things worldly. Like the Witnesses in Apostasy (Dan Kokotajlo, 2017), they are waiting with eager anticipation for the Return of Christ and the establishment of the New System, when all things will be renewed and made good. The couple have decided not to have children until that state of things comes to pass, which they believe it will soon.

It’s easy enough to get time away from them, though, and Jaime hangs out on her own in the fabulous countryside, accidentally losing her portable music player when it falls off the bridge parapet on which she’s perched into the river below.… Read the rest