Tag: US

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

John Wick
Chapter 4

Director – Chad Stahelski – 2023 – US – Cert. 15 – 169m

** The first hour or so.

***** The last hour and a half or so.

The eponymous assassin is given a path to follow that will rid him and others of his obligations to shadowy organisation The High Table once and for all – out in UK cinemas on Friday, March 24th

The fourth episode in the John Wick franchise is not a film to come to without seeing the previous three first – and in the recent past, so they’re fresh in your memory. That was the mistake this reviewer made. Too much in the first hour or so refers back to what has gone before. Characters wander through vast urban or other sets (there’s an early sequence in the open North African desert) often spouting ponderous dialogue.

This works if you have an actor of the calibre of Ian McShane, who plays Winston, the deferential owner of the New York Continental Hotel, and, perhaps surprisingly, it also works with the franchise’s action star Keanu Reeves, who has got the delivery of grunts and one word dialogue lines (“yeah”) down to a fine art.

Even so, the surfeit of overly talky scenes in the first hour or so tends towards the tedious.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

The Cow
Who Sang
A Song
Into The Future
(La Vaca
Que Cantó
Una Canción
Hacia El Futuro)

Director – Francisca Alegria – 2022 – Chile, France, US, Germany – Cert. 15 – 98m

***1/2

A dead woman emerges resurrected from a polluted river to reconnect with her husband, children and grandchildren – out in UK cinemas on Friday, March 24th

The banks of a river cutting through a forest, strewn with dead fish. The sound of a strange song, a mournful chorale. Bubbles. A woman (Mia Maestro) rises from the water, dripping wet and clad in overalls and a helmet as if she’s been riding a motorcycle. She makes her way to the bank, collapses, coughs up water. She feels a joy in being, being back, being on land. She walks along a leaf-covered train track. She boards a bus, paying the driver not with the money for the fare but with a touch of her hand.

She doesn’t speak a word. The whole scenario doesn’t feel quite right. Is she real? Is she an apparition? She’s certainly unexpected in town, when her decades older husband Enrique (Alfredo Castro), collapses after seeing her from the inside of a shop window. Bernardo (Marcial Tagle) phones Cecilia (Leonor Varela) with the news that their father claims to have just seen their late mother, his wife Magdalene, which is, of course, impossible.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Babylon

Director – Damien Chazelle – 2022 – US – Cert. 18 – 188m

***1/2

The rise and fall of stars and other talents navigating the excessive lifestyle and work ethic of the silent era US movie business – out on Digital on Tuesday, March 21st and on 4K Ultra HD™, Blu-ray™ & DVD on Monday, April 3rd, following its release in UK cinemas on Friday, January 20th 2023

Having established himself as a top A-list Hollywood director with the likes of Whiplash (2014) and La La Land (2016), Chazelle delivers a cast of thousands epic about Hollywood in the silent era and beyond, a project that’s apparently been gestating in his head for some 15 years. With its name referencing a city that grew to great heights and considerable excess before crumbling into dust, Babylon starts with Manny Torres (Mexican actor Diego Calva in his first US role) and compatriots attempting to deliver an elephant to a Hollywood party at a desert mansion in the middle of nowhere. The tone for the whole is set – or perhaps set free from audience preconception about what is to follow – when one of Calva’s compadres, walking behind the trailer containing the creature pushing it up a hill, is unexpectedly covered in elephant excrement.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Plane

Director – Jean-François Richet – 2022 – UK, US – Cert. 15 – 107m

****

A commercial passenger aircraft flying through bad weather conditions gets into trouble and is forced to land on an island run by military insurgents – out on digital from Monday, March 13th

While this is unlikely to win any Oscars, it’s a shrewdly put together action movie that gets everything right, tells its audience exactly what it’s going to do and then proceeds to do it, wrapping up everything very quickly in about thirty seconds once the narrative is over. That might not sound like much, but most action movies you see fail to meet such criteria. Moreover, a lot of action movies work perfectly well on a small screen, but this one works better if you see it on as big a screen as possible.

Singapore. Scotsman Brodie Torrance (Gerard Butler from 300, Zak Snyder, 2007) is cutting it fine and may be about to be late for work again. Since he’s an airline pilot, that’s quite a big deal. Somehow, he gets to the cockpit of the plane with enough time to introduce himself to his co-pilot Samuel Dele (Yosun An from Mulan) ahead of the pre-takeoff, routine inspection by an aviation official.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

The Middle Man

Director – Bent Hamer – 2021 – Norway, Denmark, Canada, UK, Germany, Switzerland – Cert. 15 – 95m

****

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but… A man in a heartland American town becomes a middle man, whose job it is to convey bad news to local people – out in UK cinemas on Friday, March 10th

Curiously for an English language film set in a small American town, this one was funded by a variety of European countries and Canada. While its visuals clearly owe much to the films of David Lynch, particularly Blue Velvet (1986) and Lost Highway (1997) with their heavy night time interiors filled with dark, impenetrable black spaces, it eschews the over the top moments of sex and violence with which Lynch peppers these films with something much less jocular and more deadpan. Like Lynch it feels distinctly odd, yet in a completely different way. Unlike those films, it’s adapted from (part of) a novel.

Opening images. Factories in a town belch smoke. A small, industrial town on a river. This is Karmack, USA.

Frank Farrelli (Pål Sverre Hagen) is the second interviewee by the three person panel (the local sheriff, pastor and doctor played respectively by Paul Gross, Nicholas Bro and Canadian regular Don McKellar) for the town’s job of middle man, the person who has to deliver bad news, e.g.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Scream VI

Directors – Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Tyler Gillett – 2022 – US – Cert. 18 – 123m

**1/2

The sixth entry in the Scream franchise relocates from Woodsboro to New York City as the masked killer continues to stalk and kill his victims – out in UK cinemas on Friday, March 10th

The phone rings. Someone picks up. If it’s the first time he’s called, the caller (voice: Roger L. Jackson) engages them in conversation, often about whether they like movies, in particular scary movies. This often leads to the recipient of the call being bloodily murdered shortly after. But not always. Some of the characters in the Scream movies stay alive via a judicious knowledge of the rules of horror films. The previous five films, of which the fifth film is somewhat confusingly called Scream exactly the same as the first, are set in the town of Woodsboro, California with a cast of repeating characters among the ongoing survivors.

This sixth film is set in the very different urban milieu of New York City. Which, along with a smart graphic whereby the last three quarters of the letter ‘M’ are coloured red to turn into the Roman numeral VI, may entice back viewers who had long since given up on the franchise (the ideas got tired after the first couple of films).… Read the rest

Categories
Art Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Mary Cassatt:
Painting
The Modern Woman

The Tea (c. 1880)

Director – Ali Ray – 2023 – UK – Cert. U – 93m

*****

A look at an often overlooked member of the Impressionists, a US-born, female painter and printmaker who moved from Philadelphia to live in France – out in UK cinemas for one day only on Wednesday, March 8th (International Women’s Day)

I had never heard of Mary Cassatt when I came to this documentary. I’m not really sure why not (apart from the obvious reason, the widespread exclusion of numerous women artists from the annals of art history until recently) and feel indebted to this remarkable study for introducing me to her work. It comes as no surprise that the film was produced by Phil Grabsky for his excellent Exhibition On Screen series about art, although what IS a surprise here is that all the interviewees in this instance are women. Nothing at all wrong with that if they have something of value to say, which they clearly do.

One could argue that the piece has a very strong feminist leaning with its emphasis on women being free to live their lives as they choose. It’s tempting to say that one could forget the gender bias here and simply say that all the interviewees have important insights to share and do a good job.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

The Son

Director – Florian Zeller – 2022 – UK – Cert. 15 – 123m

****1/2

A man and his wife must deal with the mental illness of his son by a previous marriage when he moves in with them – in cinemas from Friday, February 17th

Peter (Hugh Jackman) is a successful New York lawyer with a wife Beth (Vanessa Kirby) and a small child Theo. One day, his ex-wife Kate (Laura Dern) turns up at his apartment door to inform him that, as she’s just found out, their teenage son Nicholas (Zen McGrath) has not been to school for one month. She has tried to talk to the boy but got no sense out of him. When Peter goes to visit them, the boy insists he’d like to come and live with his dad.

New mum Beth is understandably hesitant, but nevertheless the couple agree to have Nicholas stay. It quickly becomes apparent that he has grievances against his father and step-mother for leaving his mother and becoming involved with his married father respectively. While Nicholas has never got over his parents’ break-up, Peter has continued in a career which leaves him increasingly less time for family. That looks like getting worse, too, because he has the chance of being part of the team of an electoral candidate.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Women Talking

Director – Sarah Polley – 2022 – US – Cert. 15 – 104m

*****

Should we stay or should we go? Following an incident of mass sexual abuse in an isolated religious community, its women debate the question, stay and fight – or leave? – out in UK cinemas on Friday, February 10th

Here’s a film that defies the rule that, by rights, a bunch of people talking to one another in one location ought to make for tedious cinema. (Such outings usually work very well on the stage, a medium about a bunch of people talking in one location.) Yet Sarah Polley’s adaptation of the novel Women Talking proves electrifying. It’s based on a novel by Canadian author Miriam Toews which is in turn based on horrifying real life events (although the book is “an imagined response to real events”, rather than an attempt to actually conjure or describe those events).

Between 2005 and 2009, in an isolated Mennonite community in Bolivia, over a hundred girls and women were raped in their sleep. Their discoveries were initially dismissed by the community’s menfolk until it came to light that a small group of men had sprayed the interiors of the victims’ houses with animal anaesthetic to render them and their families unconscious.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

The Fabelmans

Director – Steven Spielberg – 2022 – US – Cert. 12a – 151m

*****

The life and times of a young boy and amateur US movie maker whose extended family harbours an unexpected secret – out in UK cinemas on Friday, January 27th

Throughout his career, Spielberg has continued to surprise. He’s made big blockbusters which seem, very often, to be about the intimacies of family relationships. Perhaps it was inevitable that, sooner or later, he would make something like The Fabelmans.

Orson Welles once said that Hollywood was the best train set a boy could have to play with. Presented with a train set, young Sammy Fabelman (Mateo Zoryan Francis-DeFord) plays with it by staging train crashes, about which behaviour his brilliant, scientific nerd father Burt (Paul Dano) is less than pleased.

However, his mother Mitzy (Michelle Williams), after some thought, realises that her son need to see the trains crash over and over again, so secretly allows him to stage a crash and film it with the family’s Super 8 home movie camera to enable his required repeat viewing. This kindles within the boy a desire to make his own movies, and soon he’s enlisting his family, friends and neighbours in these enterprises.… Read the rest