Tag: US

Categories
Animation Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Coup 53

Director – Taghi Amirani – 2019 – UK – Cert. 15 – 120m

*****

The officially unacknowledged British role in the 1953 coup overthrowing the Iranian government – more timely than ever, and now back out in UK cinemas from Friday, May 5th 2026; more dates added daily at https://coup53.com/
Originally in UK cinemas from Friday, August 21st 2020

A documentary begun in 2009 interviewing many people who died before the film’s completion some ten years later, this covers the 1953 coup in Iran backed by President Eisenhower in the US and Prime Minister Churchill in the UK which replaced Iran’s democratically elected, left-wing Prime Minister Mossadegh with the Shah. The UK has never officially acknowledged its role in this coup.

Amirani’s researches lead him to a basement of documents held by Mossadech’s grandson in Paris comprising archive material from the Granada TV 1985 End Of Empire documentary series, for which he gets access to the rushes from the BFI. Iran was included because it had been controlled by British interests for so long (because of its oil reserves). Amirani’s editor, helping pull all this together, is the legendary Walter Murch (Gimme Shelter / 1970, The Conversation / 1974, Apocalypse Now / 1979, The English Patient / 1996).… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

I’ve Seen All I Need To See

Director – Zeshaan Younus – 2025 – US – Cert. 15 – 84m

*

A woman mourns her sister, dead in circumstances which remain far from clear – impenetrable drama is out in UK cinemas on Friday, May 1st

NSFW

Parker (Renee Gagner from Gazer, Ryan J. Sloan, 2024) sits on a chair and delivers a monologue. Apparently she’s doing an audition for an acting part. Either way, she rambles on about being finger-fucked in a car by a man who would later be turned to red mist as he served abroad with the military. The sequence, which consists of one unbroken, locked-off camera shot, is unlikely to engage you on any level. And it’s typical of everything else about this lacklustre effort.

In the middle comes a sequence in which car headlights appear in a night of pouring rain, and a series of characters gather outside a warehouse. One of them pulls out a gun. Shots are heard to be fired, by which time the picture has cut to a sunset landscape so you could be looking at the end of this mysterious meeting that looks like it isn’t going to go well, or it might be unrelated. It’s hard to tell.… Read the rest

Categories
Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Kinaesthesia

Director – Gerald Fox – 2026 – UK – Cert. 15 – 97m

**1/2

A journey through the dream imagery of silent cinema and its cinematographic effects, augmented by present day stagings before the camera – out in UK cinemas on Friday, April 17th

Long fascinated by dream imagery in cinema, director Fox attended the Harvard course run by its Professor of Film Studies Vlada Petrić (1928-2019) to which this documentary essay is dedicated, being based on and quoting intensely from the latter’s theories.

Additionally, it just about works as a useful primer in silent cinema for the uninitiated provided you’re aware of its inherent biases and limitations. These may well be linked to the films (or film libraries) for which producer-director Fox secured rights, because there’s a far greater amount of French movies than you might expect. Or, these may may simply reflect Petrić’s theories and tastes.

Either way, the selection of movies here also leans towards the avant-garde in not only France but also the US. Then it throws in specific films from Griffifth (Edgar Allan Poe, 1909; The Avenging Conscience / Thou Shalt Not Kill, 1915) and Hitchcock (The Ring, 1927), China’s Romance of the Western Chamber (Hou Yau, 1927) and Japan’s A Page of Madness (Teinosuke Kinugasa, 1926).… Read the rest

Categories
Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Orwell: 2+2=5

Director – Raoul Peck – 2025 – UK – Cert. 15 – 119m

****1/2

A primer on the life and work of George Orwell, particularly Nineteen Eighty-Four, and its relevance to today’s post-truth world – out in UK cinemas on Friday, March 27th

This belongs to the school of documentary which creates a film out of assembling fragments of movies, found footage, archive clips and images, moving or still. The list of feature films and other source material used in this instance is astonishing, with the director given full access to the Orwell Estate. Peck also makes use of clips from various movie adaptations of Nineteen Eighty-Four (Paul Nickell, 1953; Rudolph Cartier, 1954; Michael Anderson, 1956, Michael Radford, 1984) plus Brazil (Terry Gilliam, 1985), a film so heavily inspired by Orwell’s book that it was originally entitled 1984½, and Animal Farm (John Halas, Joy Batchelor, cartoon animated feature, 1954; John Stephenson, Jim Henson Creature Shop, 1999; illustrations by Ralph Steadman, 1995). On top of this, he uses BBC Drama The Crystal Spirit: Orwell on Jura (John Glenister, script: Alan Plater, 1983) and Orwell’s essay Why I Write (1946).

These last two are particularly pertinent, given that Peck has chosen to focus on the final year (1949-50) of Orwell’s life during which he took himself off to the Island of Jura, Scotland to finish writing Nineteen Eighty-Four and was subsequently admitted to University College Hospital, London with Tuberculosis.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

They Will Kill You

Director – Kirill Sokolov – 2025 – US – Cert. 15 – 94m

****

A young woman, searching from her missing sister, takes a job as a cleaner in a mysterious, wealthy, New York apartment block – horror action movie is out in UK cinemas on Friday, March 27th

This has been sold as a horror / paranoia conspiracy thriller about a New York apartment building in the mould of Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968). Yet while its opening set up has echoes of that film, it turns out to be something altogether very different.

Asia Reaves (Zazie Beetz from The Bad Guys, Pierre Perifel, 2022; Joker, Todd Phillips, 2019; Deadpool 2, David Leitch, 2018), her younger sister Maria (Myha’la from Dead Man’s Wire, Gus van Sant, 2025; Bodies Bodies Bodies, Halina Reijn, 2022) in tow, flees their abusive father. He tracks them down in a grocery store, outside which she later shoots and hospitalises him before going on the run alone.

Ten years later, she applies for a housekeeper’s job at the Virgil, a nine-storey New York apartment building. The door is answered by Irish building superintendent Lily (Patricia Arquette from Boyhood, Richard Linklater, 2014; Lost Highway, David Lynch, 1997; True Romance, Tony Scott, 1993) who introduces her to a few of the tenants in the lobby including Sharon (Heather Graham from Austin Powers 2; The Spy Who Shagged Me, Jay Roach, 1999; Boogie Nights, Paul Thomas Anderson, 1997) and Kevin (Tom Felton – Draco Malfoy from the Harry Potter films, 2001-2011) before showing her to her room.… Read the rest

Categories
Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Underland

Director – Rob Petit – 2025 – US, UK – Cert. 12a – 79m

***

Three separate journeys beneath the Earth’s surface in the company of an archaeologist, a particle physicist and an urban explorer – had its sold out UK Premiere at the Barbican on Tuesday, March 24th and is out in UK cinemas on Friday, March 27th

Why do we seek the void, asks a narrator (Sandra Hüller from Project Hail Mary, Phil Lord, Christopher Miller, 2026; The Zone of Interest, Jonathan Glazer, 2023; Anatomy of a Fall, Justine Triet, 2023) as the camera descends into an Academy 4:3 image of an orifice within an ash tree, a portal to the world below. In a letterboxed image, we’re in a car passing the garish lists of Las Vegas entertainments, then on to breach a wire fence on the outskirts of that city. Then with a group of women cavers in a jungle, possibly South America somewhere, near a tree on the edge of a vast hole in the ground. Another group of cavers stand around in a room in readiness. A further caver walks down an urban street and starts to lift a manhole cover.

In terms of following what’s going on, apart from the idea of people in different places possessed of a desire to penetrate the Earth’s surface, and exciting, pulsating music by Hannah Peel, all this is really hard to follow; the viewer’s brain is overloaded.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Project Hail Mary

Directors – Phil Lord, Christopher Miller – 2026 – US – Cert. 12a – 156m

*****

Hail Mary, Full of Grace. A school teacher is sent to a star 12 light years from Earth to determine why it is surviving the emergent life form killing all other stars, including our sun – out in UK cinemas on Friday, March 20th

“What is 2 + 2?” Rudely awakened from cryogenic sleep by the ship’s computer (voice: Priya Kansara from Polite Society, Nida Manzoor, 2023), Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling from Blade Runner 2049, Denis Villeneuve, 2017; La La Land, Damien Chazelle, 2016; Drive, Nicholas Winding Refn, 2011) comes under a barrage of questions designed to check his medical status. While he is perfectly healthy, his fellow crew members – the captain (Milana Vayntrub) and the pilot (Ken Leung from Joker: Folie à Deux, Todd Phillips, 2024; Lost, TV series, 2008-10; Rush Hour, Brett Ratner, 1998) – have died in their sleep chambers. Who is he, how did he get here? Memories come flooding back, building a picture of his past and revealing the answers, even as he goes about his mission.

Back on earth, Grace was a middle school teacher.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

A Pale View of Hills
(Toi Yamanamino Hikari,
遠い山なみの光)

Director – Kei Ishikawa – 2025 – UK, Japan, Poland – Cert. 12a – 123m

From the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro

***1/2

An aspiring journalist in 1982 England delves into her mother’s past life in 1952 Nagasaki and unearths dark family secrets – out in UK cinemas on Friday, March 13th

As will be seen from the above logline description, this essentially plays out in two timelines.

One is in Nagasaki, Japan in 1952, less than a decade after the dropping of the atomic bomb, where the married and barely visibly pregnant Etsuko (Suzo Hirose from Lupin III the First, Takashi Yamazaki, 2019; The Third Murder, Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2017; The Boy and the Beast, Mamoru Hosoda, 2015; Our Little Sister, Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2015) befriends Sachiko (Fumi Nikaido from River’s Edge, Isao Yukisada, 2018; Himizu, Sion Sono, 2011), the mother of local waif Mariko (Mio Suzuki), who lives in an isolated shack near the river and plans to emigrate to the US with a man named ‘Frank’.

The other is in a town in England somewhere near Greenham Common, Berkshire, in 1982, where aspiring journalist Niki (Camilla Aiko from Dr.… Read the rest

Categories
Dance Features Live Action Movies Music

The Testament
of Ann Lee

Director – Mona Fastvold – 2025 – US, UK – Cert. 15 – 130m

****

In the mid-eighteenth century, wishing to preach her unique take on the Christian Gospel, Ann Lee crosses the Atlantic with a small party from from Manchester, England, to establish a Shaker community in America – unlikely religious musical is out in UK cinemas on Friday, February 20th

This review is written after seeing this film for a second time. On my first viewing, I went in cold, knowing a great deal about both Christian history and the Quakers, but nothing about the Shakers (‘the Shaking Quakers’) around whom the historical side of this film is based. As far as I can tell, the historical portrayals of the Shakers here, and their leader Mother Ann Lee (Amanda Seyfried in a career-defining role), are pretty accurate.

This is to leave aside the fact that this is also a musical, the genre in which people suddenly burst into song, and we somehow accept it. In real life, people generally don’t burst into song in the ordinary run of things. And yet, it’s a genre convention we accept, and as a genre the musical has a perfectly respectable history. That said, if you’ve been brought up within any sort of English protestant Christian church tradition, from C of E to house churches, you’ll be familiar with people singing hymns as part of their religious worship.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Scream 7

Ghostface in Paramount Pictures and Spyglass Media Group's "Scream 7." © 2025 Paramount Pictures. Ghost Face is a Registered Trademark of Fun World Div., Easter Unlimited, Inc. ©1999. All Rights Reserved.”.

Director – Kevin Williamson – 2026 – US – Cert. 18 – 114m

****

A survivor from the original murder spree tries to protect her 17-year-old daughter from the recently reappeared killer – out in UK cinemas on Friday, February 27th

This cleverly plays to both anyone who has followed the Scream franchise since its inception and anyone coming to it for the first time. It grabs you straight from the start with a clever little sequence, featured in the first quarter of the trailer, in which a young couple (Michelle Randolph and Jimmy Tatro) arrive for their stay at a Woodsboro house where the Stu Macher murders took place decades earlier, now done up as a short stay holiday home for crime thrill seekers. Since the trailer gives it away, it seems reasonable to point out that these two are about to become the latest victims of the so-called Ghostface killer, clad in his familiar mask that to this writer has always conjured Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream (1893).

Jimmy Tatro stars in Paramount Pictures and Spyglass Media Group’s “Scream 7.”

An additional conceit of the franchise is that the Ghostface killer’s trademark mask and cape can be worn by anyone, meaning that if you can disarm or kill them, you can then remove the mask and discover the identity of this particular Ghostface.… Read the rest