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Origin

Director – Ava DuVernay – 2023 – US – Cert. 12a – 135m

***

A US journalist researches a book reinterpreting US racist attitudes to black people through both the Nazi’s segregation of Jews and the Indian caste system’s treatment of Dalits – out in UK cinemas on Friday, March 8th

This is based on both the 2020 nonfiction book Caste: The Origin of Our Discontents and its author US journalist and Pulitzer Prize-winner Isabel Wilkerson’s journey in writing that book. Highly effective in putting the first of those elements on the screen, the screenplay, credited to both DuVernay and Wilkerson, proves much more uneven in its attempts to do so with the second.

Wilkerson’s thesis looks at the US’ historic racist treatment of black people through the lens of a caste system. The term caste system derives from the Western European analysis of Indian society, and to a lesser extent other South Asian societies, in which certain designated groups are elevated above others to produce and maintain a social hierarchy. As portrayed here in the film, the book looks firstly at the US in these terms – a caste system favouring white people over blacks – then Nazi Germany – a caste system favouring Germans over Jews, a radical use of caste as an historical analytical tool I have never come across before – and finally India – a caste system putting the Dalits, the untouchables who traditionally clean latrines, at the bottom of the pile below everyone else.… Read the rest

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Animation Features Movies

The Inventor

Directors – Jim Capobianco, Pierre-Luc Granjon – 2023 – US, France, Ireland – Cert. PG – 100m

****

Towards the end of his life, inventor Leonardo da Vinci goes to live in France under the patronage of the King – stop frame / drawn animation composite is out in the UK’s Vue cinemas on Friday, March 8th

Rome, Italy, 1516. Leonardo da Vinci (voice: Stephen Fry) happily shows off a giant optical system of magnifying glasses for observing the heavens to his assistant Francesco Melzi (voice: Angelino Sandri). Francesco retorts that Leonardo ought to be worried about the Pope who has spies everywhere (and sure enough, there are eyes watching from nearby peepholes). Leonardo’s other assistant, the hulking, mute Zoroastro sources corpses for him, on which the curious Leonardo performs dissections and studies what he finds through making drawings in his quest for find the animated spirit of man, a search which, in dreams and visions, often leads him into confrontation with a mysterious, gargantuan, dark-hooded figure.

The inventor is summoned to Pope Leo X (voice: Matt Berry) who wants to know, why can’t Leonardo just make pretty things? The arrival of a messenger whose helmet is half crushed by a cannonball leads Leo to suggest Leonardo fashion him machines of war.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

The Beast
(La Bête)
(2023)

Director – Bertrand Bonello – 2023 – France – Cert. – 146m

*****

Required to expunge her emotions by the ruling AI of 2044, a woman with a sense of dread revisits her past lives in 1910 and 2014 and their incarnations of the love of her life – curious mix of art house movie and science fiction plays Glasgow Film Festival which runs from Wednesday, February 28th to Sunday, March 10th, and is out in UK cinemas on Friday, May 31st

An actress (Léa Seydoux) against green screen rehearses a scene in a house – the director’s voice tells her where the stairs and other features are in relation to her position and marks on the floor. With these minimal visuals but with the addition of music and full sound effects, she works through the scene up to the point where she sees the terrifying shadow of the Beast on a wall and screams. Consciously or unconsciously, this echoes the screen test on the boat of Ann Darrow (Fay Wray) in King Kong (Merian C. Cooper, Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1933) as she is required to scream at an unseen, gargantuan monster for the camera.

As in Kong, this scene anticipates one that will play out later in the film.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Dune Part Two

Director – Denis Villeneuve – 2024 – US – Cert. 12a – 166m

*****

Afallen dynastyfights back on a desert planet populated with giant sandworms– out in cinemas on Friday, March 1st

The second part of the adaptation of Frank Herbert’s sprawling novel Dune (1965) – the title Dune Part Two following the title Dune Part One on the print of the previous film – poses the filmmakers a greater adaptation challenge than the first in terms of the magnitude of, exactly what do you leave out to turn it into a strong, two and a half hours plus movie, and what do you keep in.

Villeneuve clearly doesn’t want to repeat himself, because he takes a very different approach adapting the second half of the book than he did for the first, which may or may not serve to make the two halves feel weirdly incongruent when viewed, as they surely will be, back to back. Indeed, it makes you wonder whether there exists a much longer cut of Dune Part Two or a much longer version of the screenplay – it all depends on whether the pruning took place at the scripting stage, the shooting stage, or the editing stage.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies Music

Bob Marley
One Love

Director – Reinaldo Marcus Green – 2023 – US – Cert. 12a – 104m

***1/2

From his childhood in poverty in Jamaica, Bob Marley rises to stardom and international fame as the bast known proponent of reggae music – out in UK cinemas on Friday, February 16th

All this movie has to do to succeed is give us lots of Bob Marley’s recordings and show us lots of images of him doing things in the process. That’s what the movie says on the tin and that’s what you find inside. It fundamentally delivers what its audience expects and will probably do very well. Although I wouldn’t describe myself as a particular fan, over the years Marley’s music has seeped inescapably into both the popular and my own consciousness: it’s good, positive stuff which genuinely hits a tangible musical groove. I watched the movie and had the good time I was expecting. And Kingsley Ben-Adir is watchable enough as Marley.

However.

Anyone who comes to this wanting to know more about Bob Marley will find this a frustrating experience. Director Green, who co-wrote the script, fails to introduce a number of characters properly. Among Marley’s entourage of musicians and friends, for instance, I couldn’t tell you which one in the film is Peter Tosh (Alex-A Game), who is something of a lesser legend in the world of reggae.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Dune
(2021)

Director – Denis Villeneuve – 2021 – US – Cert. 12a – 155m

*****

A powerful family is exiled to a desert planet populated with giant sandworms as part of an interplanetary conspiracy to end their dynasty – back out in cinemas from Friday, February 8th 2024

Frank Herbert’s sprawling novel Dune (1965) was read in the late 1960s and 1970s by any teenage boy with the slightest interest in science fiction and fantasy. It had (a little) space travel but more significantly it had alien worlds, notably the desert planet Arrakis on which 95% of the action takes place, and so ticked the SF box.

Then it had a whole ecology involving the planet’s occupants the Fremen, a drug known as ‘the Spice’, and giant sandworms, so it also ticked the fantasy box.

On top of this, it pitted dynasties – ‘Houses’ – against each other in a tale of interplanetary political intrigue.

The plot was unbelievably convoluted, spawning a lengthy series of sequels. I gave up around the fifth or sixth book. And yet, the first book possessed an almost mythic quality that my diminishing interest in the later volumes was unable to dispel.

The sheer quantity of plot was always going to be a challenge for a standalone movie.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Born To Fly
(Chang Kong
Zhi Wang,
长空之王,
lit.
King Of The Sky)

Director – Liu Xiaoshi – 2023 – China – Cert. 12a – 128m

***1/2

Genuinely thrilling action movie about Chinese test pilots owes much to US movies Top Gun and The Right Stuff, even as it attempts to justify current expansionist Chinese views – out on Blu-ray and Digital from Monday, February 5th

From above the clouds. Two stealth jets. Down towards the sea surface and an oil platform flying a Chinese flag. Coffee in a cup vibrating Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993) style to indicate the imminent approach of the monster. Sonic boom. Aircraft fly past. Oil rig windows blow out. Faces are cut to ribbons. In one cockpit, the pilot radios his colleague and, presumably, anyone else listening (in US English): “we can come and go anywhere we want.”

Then, a Chinese plane after them. In their sights. But, before the American can shoot it down, the Chinese loops the loop, transforming from target to shooter. Vowing, like that villainous Hollywood icon The Terminator (James Cameron, 1984) to be back, the US pilots leave Chinese airspace.

The Chinese aircraft, meanwhile, clearly inferior to its US counterparts, suffers flameout requiring its ace pilot to make a forced landing during which its drogue parachute fails to open.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

American Fiction

Director – Cord Jefferson – 2023 – US – Cert. 15 – 117m

*****

A black, American college Literature professor, unexpectedly finds celebrity via an anonymous alter-ego when he writes a cliché-ridden book about ‘the black experience’ – out in UK cinemas on Friday, February 2nd

College professor Thelonius ‘Monk’ Ellison (Jeffrey Wright) is a black academic at a white university. He teaches literature. While he’s teaching a class on the literature of the American South, a young, white, female student objects to the “N-word”, walks out of the class, and – in due course – gets him put on an unpaid Sabbatical. He’s a published novelist who hasn’t had anything published for years, including a manuscript currently doing the rounds through his agent Arthur, whereas other, white, faculty members publish work he considers beneath him yet which also sell in volume in airports.

His Sabbatical ties in with the fact of his going to a Literature Festival in his home city of Boston, where he finds his seminar poorly attended because it’s up against one by rising publishing sensation Sintara Golden (Issa Rae), author of We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, which, when he investigates her session, turns out to be what he considers pandering to black stereotypes of living in poverty, crime and misery.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

The Holdovers

Director – Alexander Payne – 2023 – US – Cert. 15 – 133m

*****

A teenage pupil must remain at school in the care of his strict and widely despised Ancient History teacher over the 1970 Christmas holidays – out in UK cinemas on Friday, January 19th

A school movie with a difference: this takes place not in term time, but in the holidays. Specifically, a New England boys’ boarding school in the 1970 Christmas holidays, when, for various reasons, five pupils – three teenage, two younger – are unable to go home for the seasonal break, so must instead be looked after by a member of staff at the school. That task falls to ancient history teacher Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti), who is filling in for the member of staff who made up a story about a difficult family health situation to get out of being lumbered with the task. Paul is put upon for jobs like this because he’s the guy who can’t say no; he’s also a stickler for hard work and discipline who is disliked by fellow teaching staff and pupils alike.

Once the other staff and students have left, one other person remains on the premises: the head cook Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) who has a connection to the institution beyond her employment.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Mean Girls (2024)

Directors – Samantha Jayne, Arturo Perez Jr. – 2024 – US – Cert. 12a – 112m

**

A reimagining as a musical of the eponymous, 2004 US High School movie in which the new girl finds herself up against a girl clique – out in UK cinemas on Friday, Wednesday, January 17th

Raised and homeschooled on the open plains of Kenya, 16-year-old Cady Heron (Angourie Rice) is in for a shock when her mum suddenly decides the family is moving back to the US. The shock comes specifically in terms of High School, which she swiftly discovers to be a hostile world of exclusive cliques.

Two outsiders Janis (Auli’i Cravalho) and Damian (Jaquel Spivey) take it upon themselves to explain who’s who and against their advice, she falls in with the Plastics: Regina George (Reneé Rapp), Gretchen (Bebe Wood), and Karen (Avantika), a group of three rich, bitchy and style-obsessed girls who regard themselves as superior to everyone else.

Cady swiftly puts a foot wrong by falling head over heels for Regina’s boyfriend Aaron Samuels (Christopher Briney), and the narrative swiftly develops into a conflict between her and the other three Plastics, particularly Regina. It’s a musical, too: cue song and dance numbers.… Read the rest