Tag: war

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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 on Disney+ from Wednesday, March 13th

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

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Features Live Action Movies

Primavera
(Primavera)

Director – Damiano Michieletto – 2025 – Italy, France – Cert. 15 – 110m

*****

A young Venetian orphan comes into her own learning to play the violin under her orphanage’s new Master of Music, Antonio Vivaldi – period drama is out in UK and Ireland cinemas on Friday, April 24th

A group of girls, all wearing similar dresses, fawn over a cat’s newly birthed litter of kittens. That doesn’t last long, as an older woman unceremoniously picks up the kittens one by one, stuffs them into a sack, goes to the huge wooden door of the courtyard, opens it, and throws the sack into the canal. In seconds we have gone from unbearably cute to unspeakably cruel.

The older woman is the Prioress (Fabrizia Sacchi) who presides over an orphanage in eighteenth century Venice. Baby girls are abandoned outside their doors, accompanied by half a memento – should the woman later wish to reclaim her daughter, she need only turn up at the orphanage bearing the matching half. The orphanage’s archive lists the details of every girl, complete with half memento. Many of the mementos are religious, such as an image of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

The orphanage is renowned for its orchestra.… Read the rest

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Documentary Features Live Action Movies

London’s Last Wilderness

Director – Pablo Behrens – 2026 – UK – Cert. 12a – 61m

*****

London’s Thames Estuary filmed and edited from the point of view of an alien – out in UK cinemas on Friday, April 24th

A genre bender of a documentary, this owes a great deal to Petropolis (Peter Mettler, 2009) which comprises aerial cinematography of the environmental wreck of Canada’s Alberta Tar sands. The subject of London’s Last Wilderness, however, is not an ecological catastrophe, however much its narration by intertitle might (mis)interpret it as the aftermath of a war zone. It is rather the estuary of the Thames, the river that further inland flows through London, which city puts in a brief appearance towards the end. Indeed, insofar as this has a narrative spine, it is of a journey from the largely uninhabited estuary inland to the metropolis itself.

Where Petropolis was shot largely from a helicopter by a cameraman, the results recalling nothing so much as the aerial footage that opens The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980) and closes (because they bought the rights to it) Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982), aerial photography has moved on considerably in the last fifteen of so years with the evolution of drones, today a major part of the filmmaker / cinematographer’s arsenal.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Dongji Rescue
(Dong Ji Dao,
東吉 嶼)

Director – Fei Zhenxiang, Guan Hu – 2025 – China – Cert. 15 – 133m

The first hour and a half **1/2

The last half hour ****1/2

Chinese islanders under Japanese Occupation in WW2 set out to rescue a thousand plus British prisoners from a sinking, torpedoed ship – streaming on UK VoD from Friday, April 17th

An announcement in English on the BBC, from October 1st, 1942: “On September 27th 1942, the Japanese transport ship Lisbon Maru carrying 1,816 British prisoners of war departed Hong Kong for Japan. On October 1st, she was struck by a torpedo from American submarine USS Grouper and began to sink off the Eastern coast of China. Just two miles South West of the site lies a small island known to the Chinese as Dongji Island… This information comes overwhelmingly fast at the start, accompanied by CG images of the incident. Anyway, you get the drift.

And then, as if to suggest at least one of the directors’ true interests lie somewhere else altogether, there follow breathtaking images of an island, vast spaces with grasses blowing in the wind. And more verbal exposition: two young boys were rescued from the sea by Old Wu, but then the Northern islanders banished the boys to the Southern part of the island, believing them to have “pirate blood”.… Read the rest

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Animation Features Live Action Movies

Terminator 2
Judgement Day

Director – James Cameron – 1991 – US – Cert. 15 – 127m

*****

A second Terminator is sent from the future to kill the future leader of the war against the machines – opening film in Film Tottenham’s upcoming programme celebrating female action heroes, plays Sunday, April 12th 2026, 6.30 for 7pm start

In the 1984 original, a Terminator robot (Arnold Schwarznegger) is sent back in time to kill Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), the mother-to-be of the leader of the war in the future against the machines, who are exterminating humanity.

This sequel sees a more advanced T-1000 robot (Robert Patrick) sent back in time to kill Sarah’s now-ten-year-old son John (Ed Furlong). Another Terminator (Schwarzengger) is also running around in the present (i.e. 1991).

Sarah’s recurring nightmare pictures the coming apocalypse when the machines unleash nuclear missiles on humanity. That aside, this is basically an essay on mothers and sons – and fathers and sons – wrapped up in the best chase movie you’ve ever seen.

What makes the film work is the mother and son element. Sarah is a believer in Terminators, the coming war against the machines, and humanity’s fightback in a world where such beliefs are dismissed as delusions.… Read the rest

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Animation Features Movies

Little Amélie
or
The Character of Rain
(Amélie
et
la Métaphysique des Tubes)

Directors – Maïlys Vallade & Liane-Cho Han – 2025 – France – Cert. PG – 77m

*****

A Belgian diplomat’s baby daughter growing up in Japan comes to realise, by her third birthday, that she is not God – out in UK cinemas on Friday, February 13th; previews Saturday, 7th and Sunday, 8th February

In the beginning was God. At least, that’s how the new-born Amélie (French language version voice: Loïse Charpentier) sees herself. She is, essentially, a tube which swallows, digests and ejects (as per the film’s French language title). She has a perfect command of verbal language, so sees no need to say anything. That said, she makes great use of voice-over throughout the piece. She remains motionless, practising “the gift of serenity”. “Your child is a vegetable”, proclaims a doctor to the child’s parents. She remains in this state until her second birthday, when life is interrupted by an earthquake – nothing significant in the wider scheme of things, but a momentous event in the interior life of a small child. She attempts to speak, but to her horror the words in her head don’t emerge, only baby noises.

Amelie is the third child of Patrick (French voice: Marc Arnaud) and Danièle (French voice: Laetitia Coryn), and has two older siblings, Juliette (French voice: Haylee Issembourg) and André (French voice: Isaac Schoumsky).… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies Music

The History of Sound

Director – Oliver Hermanus – 2025 – UK, US – Cert. 15 – 128m

****

A Kentucky man falls for a music professor in Boston and accompanies him on a field trip recording folk songs – out in UK cinemas on Friday, January 23rd

In 1917, having grown up on a farmstead in rural Kentucky and his remarkable singing voice being noticed by a local schoolteacher, Lionel Worthing (Paul Mescal from Hamnet, Chloé Zhao, 2025; Gladiator II, Ridley Scott, 2024; All of Us Strangers, Andrew Haigh, 2023) gets a student scholarship to Boston’s New England Conservatory of Music. One Saturday evening in a Boston pub with friends, he makes the acquaintance of David White (Josh O’Connor from  La Chimera, Alice Rohrwacher, 2023; Mothering Sunday, Eva Husson, 2021; The Crown, TV series, 2019-20; God’s Own Country, Francis Lee, 2017) who is playing folk songs on the piano and, it turns out, is a tenured academic with an obsessive hobby: travelling around the country collecting, recording and cataloguing folk songs. David has what Lionel describes as the sound equivalent of a photographic memory: he can remember word for word and note for note, any song sung in his presence.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Taegukgi
The Brotherhood of War
(Taegukgi Hwinallimyeo,
태극기 휘날리며)

Director – Kang Je-gyu – 2004 – South Korea – Cert. 15 – 140m

****

When two brothers are conscripted into the Korean War, the older one’s attempts to keep the younger from harm’s way irrevocably damage their filial relationship – plays in LEAFF10 (London East Asia Film Festival 2025) with an In Conversation session with Production Designer Shin Bo-kyeong on Monday, October 27th

Named after the South Korean national flag, this latest Kang Je-Gyu (The Gingko Bed, 1996; Shiri, 1999) offering tells the story of two young Korean brothers caught up in the Korean War (initiated when the Communist North invaded the South in 1950). Like numerous other Oriental movies (e.g Bullet In The Head, John Woo, 1990), the considerable, historical detail realised on the screen is secondary to the emotionally charged, interpersonal core drama.

Thus, shoe shine boy and older sibling Jin-Tae (Jang Dong-gun from Nowhere To Hide, Lee Myung-se, 1999) is saving to send little brother Jin-Seok (Won Bin) to university. When war breaks out, younger brother is conscripted, with elder brother forcibly joined up only when he tries to have Jin-Seok’s conscription reversed. Leaving behind girlfriend Young-Shin (Lee Eun-doo), Jin-Tae learns that his earning the medal of honour might secure Jin-Seok’s release, so sets about on the one hand undertaking as many dangerous missions as possible and on the other refusing to allow Jin-Seok to do so.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies

The Glassworker
(Sheesha Gar,
شیشہ گ)

Director – Usman Riaz – 2024 – Pakistan, Spain – Cert. 12a – 98m

*****

The son of a pacifist glassblower learning his father’s trade falls for the violin-playing daughter of an army colonel in wartime – complex, anti-war drama from the 2024 Annecy International Animation Festival in the Contrechamps section, released in Pakistan on Friday, 26th July 2024 and out in UK cinemas on Friday, September 19th

If you knew nothing about this animated film beforehand, you’d assume it to be Japanese. Love it or hate it, most animation made in Japan falls within very distinctive, stylistic, visual parameters. According to the press blurb, director Riaz is an admirer of Studio Ghibli directors Miyazaki and Takahata as well as more recent directors Mamoru Hosoda and Satoshi Kon. Visually, the film feels more like a Miyazaki than anything else, and of comparable quality too. Yet it’s also highly original, and Riaz, here directing his first feature after a number of shorts, clearly has his own voice.

It opens with a frame story about youthful glassblower Vincent Oliver (voice: Sacha Dhawan) who, with the help of his father, is preparing for the opening of his debut glassware exhibition. He rereads a letter from a girl which his father (voice: Art Malik) had told him years ago to destroy in their workshop’s furnace.… Read the rest

Categories
Documentary Features Live Action Movies

2000 Meters to Andriivka

Director – Mstyslav Chernov – 2025 – Ukraine – Cert. 15 – 107m

****

A small Ukrainian Army unit advances through a narrow strip of war-scarred forest to recapture a village from the occupying Russians – documentary from the makers of 20 Days in Mariupol is out in UK and Irish cinemas on Friday, August 1st

Set in the 2023 Ukrainain offensive to take back land occupied by the Russians in the East of Ukraine, this covers the advance of a small, Ukrainian army unit, the 3rd Assault Brigade, on the country’s Russian-occupied village of Adriivka, located on the outskirts of the town of Bahkmut. Given that the latter is two hours away from Kharkiv, the hometown of director Mstyslav Chernov (20 Days in Mariupol, 2023), the location has a clear personal significance for him. He and his Associated Press colleague Alex Babenko take their camera with the unit on their mission.

The soldiers are all equipped with helmet cams, giving the filmmakers additional material to play with. Such technology is unimaginable as recently as 25 years ago. One might argue that war has changed little, that it’s still much the same, horrible phenomenon it always has been. The advent of the cam, however, means that an audience can watch the viewpoint of a war participant up close and personal.… Read the rest