Tag: welfare

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Features Live Action Movies

Freud’s Last Session

Director – Matthew Brown – 2023 – UK – Cert. 12a – 108m

****

Celebrated psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud is visited in the last month of his life, living in Britain, by young Oxford don and Christian apologist CS Lewis – out in UK cinemas on Friday, June 14th

September 1939. Chamberlain has issued his ultimatum to Hitler, and Britain waits to find out whether it will shortly be at war with Germany. Celebrated psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud (Anthony Hopkins), recently moved to Britain from Vienna to escape the Nazis, keeps turning the radio on and off in the hope of an update from the BBC. He is also expecting a visit from a young Oxford don, CS Lewis (Matthew Goode), “the Christian apologist”, with whose views he profoundly disagrees. 

Lewis has written books including a parody of Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress called The Pilgrim’s Regress, which is mentioned here, and the first book in his science fiction trilogy Out of the Silent Planet, which isn’t. He has however yet to either give his BBC broadcasts about the Christian faith, which will later form the basis of his most celebrated apologetic work Mere Christianity, or write his Narnia children’s fantasy novels.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

The Small Back Room

Directors – Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger – 1949 – UK – Cert. PG – 106m

*****

In London during World War Two, a back room boffin and bomb disposal man struggles with alcoholism – 4K restoration played at BFI Southbank on Tuesday, May 28th prior to release on Blu-ray, DVD and Digital on Monday, June 3rd

This black and white, post-war era drama isn’t the first film that comes to mind when people think about Powell and Pressburger – it was made immediately after what today are regarded as three of their best colour features – A Matter of Life and Death (1946), Black Narcissus (1947) and their arguable masterpiece The Red Shoes (1948). And that was preceded by one of their finest black and white works, “i know where i’m going!” (1945).

In many ways, The Small Back Room couldn’t be more different. There’s a marvellous sense of whimsy about those films, even if the later ones are intense and savage in places. Like Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes – and, for that matter, Powell’s late solo masterpiece Peeping Tom (1960), an intensity lies at the heart of The Small Back Room.

Gone are the light, airy spaces of the earlier films, their sense of the outdoors expanse (and, in The Red Shoes, the expanded landscapes of the eponymous ballet sequence within the film).… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Twilight Cinema Blues
(Ginpei-cho Cinema Blues,
銀平町シネマブルース)

Director – Hideo Jojo – 2022 – Japan – 99m

*****

Two homeless men find a new spiritual home at a run-down, local cinema which, like them, is struggling to survive – plays UK cinemas in the Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme 2024 between Friday, 2nd February and Sunday, 31st March

Down on his luck in his home town of Ginpei-cho, Takeshi Kondo (Keisuke Koide fromShin Godzilla, Hideaki Anno, Shinji Higuchi, 2016) is napping by the riverside in daylight. Along comes another tramp Sato (Shohei Uno from A Far Shore, Masaaki Kudo, 2022; 37 Seconds, Hikari, 2019) to sell him a flier for money and, when Kondo is distracted by the arrival of his old friend Kumika, to steal his bag. After Kondo tracks Sato down and retrieves his bag – “sorry, it’s a habit”, says Sato – the two tramps respond to an ad claiming it can help them play the system and receive welfare payments. Sadly, the people behind the scheme will turn out to be, as a fellow tramp vocally suspects, crooks with a whole other moneymaking agenda.

Kondo attends welfare-claiming training sessions with Sato, but his heart isn’t in it.… Read the rest