Tag: woodlands

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Features Live Action Movies

Shoulders

Director – Jamie Flatters – 2024 – UK – Cert. 15 – 101m

* or *****, depending how I’m feeling at the time

A group of soldiers armed with sticks instead of guns fight a war against an unseen enemy on open ground near some woodlands – opens the Clapham International Film Festival which runs from Wednesday, November 27th to Saturday, November 30th.

With a title that sounds like a mis-pronounciation of ‘Soldiers’, Shoulders is a pretty strange experience. Photographed, ***** SPOILER ALERT ***** apart from a couple of shots in colour ***** SPOILER ALERT ENDS *****, in at once stark and ravishing black and white, it features a visually partially diverse cast some of whom are instantly recognisable and some of whom it’s easy to confuse with one another. There is (I believe) a script, although any narrative coherence is largely lost under what feels like multiple layers of improvisation. And yet… Somehow, the whole thing coheres, at least up to a point, by virtue of its own peculiar internal logic and succeeds almost entirely on its energy and that of its various collaborators, director, cast, and crew. I’m not even sure that that logic can be adequately expressed in words.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Sasquatch Sunset

Director – David & Nathan Zellner – 2024 – US – Cert. 15 – 88m

****

As recreated by actors wearing primate suits, a family of Sasquatches are photographed in the wild over the course of a year – on Blu-ray and Digital from Monday, August 26th, packed with more than three hours of UK exclusive special features

In the US and Canada, the Bigfoot or Sasquatch is a staple of American folklore; a primate alleged to live in various American woodlands habitats, an assertion supported by such dubious artefacts as the Patterson-Gimlin film, amateur footage of a Bigfoot female walking through a forest. It’s far from conclusive, and could well be a man in an ape suit.

There is, however, no doubt whatsoever that the four Sasquatches in Sasquatch Sunset are human beings wearing ape suits. The film doesn’t try to pass itself off as anything other than actors playing a family of the creatures, and uses no narration voice-over to tell the audience what to think. Rather, it follows its creatures through a year of their existence in the wild, from Spring through Winter. It isn’t attempting to prove the existence of these creatures one way or the other; rather, it’s an attempt to imagine what they might look like and how they might behave if they were (or are) real.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies

Princess Mononoke
(Mononoke-hime,
もののけ姫)

Director – Hayao Miyazaki – 1997 – Japan – Cert. PG – 134m

*****

Reviewed for What’s On in London when the film appeared in the Barbican’s 2001 Studio Ghibli season. It never got a proper theatrical release in the UK. The review presents a fascinating snapshot of the cinema landscape in the UK from the time when, outside of anime fandom, film journalists, and industry insiders, Studio Ghibli and Hayao Miyazaki were largely unknown.

Film critics are occasionally privileged to see incredible films that, for one reason or another, never receive proper UK release. The Barbican is currently hosting a season of 11 films by Japan’s legendary Studio Ghibli (Jib-Lee), an animation company as familiar in Japan as Disney is here, that fall into exactly this category. They include Ghibli director Hayao Miyazaki’s legendary masterpiece My Neighbour Totoro (1988) and his imaginative fantasy epic Princess Mononoke (1997). Both took the Japanese box office by storm, the latter topping $150m putting it second only to Titanic (James Cameron, 1997). Miyazaki’s latest Spirited Away (2001) has topped the Japanese box office for weeks. Ghibli signed a deal in 1996 to distribute their films worldwide through Disney – but it’s been a long wait.… Read the rest

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Animation Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Wilding

Good Stewardship

Wilding

Directed by David Allen

Certificate PG, 75 minutes

Released 14 June

After they inherited the Knepp farm in West Sussex from his parents in the early 1980s, Charlie Burrell and Isabella Tree (Lady Burrell) kept it going for some 17 years until the late 1990s, when they were one and a half million pounds in debt. The agro-chemical pesticides and industrial farming practices that they and other UK farmers use were destroying the land. The pair decided to stop running the estate as a farm and to see if there was a way of repairing or regenerating the depleted land. [Read the rest at Reform magazine.]

[Read my longer, alternative review for this site.]

Trailer:

Categories
Documentary Features Live Action Movies

The Creeping Garden

Directors – Jasper Sharp, Tim Grabham – 2014 – UK – Cert. E – 81m

***1/2

You wouldn’t make a documentary about slime mould unless you found it fascinating. These two filmmakers clearly do so and their enthusiasm is likely to win you over – available on dual format BD/DVD and now also on Arrow Channel from Fri, 28th April 2023

Plasmodial slime mould. I have to confess that before this film came along, I’d never even heard of it. The Creeping Garden gives me the impression that I am not alone in this, since within the confines of biology, few researchers have paid much attention to the phenomenon. However, those few who have done so and are featured here – plus an artist – are clearly smitten.

To the naked eye, plasmodial slime mould is similar to fungus. There is one huge difference between the two: slime mould moves. Purposefully. Not that you’d notice in passing because it moves very, very slowly…

[read the full review at DMovies.org]

The Creeping Garden is available on dual format BD/DVD and now also on Arrow Channel from Fri, 28th April 2023

Review originally published on DMovies.org on 07.03.2017.

Trailer:

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Europa

Director – Haider Rashid – 2021 – Iraq, Italy, Kuwait – Cert. 12a – 75 m

****

A young Iraqi migrant is hunted by mercenaries after he crosses the Turkish/Bulgarian border – out in cinemas and on demand on Friday, March 18th

A number of movies hang over this bold adventure thriller about Kamal (Adam Ali), a young Iraqi migrant who after crossing from Turkey into Bulgaria finds himself hunted by paramilitaries with guns and balaclavas. One is the gothic classic The Most Dangerous Game / The Hounds Of Zaroff (Irving Pichel, Ernest B.Schoedsack, 1932) in which the passengers of a luxury liner shipwrecked on an island find themselves in a deadly relationship with the big game hunter who lives there. The others are much more recent. Utøya July 22 (Erik Poppe, 2018) is a one take recreation of the Utøya teen camp Summer massacre in which kids attempted to survive a rampaging gunman while Son Of Saul (László Nemes, 2015) follows a Jewish worker-prisoner around a Nazi death camp.

The connection with The Most Dangerous Game may actually be coincidental rather than deliberate, since what inspired Rashid was stories of real life migrants’ experiences. The locations are a Bulgarian woods not a constructed Hollywood jungle set, yet it fits neatly into that lineage.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

The Green Knight

Director – David Lowery – 2021 – UK – Cert. 15 – 130m

***1/2

A retelling of the story of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight from Arthurian mythology – out in cinemas on Friday, September 24th

This immediately sets out its stall with a woman leading a horse out of a courtyard and Gawain (Dev Patel) being awoken by a bucket of water on Christmas Day thrown by his lover Essel (Alicia Vikander) in a building which may or may not be a brothel. He attends mass with her, then goes back to his mother (Sarita Choudhury) who is going to pass attending the King’s court this Christmas Day.

The colour blind casting here has the good sense to cast Gawain and his mother in a similar ethnicity, which is certainly consistent and avoids the problems it produced in The Personal History Of David Copperfield (Armando Ianucci, 2019).

Whatever expectations of straightforward narrative the unwary moviegoer might have had from watching the trailer have been dashed. Much of the rest of the film is similarly oblique. While there is a basic underlying structure of a quest, what happens in the course of that quest comprises serial events and incidents en route that seemingly bear scant relation to the quest itself.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Rose:
A Love Story

Director – Jennifer Sheridan – 2020 – UK – Cert. 15 – 86m

*****

A couple isolate themselves from the outside world by living off grid in the woods for reasons not immediately apparent – out in the UK on digital including Amazon Prime from Monday, April 5th

The LFF put this in their Cult strand and the label fitted perfectly. Impressionistic images show cutlery, cups, CDs hanging from trees. A man leaves a hunting cabin. A woman sleeps in a bed. An eye of a beast in close up. A rabbit. The woman wakes, startled by a man’s voice. She puts paper in a typewriter. The rabbit is killed in a trap.

“I’m trying to give the doctor a reason to be in Prague so Susie can meet him,” Rose (Sophie Rundle) tells Sam (Matt Stokoe, also the film’s screenwriter). She is writing a book and they are living in isolation in the woods. This seems to suit them although something odd is definitely going on. They have supplies of leeches in jars, and he sits reading of an evening after applying a few of these to the upper part of his legs. Then he mashes up the results into a red pulp which comprises her diet.… Read the rest