Tag: woods

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Features Live Action Movies

Rumours
(2024)

Director – Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, Galen Johnson – 2024 – Germany, Canada – Cert. – 109m

****1/2

The G7 leaders meet at a summit only to find themselves trapped in the woods following an apocalyptic event – from the BFI London Film Festival 2024 which runs from Wednesday, October 9th to Sunday, October 20th in cinemas and on BFI Player and then out in UK cinemas on out in UK cinemas on Friday, December 6th

LFF: Sun 13 Oct 15:15, BFI Southbank NFT1; Mon 14 Oct 20:30, Prince Charles Cinema; Sun 20 Oct 19:13, Curzon Soho Screen 1.

Every so often, the leaders of the world’s leading liberal democracies – the G7 – gather for summits to deal with the impending global crisis. On this occasion, it’s a bright, sunshiny day. Prior to getting down to business, they are toured through some local woods and shown the remains of one of the Bog People in a deep pit, their corpses perfectly preserved, apart from their bones which have disappeared, thanks to the properties of the bog land environment in which they were buried thousands of years ago. One corpse which they are shown has had his penis cut off and hung ornamentally round his neck.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies

Watership Down
(new 4K restoration)

Director – Martin Rosen – 1978 – UK – Cert. PG – 92m

*****

When a young rabbit visionary foresees doom for those who remain, some of the rabbits leave their warren in search of a safer home, encountering many life-threatening perils along the way – new 4K restoration of animated feature is out in UK cinemas on Friday, October 25th, following its World Premiere in the London Film Festival on Saturday, October 12th

LFF: Sat 12 Oct 12:20 World Premiere, Tues 15 Oct 12:15,
both BFI Southbank NFT1.

This opens with a mythological segment involving a powerful God, represented as the sun, and rabbitkind, specifically the archetypal rabbit El-ahrairah. It’s drawn and painted in an arresting, non-naturalistic style involving coloured lines animated against a white background to create the impression of moving, primitive drawings, due in large part to uncredited director John Hubley, whose vision for the film was at odds with that of producer Martin Rosen. The latter ended up firing the former as he wanted something grittier and less lightweight.

It’s arguable this has worked to the film’s advantage: the fable sequence works as otherworldly rabbit mythology, suggesting a race of intelligent creatures capable of constructing creation myths about their species much as human beings do.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Things Will Be Different

Director – Michael Felker – 2024 – US – Cert. 15 – 102m

****

A brother and sister go through a portal into the past, are trapped there by an unseen adversary, and must wait for a mysterious visitor – out in UK cinemas on Friday, October 4th

This movie is different. It’s about philosophical ideas. It would work very well as a piece of writing (a short story? a novella?), it would work as a radio drama, and – yes – it works very well as a movie. Because what’s compelling about it is not what you see with your eyes or hear with your ears, it’s the implications of it all, the stuff that goes through your head as you’re watching the movie. Welcome to the Cinema of Ideas.

Early one bright and sunny Summer morning, Sidney (Riley Dandy) enters the diner where her brother Joseph (Adam David Thompson), who she’s not seen for a while, is having breakfast. She has the rifle. He has the two bags with the money. As arranged, they go through the woods, across the high cornfields towards the house. There are people in the woods, which are supposed to be deserted. She is concerned.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies

A Greyhound
of a Girl

Director – Enzo d’Alò – 2023 – Luxembourg, Italy, Ireland, UK, Latvia, Estonia, Germany – Cert. U – 88m

****1/2

A young, cookery-obsessed girl with a fear of dogs must come to terms with the fact that her beloved granny is dying – animated feature is out on Blu-ray, DVD & Digital Monday, August 26th

Ireland. Faced with an unsympathetic interview panel for the Ballymaloe Cooking School when she unwisely makes a tatty tart with bananas, young girl Mary (voice: Mia O’Connor) finds she has an ally in her granny (voice: Rosaleen Linehan) who gives the judges a friendly talking to when they reject her granddaughter. The girl can always come back next time. She and granny are driving home on a minor coastal road and granny is refusing to talk about her own childhood – apparently there was an incident involving a dog and a well – when granny swerves to avoid a dog and dents the car. Mary doesn’t like dogs, although she’s a caring child who stopped granny accidentally running over a hedgehog earlier.

Granny has been coughing all day. With the news that Mary’s bestie Ava (voice: Amelie Metacalf) is soon be leaving as her dad has got a job in England, it’s not a great time for the young girl, and it gets worse, when she discovers her gran has a fever and her mum calls an ambulance.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Kneecap

Director – Rich Peppiat – 2023 – Ireland, UK – Cert. 18 – 105m

****

A fictionalised origin story about an Irish language rap band as a music teacher teams up with two younger men to turn their confrontational, anti-British poetry into Irish rap music – provocative sex-, drugs-, and violence-laced music biopic is out in UK cinemas on Friday, August 23rd

NSFW

Kneecap are an Irish-speaking rap band who came together on the eve of the 2017 Irish language march in Belfast, Northern Ireland. This drama about them, whatever else it might be and whatever other accusations can be levelled against it, certainly never plays it safe.

That’s obvious from the get-go, when the voice-over by one of the band members explains and shows how all movies abut Northern Ireland start – with footage of terrorist explosions during ‘the troubles’. The film then proceeds to have its cake and eat it, having started in exactly that manner, by starting again with the story of one of its members as a child being baptised in a wood at night and attracting RUC helicopter searchlights for their pains.

It moves pretty swiftly on to show the two fully grown lads in the band as party animals, consuming alcohol and drugs and dealing the latter, for instance giving it away free at early gigs to attract an audience, and engendering a hostile attitude to the Peelers (as they refer to the British police).… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

New Life

Director – John Rosman – 2023 – US – 85m

***1/2

Neither the widow nor the assassin pursuing her towards the Canadian border are quite what they seem – genre-bending thriller is out on digital in the UK

The sound of a distressed woman. Now we see her (Hayley Erin) – her head is bleeding as she walks. Away from – what? She makes it down the street in a very normal-looking, small town somewhere in Middle America, into her very ordinary, well-kept, no frills, suburban house. She washes the blood off her head, switches a hoodie for a sweater. Constantly checking around her, she sees the armed men in the hallway and exits through a window.

Another woman (Sonya Walger) puts down her handgun on the edge of a bathroom sink. She looks tired. The yellow post-it notes on her mirror read “I have unlimited opportunities to succeed” and “I am in the process of becoming the best version of myself”. She takes a pill from the ‘M’ compartment of a little circular dispenser marked in letters for days of the week. On her mobile, she hits Play on Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited, specifically the song Like a Rolling Stone.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Sorcery (Brujería)

Director – Christopher Murray – 2023 – Chile, Mexico, Germany – Cert. 15 – 100m

*****

When the father of an indigenous Christian convert is murdered by her German Christian employer’s dogs, her thirst for justice leads her to employ occult folk magic against his family – out in UK cinemas on Friday, June 14th

1881. Chiloé, the Northernmost island of an archipelago off the coast of Chile. Indigenous, 13-year-old Rosa (Valentina Véliz Caileo) works as a maid for German immigrant Stefan (Sebastian Hülk from All Quiet on the Western Front, Edward Berger, 2022; Little Joe, Jessica Hausner, 2019; The White Ribbon, Michael Haneke, 2009) who together with his wife (Annick Durán) runs a sheep farm. The couple have two young boys, Thorsten (Matías Bannister) and Franz (Iker Echevers). The family are Christians, and Rosa is a convert to that religion.

One day, Stefan’s sheep lie dead in his field, with woven garlands of vegetation round their necks. With tensions understandably high, Rosa’s father approaches Stefan holding a knife, and Stefan releases his two dogs upon him, killing the man. Rosa later places a makeshift cross of two sticks bound together on his basic grave, which she and Stefan’s family visit, Stefan’s wife pointing out that the man wasn’t a Christian.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

The Latent Image

Director – Alexander McGregor Birrell – 2022 – UK – Cert. 15 – 82m

***1/2

A mystery thriller writer working alone in a secluded cabin in the woods is interrupted by the arrival of a stranger – out in UK cinemas and on digital platforms from Sunday, October 8th

Developed from his 20 minute, 2019 short of the same name and starring the same two leads, Birrell’s debut feature is a curious mixture of innovation and genre cliché. Yet, enough of what’s going on here works sufficiently to hold the viewer’s attention.

Ben (Joshua Tonks, who co-wrote the screenplay with director Birrell), who isn’t named until quite some way into the film, has rented a cabin in the woods in order to write his latest novel, “if you can call it that” – he’s working in horror, thriller fiction. Tonight, he becomes engrossed in writing about his antagonist – a mysterious stranger – he suddenly becomes convinced that there is someone lurking outside the cabin. When he looks, he can see no-one. Nevertheless, his gut instinct is correct: someone is watching the cabin from the darkness.

What follows skilfully walks a knife edge between someone writing or imagining a story about being terrorised by a stranger whilst staying at a cabin in the woods and someone actually being terrorised by a stranger whilst staying at a cabin in the woods.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

A Chinese
Ghost Story
(Sien Lui Yau Wan,
倩女幽魂)

Director – Ching Siu Tung – 1987 – Hong Kong – Cert. 15 – 95m

*****

Some of the most seminal offerings of the commercial Hong Kong cinema are the product of creative wizard Tsui Hark. The producer who first gave John Woo his niche as bullet strewn action director on A Better Tomorrow (1986) also ensured director Ching Sui Tung’s place in fantasy film’s Hall of Fame with this stunning little offering.

The Hong Kong supernatural, fantasy genre is itself defined almost single-handedly by Tsui’s groundbreaking epic Zu: Warriors From the Magic Mountain (1983). CGS both typifies the genre and proves one of its finest examples. CGS spawned two sequels for what Tsui describes as “sentimental reasons – when the ghost died at the end, we want her to come back pretty badly.” He admits the sequels weren’t as good, though.

CGS opens in a downpour as a rain sodden Leslie Cheung (known to Western audiences from such diverse fare as A Better Tomorrow and art house hit Farewell My Concubine, Chen Kaige, 1993) watches a grim, head lopping argument between two bandits as he does his cowardly best to look inconspicuous. His work as a debt gatherer suffers something of a setback as he discovers the ink in his books has run with the damp, so once he arrives in the nearby town he’s unable to collect the payments he’d expected.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Live Action Movies

Boonie Bears
Guardian Code
(Xiong Chu Mo
Ban Wo Xiong Xin,
熊出没·伴我“熊芯”)

Directors – Lin Yongchang, Shao Heqi – 2023 – China – Cert. PG – 99m

****1/2

Abandoned by their mother as children, bear siblings Bramble and Briar uncover a conspiracy involving roboticists and robots – in a dubbed format for family audiences – out in cinemas on Friday, May 26th following its premiere at the Prince Charles Cinema around midday on Saturday, May 13th

Bear cubs Bramble (voiced in the English language version by Siobhan Lumsden) and Briar (voice: Nichalia Schwartz) enjoy and idyllic life in the Pine Tree Mountain forest in the care of their loving, lullaby-singing mother Barbara (voice: Kally Khourshid). Barbara shows them her amber pendant containing a moon and a star shape, one for each of her two cubs who have those shapes in light patches of fur on their chests. (Bramble is the one with the yellowish fur and Briar the one with reddish fur.)

One day, Briar sees her walk away through the burning ruins of a house as if she never knew him. The brothers never see her again, growing up on their own and looking out for one another.

Years later, the adult Bramble (voice: Joseph S. Lambert) and Briar (voice: Patrick Freeman), disguised as robots using makeshift fridge and washing machine costumes that would give the robot performer of Brian And Charles (Jim Archer, 2022) a run for his money, are being driven by their best friend the human Vick (voice: Paul ‘Maxx’ Rinehart) along with roboticist Dr.… Read the rest