Tag: WW2

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Features Live Action Movies

Pressure

Pressure

Director – Anthony Maras – 2026 – UK, France – Cert. 12a – 100m

*****

Days before the proposed Allied D-Day landings in 1944, the Scots meteorologist in charge becomes convinced that it should be postponed due to impending bad weather – out in UK cinemas on Wednesday, September 9th

Taking leave from his heavily pregnant wife Liz (Tamsin Topolski), due in hospital imminently for the birth, Scots meteorologist RAF Gp Capt. James Stagg (Andrew Scott) travels by military car to Southwick House, the stately home requisitioned for the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) under General Eisenhower (Brendan Fraser), where he meets his own liaison officer Andrew Carter (Jojo Macari) and, in what is to be his office, MTC First Lt. Kay Summersby (a nicely understated Kerry Condon), Eisenhower’s private secretary. All communications with the General go through her.

From their first encounter – three days from the proposed D-Day landing on Monday morning, when USAAF Col. Krick (Chris Messina) and his weather room staff are improvising a version of The Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy from Company B with a piano – Stagg is less than impressed with his American counterpart. Krick boasts that he not only correctly predicted the weather for Eisenhower ahead of various military battles in North Africa and elsewhere, but also did the same for David O.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies

Chicken Run

Chicken Run

Producer-Directors: Nick Park, Peter Lord – Producer – David Sproxton – 2000 – UK – Cert. PG – 84m

*****

Which came first – the chicken or the egg? Plasticene stop-frame animation house Aardman Animations’ debut feature film reconceives The Great Escape with chickens – back out in UK cinemas from Friday, 24th July

Aardman Animations’ A Close Shave (1995), the third half-hour outing for Nick Park’s popular Wallace & Gromit duo, exhibited several danger signs – specifically its close resemblance to brilliant, immediate precursor The Wrong Trousers (1993). Clearly aware of such pitfalls, Park and founding Aards Sproxton and Lord shrewdly signed a five-picture deal with Dreamworks but refused to rush into a first feature. Their caution has paid dividends: this first full length Aardmovie proves an unexpectedly wondrous odyssey.

It’s The Great Escape reconceived with chickens: familiar WW2 prison camp is reconfigured as North of England chicken coop with impenetrable fencing, rows of huts and a motley assortment of portly hen inmates. Ginger (voice: Julia Sawalha) wants to escape, but several disastrous attempts lead to solitary confinement (where she bounces a ball off the wall Steve McQueen style). Other chickens can’t see a problem – Bunty (voice: Imelda Staunton) simply keeps on laying eggs, while Babs (Horrocks) busies herself with constant knitting.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies

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

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 – plays in the Annecy International Animation Festival 2026 which runs from Sunday, 21st June to Saturday 27th June.

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.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Live Action Movies

Godzilla Minus One
(Gojira -1.0,
ゴジラ -1.0)

Godzilla Minus One (Gojira -1.0, ゴジラ -1.0)

Director – Takashi Yamazaki – 2023 – Japan – Cert. 12a – 124m

*****

Japan, defeated and demoralised after World War Two, must somehow defeat the seemingly unstoppable menace of Godzilla when it rises from the depths of the ocean – out on Netflix from Sunday, May 3rd 2026

World War Two, Pacific theatre. Unwilling Kamikaze pilot Koichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) feigns engine trouble and lands on an island for aircraft maintenance, where he is grounded. While there, he notices deep sea fish curiously floating on the surface of the surrounding ocean: they presage the arrival of a huge monster, named Godzilla by the locals. With Koichi failing to fire his 20mm aircraft guns at the creature to kill it, almost everyone else on the small island is killed. (Whether his guns would have had any effect in halting the creature’s advance is debatable. They probably wouldn’t have had any effect whatsoever.) The only other survivor, who had previously congratulated Koichi for a near impossible landing on a tiny runway, blames him for the multiple deaths because he didn’t pull the trigger.

In 1945, in the ruins of post-war Tokyo, Shikishima is accused by a survivor – a woman whose children have died – of being a disgrace.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Dongji Rescue
(Dong Ji Dao,
東吉 嶼)

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

Categories
Art Documentary Features Live Action Movies

War Paint
Women at War

The Crying Game. Between a Rock and a Hard Place 2017 by Marcelle Hanselaar

Director – Margy Kinmonth – 2025 – UK – Cert. 12a – 89m

*****

A look at the output of various women artists who have documented and dissected war, and what they can tell us – out in UK cinemas on Friday, March 28th

Although being promoted, reasonably enough, with an image from World War Two of women working with barrage balloons, right from the start in narration over its opening titles this breaks the mould for anyone expecting it to cover any one specific historical or geographical war. “I’m going to talk to women all round the world”, says director Kinmonth in regard to the concept of war as a catalyst for creativity. “What do women see that men don’t?” Quite apart from her gender, she is well-placed to tackle such a subject having recently made two documentaries on the subject of war artists: Eric Ravilious: Drawn to War (2022), War Art with Eddie Redmayne (2015), and many more before that on the subject of art in assorted social contexts.

The film is a compendium of interviews with living female artists or, in the cases of artists who’ve passed on, their descendants or proponents. Some of the names are familiar, such as Lee Miller, Maggi Hambling or Dame Rachel Whiteread, others much less so.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Schindler’s List

Director – Steven Spielberg – 1993 – US – Cert. 15 – 195m

*****

World War Two allows failed Czech industrialist Schindler to come into his own as he saves Jews from Aushwitz by employing them as slave labour in his factories– out in UK cinemas on Friday, February 18th 1994

Unsuccessful Czech businessman Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson) comes into his own during the war years as a supplier of pots and pans to the German Army. Although a badge-wearing Party member, he is neither well- nor ill-disposed towards Jews, simply an honest businessman seizing the opportunities presented by their persecution under Nazi rule. As the Jews are ghettoised in Krakow, he realises that here are investors with capital to burn for whom it is illegal to invest in business under their own names – in other words, surefire financiers; here are workers required to work all hours of the day for virtually nothing, keeping down a businessman’s cost.

He hires brilliant, ghettoised, Jewish accountant Itzhak Stern (Ben Kingsley) to run his enterprise. Under the command of ruthless commandant Amon Goeth (an astonishing turn from an unknown Ralph Fiennes which catapaulted the actor to overnight stardom) the ghettos are cleared, and the Jews moved into Plasnow concentration camp, but Schindler continues undeterred until the transportation of inmates to the Auschwitz death camp, against which he compiles Schindler’s List of 1 100 Jews necessary to run his factory, saving them from extermination.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Blitz
(2024)

Directed by Steve McQueen
Certificate 12a
120 minutes
Released 1 November

People just getting on with life in dire circumstances, doing what they have to do. A mother searches for her lost son. An 11-year-old embraces his black identity. Women work in munitions factories. Thieves take advantage of death and devastation to turn a profit. And, unexpectedly, a spiritually dark place produces an impassioned plea for the virtues of Christianity.

This is London during the Nazi bombings of the Second World War. Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave, the Small Axe TV series) and his collaborators have done remarkable historical and visual research, so that the historical situation seeps into you. McQueen’s way in was a photograph of a young black boy, around whom he has woven a story of an evacuee jumping from the train to return to his mum.

In a remarkable performance, 11-year-old Elliot Heffernan plays the boy… [Read the rest at Reform magazine]

Read my longer review on this site here.

Trailer:

Categories
Animation Features Live Action Movies

Godzilla Minus One
/ Minus Color
(Gojira-1.0 / C,
ゴジラ -1.0 / C)

Director – Takashi Yamazaki – 2023 – Japan – Cert. 12a – 124m

*****

Japan, defeated and demoralised after World War Two, must somehow defeat the seemingly unstoppable menace of Godzilla when it rises from the depths of the ocean – now in black & white – out in UK cinemas from Friday, November 1st

Something happens when you watch this / Minus Color version of Gozilla Minus One, which director Yamazaki has gone through cut by cut and personally overseen. You are watching a 2023 movie, yet you feel as if you’re watching a 1954 one. Because the film is about Japan, World War Two and its immediate aftermath, the film seems to play better in black and white.

World War Two, Pacific theatre. Unwilling Kamikaze pilot Koichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) feigns engine trouble and lands on an island for aircraft maintenance, where he is grounded. While there, he notices deep sea fish curiously floating on the surface of the surrounding ocean: they presage the arrival of a huge monster, named Godzilla by the locals. With Koichi failing to fire his 20mm aircraft guns at the creature to kill it, almost everyone else on the small island is killed.… Read the rest