Author: mjbstaging

MFKZ (international title: Mutafukaz)

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Firstly, Mutafukaz (as MFKZ was originally named) is a Japanese animated feature made by the French for the French market utilising Japanese animation expertise (the version playing at the London Film Festival is French with subtitles, though the end credits suggest there might also be an English language version), secondly a very French, lowlife, dystopian action movie to rank alongside the live action likes of Nikita (Luc Besson, 1990) and, particularly, District 13 (Pierre Morel, 2004) and thirdly an adaptation of a French bande dessinée, the director Guillaume Renard having penned the original in comic book form under the name Run.

The animation medium allows the piece to completely design its images and environment from, as it were, the blank page/empty screen upwards and the results are fabulous. Japanimation company Studio 4°C previously worked on such high profile anime productions as SF portmanteau Memories (Katsuhiro Otomo, 1995), avant garde pop video Noiseman Sound Insect (Koji Morimoto, 1997) and fan favourite Spriggan (Hirotsugu Kawasaki, 1998) to name but three (others are name dropped in the trailer) and pull out all the stops here.

(Ange)lino is a small, young, black guy vaguely resembling Marvin Martian without the helmet and struggling to survive the mean streets of Dark Meat City (“DMC, as in Desperate, Miserable, Crap”) where he rents a roach-infested apartment with his mate Vinz whose head resembles a human skull, bare bone, no flesh, column of fire permanently burning on top. Lino can barely hold down a job for more than a few days.

We first meet Lino on a pizza delivery boy gig which falls apart when the sight of a pretty girl causes him to have a bike accident. Unemployed, Lino and Vinz are visited by their nervous liability of a friend Willy. As the three cruise around in a car, Lino notices a strange phenomenon inspired by They Live (John Carpenter, 1988): people who cast shadows belonging to creatures not of this Earth. Meanwhile, a mother with her baby in her arms is being hunted by mysterious, gun-toting men in black suits led by one wearing a white suit. Before long, they’ll be after Lino and Vinz too.

The film rattles along at a rapid pace through urban malaise, gangland shoot-outs and conspiracy theories, in passing presenting a squalid environment that could stand in for the seamier side of any number of real life cities. Designed in glorious, eye-popping colour and with a hip hop sensibility referencing Grand Theft Auto and more, it never lets up for a moment.

Although the production values have anime written all over them, with key fight scenes shots sporting familiar tropes of that medium, Renard’s Francophile sensibilities inject a whole other aesthetic and indeed feel to the proceedings. It’ll no doubt be huge in France, but it’s an impressive work which transcends its national culture and deserves to see a UK distributor taking a chance and giving it a proper release here too. I could never imagine London Transport accepting posters bearing the film’s international title, though. Which is why the new English language title MFKZ makes a lot of sense.

MFKZ played at BFI London Film Festival 2017 as Mutafukaz. It’s released in the UK on October 11th. Watch the 2017 international film trailer and the new 2018 English language film trailer below:

Pecking Order

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With New Zealand’s National Poultry Show coming up in July, the race is on to produce the perfect specimen and scoop the Show’s coveted first prize. For the competitors this is a lifelong obsession. “It’s like alcoholism”, says one of them: “you can’t give it up.” Indeed, if this documentary is anything to go by, these people spend their entire lives in pursuit of breeding bantams. In the doc Pecking Order, they farm dozens of birds in the hope that among their number will be that one creature that meets the textbook criteria and knocks the other contenders from their perches.

Meet a cast of extraordinary, real life characters who you really couldn’t make up. Their names come at you thick and fast as the film starts and it’s hard to keep up. Doug Bain washes a chicken in a grubby sink then puts it in a cage with a heater to dry it off. On another farm, his acolyte Mark Lilley and Mark’s pre-teen son Rhys discuss competing and winning. Elsewhere, young adult Sarah Bunton admits to dressing up chickens as a child and demonstrates the perils of getting a wing-flapping bird into a cardboard box for the night. And Graham Bessey, with a few missing teeth and a twinkle in his eye, proudly shows off his Barred Rock (a particular species) to camera.

However all is not well in the Christchurch Poultry And Bantam Club. Doug is currently in charge following the death of its much loved president but some members who are less than satisfied with his leadership are plotting to unseat him. The fearsome Marina Steinke is pushing Mark towards taking over, but having taken some potentially prize winning birds from Doug in the past, Mark is less than willing to go through with this unless Doug voluntarily steps down.

As the documentary switches between these two parallel main stories, red headings stamped on crate wood backgrounds demarcate certain sections of the intertwined stories within the whole. These comprise legends like “Don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched” and “You have to break a few eggs to make an omelette”. What’s fascinating is that while to an outsider the chicken breeding game seems parochial and inward-looking, to those involved it eclipses all else. As a study of obsessives who take their bizarre subculture very seriously indeed, it makes for compelling viewing even if you don’t think you’ve the slightest interest in its subject.

It helps that director Slavko Martinov injects the proceedings with just the right amount of wit to make you marvel at the ubiquity of human foibles, as prevalent here was in any other area of human endeavour. While the film is warm-hearted and loves its subjects, it doesn’t shy away from portraying the venomous sentiment lurking behind the attempt to unseat club leader Doug. You’ll be completely hooked by this strange world, its characters’ assorted antics and how everything turns out in the end. Without in any way demeaning its subjects, this film is an absolute hoot. You’ll leave the cinema with a wry smile on your face.

Pecking Order is out in the UK on Friday, September 29th.

On Body and Soul (Testről és lélekről)

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A forest in winter. Deer. Freedom. The natural world. Untrammelled. Now on to another world. A contrast. Cow feet on a muddy, industrial floor. Animals in an abattoir. They will be killed and become meat for human consumption. This is the contrast underlying On Body and Soul.

Human beings must work in this environment. They must do this job, action this process. Endre (Géza Morcsányi) is the abattoir’s manager. He has a few friends among his colleagues, but he’s basically an introvert happy in his own company and well respected in his job. The company has just taken on a new quality controller in the form of Mária (Alexandra Borbély) and she’s a stickler for following company regulations to the letter. Her inflexible attitude is going to make the business’ financial viability harder and the workforce’s lives more difficult. She isn’t going to be popular.

By contrast, one of the shopfloor workers is a bit of a lad and always larking around with some of his female colleagues. But then, some animal aphrodisiac goes missing and although this particular worker is the main suspect, a psychologist is brought in to interview and profile everyone working in the plant. She thinks someone is taking the mick when, in the course of separately asking both Endre and Mária about their dreams, they both give the same answers. She doesn’t believe it – and neither do they. But it seems the two have been dreaming the very same dream as each other. Dreams of a deer and a doe wandering together in an unspoiled, snow covered forest. Those images we saw at the start and which are developed periodically throughout the film.

Thus the stage is set for an unusual, awkward romance. While others in the slaughterhouse seem to have no problem engaging with members of the opposite sex, Endre would prefer to keep himself to himself. He has a medical condition in one arm, which doesn’t help. Mária is even more isolated: she can cope with cut and dried rules and regulations and make production procedures fit them, but she really doesn’t know how to talk with other people. Both actors deliver extraordinary, compelling performances which suck you into the drama.

Once it gets going, the pair’s painfully slow attempt at a relationship plays out against the cold, industrial, life into lifeless meat work environment on the one hand and the cool, wintry forest-scape with its relaxed, fulfilled deer on the other. Are these misfit lovers something much healthier in their dreams? Or is the waking world in which they live and move deeply out of joint?

An extraordinary, poetic fable set in a world of modern, industrialised, controlled death.

On Body And Soul won the Golden Bear for Best Film earlier this year at the Berlin Film Festival. It is out in the UK on Friday, September 22nd. It is available on Mubi from mid-November.

mother!

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His house burned up in a fire. Then he (Javier Bardem) found her (Jennifer Lawrence) and as he began to rebuild his life, so she began to rebuild the house. Her work is well on its way to completion. Outside the house lie tranquil, golden fields. He is an acclaimed poet and hasn’t written anything for a long time. The couple live in an hermetic bubble. At least she does.

That all changes when a stranger (Ed Harris) turns up and bonds with him. Suddenly she feels excluded. More new characters are soon to arrive – first the stranger’s attractive wife (Michelle Pfeiffer) then their two argumentative adult sons (real life siblings Domhnall and Brian Gleeson) then funeral guests.

He becomes increasingly obsessive recalling the writer in The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980). As he overrides her wishes she becomes increasingly isolated recalling paranoia from Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby (both by Roman Polanski, 1965 and 1968 respectively). By the end, the house has been overrun by party-goers and riotous crowds behaving like the group elements from the highly controversial The Devils (Ken Russell, 1971). From the moment Ed Harris first appeared, this was obviously going to end badly.

The narrative is presented throughout in often lengthy takes from her point of view, either directly owing much to subjective camera experiment Lady In The Lake (Robert Montgomery, 1947) or through shots of her acting within/reacting to the situation as it unfolds around her. There’s something of Hitchcock here too in the way the film constantly tortures its female lead.

Leaving aside the rather too neat book ending which sidesteps the need for backstory by some sleight of hand which doesn’t work too well, the film divides neatly into three acts which could be labelled: home building, pregnancy, motherhood. Yet each section follows roughly the same path: her idyllic existence is upset as more and more people arrive and she becomes more and more agitated.

It’s a film which might be viewed differently by men and women – and by introverts and extroverts. But as it builds, you wonder whether piling more and more outsiders onto the couple’s private world can really sustain the proceedings and, sure enough, although the film starts off very well, at some point as the numbers mount it gets rather tedious. Much of the time you can’t help feeling that the writer-director could have done more with less and done it quicker.

I’m all for Aronofsky being given the chance to make the movies he wants. When he’s good, as in Pi (1998), The Wrestler (2008), Black Swan (2010), he’s very good. He can even be good when derivative, Black Swan being in all but name a remake with ballerinas of anime epic Perfect Blue (Satoshi Kon, 1997) to which film Aronofsky owned the rights. (Perfect Blue is due for rerelease in cinemas on 31st October, so you’ll have the chance to judge for yourself then.)

So I don’t complain that mother! is derivative, only that it’s overly self-indulgent. Performances, production value and everything else here are top notch. It’s an interesting experiment and while I defend the director’s right to make it, I’m not especially enthusiastic about the end result.

mother! premiered at the 74th Venice International Film Festival and is out in the UK on Friday, September 15th.

Your Name (Kimi no Na wa)

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In a spectacular and bravura single take, vertical panning shot, a meteor descends from the heavens through the clouds towards the small lakeside town of Itomori. Then, another time, another place: on a train in Tokyo a teenage girl spots a boy and their eyes meet but there’s no time to exchange names. She knows him but he has no idea who she is. As she gets off the train, he asks her… “Your Name?”

Thereafter, Tokyo boy Taki wakes up some days Mitsuha’s body, and the other way round. Soon, each starts writing the other messages on their hands, arms and mobile phones so that the other one knows what he/she has been up to while they swapped bodies. Until one day, her messages stop.

Like the falling meteor which unexpectedly splits into a shower, at once a beautiful display in the Tokyo night sky and an impending disaster in Itomori, this weaves together two ways of looking. Girl and boy. Countryside and city. Celebration and catastrophe. As a ribbon snakes through space and meteor fragments fall through the atmosphere, a thread weaves through a loom meshing separate timelines. When the two teens meet at the beginning, she is near the end of their encounter while he is at its start thanks to subtle storytelling sleight-of-hand. They may not both know each other yet, but they are connected. When finally they meet again on urban Tokyo hillside steps, the moment is poignant.

Although the meteor is expected to fall in one piece, at the last minute it splits into fragments, one of which will wipe out Itomori. After learning through Taki that this will happen, can Mitsuha and her friends alert the town – busy celebrating its annual festival – to evacuate before lives are lost?

Japanese films have dealt with disaster for a long time, most notably in Godzilla (Ishiro Honda, 1954) which turned the devastation of the A-bomb into the eponymous, city-wasting monster. Recent reboot Shin Godzilla (Hideaki Anno, Shinji Higuchi, 2016) shows the franchise still capable of delivering such myth and metaphor.

Not that Your Name is necessarily about nuclear strikes. Japan has a long history of earthquakes and associated natural disasters, most recently the 2011 tsunami and resultant damage to the Fukushima nuclear power plant. Life goes on but such disastrous events linger in the national psyche and inform popular culture. Even as Your Name absorbs Itomori’s annihilation into its wider culture as a pretty light show over Tokyo, it grapples with the magnitude of the disaster by placing us in the immediate days and hours beforehand.

Elsewhere, Your Name plays out as both teen romance and dual exploration of male/female identity. The two protagonists wake up separately in each other’s bodies to discover with a mixture of delight and embarrassment that they possess the genitals of the opposite sex. As the twin narratives move on to explore more psychological sexual differences, the body swap device proves genuinely affecting. By the time of the impending annihilation of Mitsuko’s home town, you’re completely hooked.

It’s one of those rare movies to watch multiple times. If, like this writer, you saw it last year in a small cinema, to catch the new digital IMAX print on a bigger sized screen is a real treat. While scenes with minimal detail and movement show up the fact, other sequences are all the more effective. This applies not only to the big outdoors vistas where you’d expect it but also more intimate, everyday scenes. In short, compared to much smaller screens, the IMAX format allows Your Name’s visuals the room they need to breathe.

Your Name is out in the UK on Wednesday, August 23rd.

For another animation about Japanese life against the backdrop of impending disaster, click here.

An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth To Power

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The documentary An Inconvenient Truth (Davis Guggenheim, 2006) was based around former US Democrat vice president Al Gore’s travelling show which warned of the dangers of climate change. In some ways, much has happened since; in others, not much has. Throughout the subsequent decade, Gore has consistently spoken out about the environment.

Those expecting an updated presentation in the manner of the first film will be disappointed. Instead, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth To Power provides a brief summary of its predecessor then updates us as to events in the interim, which includes some of the original’s predictions after being lambasted by the naysayers. He was told that the idea of the Ground Zero monument at the World Trade Center being flooded was far fetched. In 2012 it happened.

Title aside, the new film works very well as a standalone entity: you really don’t need to have seen the first one. Gore journeys to the Arctic to be shown the Polar ice cap melting first-hand, little rivulets become streams which become torrents. Solid areas are now seascapes. Elsewhere, an arctic station which a year ago stood flat on the ice now stands as if on stilts, the ice having melted so much that its level has dropped by over a storey.

He visits Miami, the most flood-endangered city in the world, where coastal roads are below flood waters. He finds hope in the rise of solar energy as a viable alternative to fossil fuels and meets with the Republican mayor of Georgetown, Texas, a town which now runs entirely on renewables.

Much of the film is spent in the run up to the 2016 Paris climate change talks, where Gore is presented as its saviour when India is struggling to agree with proposals to which most other countries have signed up. Gore, who today half-jokingly describes himself as a “recovering politician”, is part campaigner, part showman. However, there’s no doubt he’s getting the message out and mobilising people. The implications of what Gore is saying are terrifying. They were terrifying back in 2006 and they’re even more terrifying now.

As for the UK, it’s conspicuous by its almost total onscreen absence (I noticed one shot of former Prime Minister Gordon Brown). Given our current Tory government’s enthusiasm for building nuclear power plants, encouraging fracking and slashing subsidies for renewables, that’s not altogether surprising.

This writer believes that the climate change issue is the single most important one facing humanity today. I applaud Gore for his tireless, pro-environment campaigning: the more people see this movie and are moved to action by it, the better.

An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth To Power is out in the UK on Friday, August 18th.

Special previews with Al Gore satellite link up on Friday, August 11th.

A Ghost Story

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A couple lives in a house. He dies and returns as a ghost (a person with a sheet over his head) she can’t see. She stays for a bit then moves out. Other people come and go. He stays, he waits.

Initially M (Rooney Mara) wants to move somewhere else, but C (Casey Affleck) rather likes the house and wants to stay. After his death, she identifies his body in the morgue then spends some time with his mortal remains. Later, his corpse gets up matter of factly, sheet and all, and leaves. To return to their house. Before moving out, she scribbles a note on a small piece of paper, folds it in to a tiny square and pushes it into a door frame. He tries repeatedly to extract this note to see what it says. We want to know, too.

Time moves on but C doesn’t. He attempts to scare a resident mum and her children by hurling kitchen plates at them in an uncharacteristic loss of self-control. He listens to a man at a party pontificate on the meaning of life in terms of what we leave behind. He waves at the (person under a floral patterned sheet) ghost in the house next door. Eventually the houses are demolished and the site is built upon. He goes back in time to watch the settlers who built the first house.

Some very long takes include one of the bereaved M violently stuffing herself with a pie then throwing up. The 4:3 frame with rounded edges throughout recalls projected photographic slides and home movies of yesteryear. Odder still are the noises off which M and the pre-ghost C get out of bed to investigate although they can find nothing. We’re never quite sure what we’re doing in this house or why we’re watching this couple in their very private, home space. We might be some strange, unearthly presence. Such as a ghost.

All of which is thoroughly compelling to experience or just to watch. As M drops out of the film, you’ll find yourself wondering what C’s ghost is still doing there, why hasn’t he just vanished at death or gone on to whatever place we go to when we die. If the film ponders such questions, it never attempts to impose easy answers. That lends it an incredible power.

C’s death is violent but we see only its peaceful aftermath. There is violence however in both their lives: M’s violent eating reflects C’s when we eventually see him eat in flashback. His violent outburst with the kitchen plates suggests something latent in his character but elsewhere he seems relaxed. The violence expresses a pent up frustration lurking beneath. What matters in life? What happens if it’s suddenly cut short? What exactly do we leave behind us?

A Ghost Story was out in cinemas in August 11th, when this piece was originally written. It’s out on all major VoD platforms in February 2018.

Click here for another film meditation on death.

The Ghoul

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A police inspector investigating a bizarre shooting incident in a London house goes undercover as a mental patient to investigate his prime suspect: a psychiatrist. The nature of mental illness being what it is, after the policeman has gone undercover it becomes increasingly hard to distinguish whether he’s really a policeman undercover as a mental patient, as was initially suggested, or whether he is in fact an actual mental patient with delusions of being an undercover policeman.

The Ghoul was executive produced by Ben Wheatley who gave British actor-turned-director Gareth Tunley a small role in dirty gem Kill List (2011). The Ghoul weaves a complex web of relationships between policemen and colleagues, policemen and suspects, psychiatrists and patients. Real and assumed identities. And this web takes the form of a Möbius strip. As psychiatrist Morland (Geoffrey McGivern) explains it to his patient Chris (Tom Meeten), it’s a strip of paper twisted then joined so that if an insect were to land upon it and walk its length, it would come to be on the other side from where it was previously without in any way crossing over from one side to the other. Proceed for the same distance in the same direction again, and it would be back where it started. As pictured here:

In his role as a policeman, Chris has driven down by night from Manchester to London in order to help to investigate an attempted double shooting. Lengthy discussions with colleagues Jim (Dan Renton Skinner) and Jim’s partner Kathleen (Alice Lowe) point to Coulson (Rufus Jones), Chris assumes the role of a man with mental health issues and takes up counselling sessions with psychiatrist Fisher (Niamh Cusack) so as to gain access to Coulson’s file at her office. She passes him on to another psychiatrist, the aforementioned Morland, who is currently counselling Coulson.

Morland talks to Chris at great length about various obsessions including a bottle “of which the outside is the inside” and explains the Möbius strip. Meanwhile, Chris has been following Coulson around the streets. Eventually Chris finds himself driving from Manchester to London again, traversing the Möbius strip, back where the film started.

Like that other Möbius strip movie Lost Highway (David Lynch, 1997) this opens and closes with a point of view shot of a road from a car driving along it at night (those familiar with Lynch’s work will probably notice a resemblance between the road markings at the beginning of the 1997 film and the art work above). It has much in common too with B-movie thriller Shock Corridor (Sam Fuller, 1963) in which a Pulitzer-prize-hungry newspaper man goes undercover as an asylum inmate in order to solve a murder that has taken place there. While Shock Corridor plays out as a linear narrative, albeit one in which deluded characters occasionally shift into lucidity, The Ghoul constantly shifts in terms of the identities of its characters.

A number of questions are raised. Is Chris a cop or a loner with mental problems? Is Kathleen his superior on the force or the girl he’s fancied since his Manchester student days? Is Coulson the subject of an investigation or Chris’ best mate? These games the piece plays with its audience and the way it folds back upon itself are ultimately what make it worth seeing.

The Ghoul is out in cinemas across the UK on August 4th. It was made available on BFI Player the following month.

Wish Upon

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Echoing of not only the ‘seemingly inanimate object which is a demon in disguise’ horror movie (the Child’s Play and Annabelle franchises which involve demonic dolls) but also the Hellraiser franchise with its deadly puzzle box, the American Wish Upon is something slightly different from both. For a start, its title recalls the song When You Wish Upon A Star from Disney’s Pinocchio suggesting a fairy story with a happy ending. Which of course it isn’t, being a horror movie. It also recalls the 1902 short story The Monkey’s Paw, the archetypal ‘be careful what you wish for’ tale widely read in U.S. schools although in fact of English origin.

Having as a small child witnessed her mother’s suicide, teenager Clare (Joey King) comes across a Chinese puzzle box. Since she’s studying Chinese in college, she works out that the inscriptions on the box’s side indicate it can grant its owner seven wishes. Some of the wording proves harder to translate as it’s written in ancient Chinese. Unperturbed, Clare starts making wishes and can’t believe her luck when the wishes come true. The part of the inscription that she’s not yet read, however, requires that each wish granted be paid in blood: whenever one of her requests is fulfilled, someone that Clare knows dies in a gruesome fashion.

On one level, this is predictably silly horror fare which pushes all the right buttons to satisfy its target audience. However, there’s a lot more to it on the level of morality. All of Clare’s wishes possess a moral dimension. She wishes the school bully Darcie (Josephine Langford) would rot, which is a form of revenge. She wishes to inherit her late uncle’s fortune and that the boy she fancies at school (Mitchell Slaggert) would fall in love with her, both of which are forms of self-gratification. She wishes her dad (Ryan Phillippe) would stop embarrassing her by dumpster diving immediately outside her school and she wants to be the most popular girl at school, both of which relate to being socially successful. It later transpires Clare only gets seven wishes, so the last two become her attempts to combat the box as the screenplay attempts to close its narrative.

Thus the film cleverly explores female teenage mores as its heroine moves from object of bullying to object of admiration and from social outcast with two good and faithful close friends (Shannon Purser and Sydney Park) to popular girl who left those two friends behind as her popularity grew. Joey King plays the heroine as ordinary, banal even, which proves highly effective in terms of the audience’s relating to her character. You’re not sure if you would make the same choices of wish yourself but you can absolutely understand why she chooses the wishes that she does. When her apparent good luck turns out to be bad, you’re completely with her in trying to make everything right again and return her life to the way it was before.

To boot, the script and direction have a lot of fun with the murderous mayhem in the wake of the wishes which include kindly neighbour Sherilyn Fenn losing a battle with a kitchen sink waste disposal unit and relative of a friend Alice Lee accidentally impaling herself on the horns of a Chinese statue in her apartment. The seven wishes limit ensures the proceedings never outstay their welcome as they might so easily have done. It’s no masterpiece but a perfectly efficient and serviceable little horror flick with a provocative moral dimension for anyone who cares to probe beneath its surface.

Wish Upon is out in the UK on Friday, July 28th. Watch the film trailer below:

Dunkirk

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British filmmaker Christopher Nolan – now one of the highest-grossing film directors in history, with the Dark Knight Trilogy under his belt – has created a complex and multilayered film that cleverly interweaves three separate narrative strands: 1) on land over a week a young soldier (Fionn Whitehead) after he arrives alone at Dunkirk beach and falls in with others (including the music superstar and heartthrob Harry Styles); 2) on sea over a day a small, requisitioned, civilian boat (crew: three) go to bring home trapped combatants; and 3) in the air over an hour three Spitfires fly a sortie. Nolan is fascinated by time and runs these in parallel so that an incident partly revealed in one strand is later retold in another revealing more. There’s a constant sense of the clock ticking differently in the three time frames: mind-bending and exhilarating stuff.

The impressive analogue 70mm IMAX version puts you in there as if you’re escaping death on the way to the beach or in a Spitfire cockpit shooting at/being shot at by the enemy. It has everything you expect from a big screen war movie that small scale drama Churchill lacks. It’s a remarkable insight into the dirty side of being part of a war. The issue is survival: if not everyone can be rescued, who will be? The top brass organising the operation led by Kenneth Branagh must confront this issue to transport the maximum number of men home.

For those who are not familiar the events, the film depicts the Dunkirk evacuation of Allied soldiers from the eponymous beaches and harbour of France, between May 26th and June 4th 1940. It is believed that the extremely risky and unexpectedly successful operation saved the 330,000 British, French, Belgian, and Canadian troops from almost certain death under the surrounding German Army. Hence the “Miracle at Dunkirk” accolade.

As in the best horror films, anyone can die at any time. Not that this is a horror film. English soldiers are gunned down by French friendly fire. Spitfire pilot Tom Hardy’s broken fuel gauge makes him reliant on the pilot in the next plane relaying how much fuel that plane has left. Civilian boat captain Mark Rylance sails into a war zone with no weaponry or means of defence so he can rescue combatants. Shell shocked soldier Cillian Murphy completely loses it and injures someone trying to help him.

Men trapped in a beached boat are fired on from outside the hull by unseen assailants. People are trapped in spaces large or small which water threatens to fill cutting off their air supply. Swimmers covered wholly or partially in oil from crashed aircraft are forced to choose between staying underwater and not breathing and coming up to breathe when an inferno rages above the surface. Life and death situations.

Nolan manages some worrying tilts at British society circa 1940 which resonate today. A young soldier reaches the beach and joins a queue to be told to go elsewhere as this line is reserved exclusively for the Grenadiers. Another soldier who doesn’t speak much is accused by others of being a German spy. And an airman who nearly drowned in action is asked by an embittered evacuee, “where were you when we needed you?” British conformism, value judgments and prejudice are alive and well in the fight for survival. But so too are heroism and being prepared to give one’s life in the fight for a better world. Britain, now as then, is both good and bad.

Dunkirk, however, is consistently good. In fact, it’s likely the most impressive film you’ll see this year. It’s out in the UK on Friday, July 21st (2017). See the analogue 70mm IMAX version at BFI Waterloo London, The Science Museum London or Vue Printworks Manchester if you can.

On Amazon Prime on Thursday, April 1st (2021). Also available on other platforms.

Watch Dunkirk‘s two IMAX trailers below:

And here:

And click here for our review of another British historical film set around the same time, and still out in some UK cinemas.

The Boy And The Beast (Bakemono no ko)

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Nine-year-old Ren runs away from his mother and is promptly abducted by a creature named Kumatetsu into the parallel Beast Kingdom of Jutengai. Kumatetsu is the outsider of two possible candidates to succeed the retiring ruler of the beastly world. Renaming the silent boy Kyuta, he designates him apprentice and teaches him fighting skills. The relationship is strained and as the boy learns from his master, so too his master inadvertently learns life skills from his pupil. This is how it all begins in The Boy and the Beast.

Where Kumatetsu lacks in self-confidence, the boy encourages him in competitive battles with the rival candidate for ruler and popular favourite Iozen. Returning to our world as a much taller teenager, Ren meets school bullying victim Kaeda, bonding with her and sharing her appetite for human learning and knowledge. After this initial return, he continually moves between the two worlds in order to maintain his obligations in both. Meanwhile in Jutengai, Kumatetsu and Iozen’s rivalry for the position of grand master builds to a decisive climax…

It’s actually a lot more convoluted than that with a supplementary cast of further, minor characters. Nevertheless the narrative is coherent and even at two hours in length The Boy And The Beast rattles along at a good pace without overstaying its welcome. If the first 40 minutes play like a children’s film, the remainder of its running time sees the film’s sensibilities mature as the boy grows into a teenager. Beneath its ostensibly silly, juvenile plot it actually covers plenty of interesting topics – the interrelation and conflict between two very different cultures, issues of parenting and child dependency, confronting school bullies, teenage male angst and more.

Parts of the Japanese animation resemble some of that medium’s cheap formulaic clichés – two creatures charging each other and turning into larger, monstrous versions of themselves, for example – while other parts achieve far greater originality. One minute it feels like a martial arts movie, the next like a father and son drama and then a complex map of political intrigues. It’s all thoroughly impressive, certainly keeps the viewer on their toes and hangs together surprisingly well.

Some of the material is quite dark: humans grow holes in the centre of their physical bodies in the Beast Kingdom which function as a metaphor for their moral disintegration, a boy advances violently towards a defenceless girl in a school playground and, in the final reel, a villain dismisses an insignificant human book about a whale (Moby-Dick) prior to transforming into a terrifying, psychic version of its eponymous monster.

The present day, human world of Shibuya (a district of Tokyo) and its parallel Beast counterpart are lovingly designed and the whole thing is consistently beautiful to look at. At the film’s core though is the growing child and his relationship with his non-human master, a beautifully handled scenario which grabs the viewer from the get go. It’s due out on UK home cinema platforms in September but worth catching on its big screen outing in the meantime. A bit of a treat.

The Boy And The Beast was out in cinemas across the UK on July 7th, when this piece was originally published. It’s out on DVD and Blu-ray on September 4th.