From Monster to Men: What’s on at Cambridge Arts Picturehouse in March and April 2024
Our film critic, Mark Walsh, discusses some of the movies showing now and soon in this sponsored feature with Cambridge Arts Picturehouse.
Monster
One of the finest Japanese film makers of this, or any, generation, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s films relate to generations themselves, beautifully detailing a variety of family dynamics in different configurations.
Films such as Broker, Shoplifters, Our Little Sister and Like Father, Like Son showcase his ability to understand the bonds of blood as well as any other director. His latest features a single mother and her son but it’s once again a lovingly crafted examination of humanity with the family at its heart.
Saori (Sakura Andō) is a single mother whose son Minato (Sōya Kurokawa) seems to be struggling at school, having been showing some very odd behaviours. After he spends the night in an abandoned train tunnel, Saori suspects his teacher Mr Hori (Eita Nagayama) might be responsible, but the school are less than helpful, while the teacher suggests it’s actually Minato who’s bullying fellow student Yori (Hinata Hiiragi).
It's Kore-eda’s sixteenth feature film, but only the second time – the first being his debut feature Maborosi – that he’s worked from a script by another writer. It also marks a first film set in his native Japan since the international success of 2018’s stunning Shoplifters.
Yuji Sakamoto’s script tells the story three times, from the perspectives of the mother, teacher and son respectively, layering in details and revelations each time and creating a beautiful film that gradually reveals not only the facets of its story, but also the warmth of the relationships, both familial and friendly, and it’s another triumph to add to Kore-eda’s list of accomplishments.
Monster is now showing.
Phantom Parrot
This documentary from Kate Stonehill looks at the world of surveillance and its effect on civil liberties. Muhammad Rabbani is director of human rights organisation CAGE, who have been working on behalf of prisoners seized in the war on terror for the past two decades.
When on one occasion he returned to the UK, he was asked at the border to hand over passwords to his electronic devices; under the 2000 Terrorism Act, police powers include the ability to search people at such controls without suspicion of terrorism.
When he refused, he was forced to face the possibility of a criminal conviction and months in prison.
Stonehill’s film looks at the relationship between the individuals and the state, and the way in which the public is normally oblivious to the consequences of such laws or the effect they can have on both a person and the information that they hold.
It includes discussions with high profile journalists involved with data leaks such as the Edward Snowdon case, as well as the lawyers involved in Rabbani’s own situation.
The screening is followed by a Q&A session with Kate Stonehill and Muhammad Rabbani, moderated by Pam Cowburn from the Open Rights Group.
Phantom Parrot is screening on Wednesday, 20 March.
NT Live: The Motive and the Cue
Such has his success been on the silver screen, with a glittering career including American Beauty, Skyfall and 1917, it’s easy to forget that Cambridge graduate Sam Mendes started out in theatre, spending over a decade as the director of the Donmar Warehouse before going on to award-winning stage productions including The Ferryman and The Lehman Trilogy.
The latest production in the NT Live series sees Mendes direct the League Of Gentlemen actor and Sherlock co-creator Mark Gatiss as John Gielgud opposite Lovesick actor Johnny Flynn as Richard Burton in a play by Jack Thorne (Harry Potter And The Cursed Child).
The setting is 1964; Richard Burton has just married Elizabeth Taylor and is preparing to be directed by Gielgud in an experimental production of Hamlet on Broadway, but the two greats become increasingly divided as rehearsals for the production continue.
Mixing their rehearsals for the stripped down production with scenes from Hamlet, it’s a lively examination of a key period of British cultural history.
The Motive And The Cue is screening on Thursday, 21 March with an encore on Tuesday, 2 April.
Blue Monday: Men
The latest in the series of late night treats at the Arts Picturehouse is the dark fantasy thriller with elements of folk horror in the finest British tradition. Alex Garland, who wrote films including 28 Days Later, Sunshine and Never Let Me Go before turning his hand to direction with Ex Machina and Annihilation, here conjures up something creepy, evocative and disturbing in equal measure.
Jessie Buckley is Harper Marlowe, who after her husband’s apparent suicide retreats to a small Herefordshire village. After being given a tour of her country rental by its well-meaning owner Geoffrey, she explores the surroundings, only to find a disturbing series of events lurking in the countryside.
However, each of the men she encounters in the immediate surroundings seems to bear a close similarity to Geoffrey (each of them being played by Rory Kinnear).
Buckley perfectly captures the frustration and dread both of the events that have unfolded that led her to her idyllic escape and the escalating terror of the situation unfolding around her. Kinnear adds subtle shades to each of the male characters in the village who draw Buckley further into her desperation, and Garland enjoys turning the screw before a full-on Gothic finale unleashes another level of horror.
Catch it to prime yourself before Garland’s latest, Civil War, arrives in cinemas later this year.
Men in screening on Monday, 15 April at 11pm without adverts or trailers.
