Wolfwalkers: The BRWC LFF Review – Cartoon Saloon are on an incredible run. Following on from the success of The Secret of Kells, Song of the Sea and The Breadwinner, the animation studio’s new film is an absolute work of art; a visually mesmerising picture with a very big heart.
Wolfwalkers tells the story of Robyn, an adventurous young girl who dreams of following in her father’s footsteps and hunting nearby wolves, until she befriends Mebh, a girl from the forest with a unique gift that changes everything.
This is exactly the sort of film that we need more of yet hardly ever see anymore. While children are so often treated to dumb, soulless releases like The Emoji Movie and Sing, here is a film that actually respects them; a charming fable with strong female characters and positive, life-affirming messages about embracing one’s true self, brought to life with classic hand-drawn animation. Its mere existence is miraculous, and its brilliance cannot be overstated.
The film’s visuals are constantly imaginative and drenched in colour and warmth. Combined with stellar voice-work from Honor Kneafsey, Eva Whittaker, Sean Bean and Simon McBurney, all oozing with life and character, and a truly magical score from Bruno Coulais, this is a story filled with myth, magic and wonder, made with love and care by a group of very talented artists.
While mostly light-hearted and breezy for the first half, the narrative becomes something else entirely as it develops, bravely raising the stakes and maturely owning its more contemporary themes of otherness and environmental ignorance. It’s truly ambitious, both emotional and suspenseful right to its conclusion, but it isn’t a film that tries too hard or cheaply pulls at the heartstrings; rather, the characters are so effectively well-drawn that we really grow to care for them.
Wolfwolkers is just magnificent; a meaningful tale of how we fear that which we do not fully understand, told from the perspective of a strong friendship that is simply joyous to observe. It’s visually mesmering, creatively animated and beautifully told; a truly rewarding experience for audiences of all ages, and the year’s finest animation.
Miss Juneteenth’s first scene has the main character lovingly caressing the pageant crown she had won a lifetime ago. It says quite a bit about all her shattered dreams and problems with the best-laid plans that she might have had. It is a very relatable scene to anyone who had ever caught themselves reminiscing about a long lost part of their past they so severely wish to change.
The movie is about Turquoise Jones (Nicole Beharie), a former winner of the Miss Juneteenth beauty pageant. Despite winning the pageant and getting full scholarships to prestigious educational institutions, her dream was cut short as she got pregnant while still in school. This makes her push her daughter hard to compete as she is determined to make sure that her daughter Kai (Alexis Chikaeze) does not repeat her mistakes.
Kai’s utter lack of interest and reluctance in sharing her parent’s dream plays a considerable part in their dynamic and is utterly relatable for anyone who has ever had their parent’s choices forced down on them. Especially when she makes her desire to dance rather than participate in the competition evident to her mother on more than one occasion.
Add to this Turquoise’s complicated relationships with her ex-husband and Kai’s father, and her religiously fanatic mother spills out to further strain her relationship with her daughter.
A significant part of why Miss Juneteenth works is its cast. It is tough not to root for Nicole Beharie, who may as well be playing the title character. She does not try to portray her as a victim, even if there is ample scope for that. And she also might not always be making the best choices for both her and Kai.
An excellent example of it is her toxic relationship with her husband, which has had a massive part in how her life has shaped up. She continues having a casual fling with him, despite seeming like a person who would make far saner choices.
Her paranoid reactions at facing the nightmare scenario that Kai might make the same mistakes she once did make sense purely because she perfectly sells how much she had suffered, making those awful choices.
Her helplessness at realizing that her husband had let her down again comes to a head when he fails to cough up money for the pageant’s dress for Kai. To his credit, Kendrick Sampson infuses enough charm in the role that you understand why Turqoiuse gave him a free pass all his life. Despite being the deadbeat disappointment that he has been. His odd logic in not being enthusiastic enough to cough up the cash for the dress almost makes sense even if he tries to justify his screw up.
Alexis Chikaeze is also outstanding as Kai on the other side of the spectrum. What also stands out is the way Turquoise and Kai deals with people. While Turquoise prefers not to take things silently, Kai chooses to be introspective and be quiet about things. When her fellow participants call her out for her lack of table etiquettes, Kai cowers down in shame, and her uncomfortableness clearly shows.
This is why her final act at the talent contest comes as an act of defiance meant to silence everyone. Especially is seeing her mother’s reaction, who, until then, would always have a snarky comeback for anything and anyone, is silently watching in mute pride.
It also says a lot about how people can get stuck in the past without really moving on. Take the case of Turquoise and her rivalry with her fellow Miss Juneteeth participant Clarissa (Lisha Hackney). Despite being more successful than Turquoise, there is still resentment at coming in second in her childhood. Just a few glances and snide remarks at each other is all that takes to say a lot about school rivalries and the reason why someone who did not make it, at least in their head, dreads to go to their reunion.
Whether Kai and Turquoise succeed at the pageant is something that should not be spoilt here. But the movie’s final scene is just perfect because there is a real sense of an ending. Not all loose ends have been tied up, and these characters are far from being on the road to that perfect life Turquoise always strived to achieve. But there is real hope that maybe they will be fine when the two sit down and share that piece of chicken.
Shoehorning Miss Juneteenth, as a simple mother-daughter relationship movie, is doing it a grave injustice. It is a must-see movie for anyone who wishes they could course-correct their future from all the mistakes they made in the past. Now, who among us wouldn’t dream of doing that?
Directors can be quite stubborn sometimes, often to a fault. Many of them who endeavour into the realms of remakes renounce the term. They’ll say “I am not remaking that film, I’m re-adapting the book on which that film was based” as if that somehow makes the two resulting films impossible and unfair to compare. The Coen Brothers did this with True Grit, but of course, their efforts were far greater than that of Henry Hathaway’s some 40 years earlier, and as such, it is a rousing success story. Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca was the only film directed by the maestro to win best picture; in many ways, it is his greatest gift to cinema. Now somehow someway Netflix have deemed it not worthy of standing alone because once again Daphne Du Maurier’s novel is being adapted by Ben Wheatley.
Starring Lily James and Armie Hammer in the roles once occupied by Joan Fontaine and Laurence Olivier, Rebecca is the story of Maxim de Winter (Hammer) and his two wives. The first, the now deceased, Rebecca, a supposedly perfect woman in every fashion, whom one character describes as, in so many words, someone annoyingly impossible to dislike. And the second, known only as Mrs. de Winter (James), the woman Maxim remarries after a not so discrete love affair in Monte Carlo.
It is said love affair which takes up the opening portion of the film, and whilst it is well filmed it is triflingly strange. What is supposed to be the glossy romance preceding the oncoming melodrama plays out oddly Woody Allen-like. Not in his sort of pretentious intellectual romance style, but more in the way of presentation. The beachy colour pallet, the sudden and un-foreshadowed rain, the twinkling guitar fluttering in and out of certain scenes, which flies a little too far from the music of the second half of the film. It all feels dreadfully modern, and very much like something from, say, Midnight in Paris, a wonderful picture in its own right, but not a product of the same thematic intensity of Rebecca.
Though when life threatens to tear the duo apart, the film must shift to continue on its way. With no family to talk her out of it, and nothing and no one as enticing to follow, the nameless young woman is soon the ‘new’ Mrs de Winter. She travels with her husband to his estate, Manderley, a beautiful house on a charming piece of land along the English coast. Here she meets many people, mostly Maxim’s staff, and naught but one of them is of real importance that being the cold and mysterious Mrs Danvers (Kristin Scott Thomas).
It is under her eerily constant gaze that Mrs. de Winter attempts to make Manderley her home, a task much easier said than done. Around every corner, almost literally, lies a reminder of Rebecca. Rooms are barred off as the mythical woman simply once used them, handkerchiefs with her embroidery are given exclusively to the new mistress of the house, and the personal artifacts that made up her existence litter seemingly every cupboard and draw. And whilst I understand this is the exact point of Rebecca, to generate this ghastly ghostly presence of a woman existing beyond the grave haunting her replacement, it all becomes a bit much. There’s only so many times you can take a bludgeoning over the head with how great this woman was while already knowing the inevitable twist. I’d say even for those of whom this is their first tussle with Rebecca’s mysteries it’s overly repetitive. At one point a hallucinatory sequence dissolves into complete self-parody when all the guests of the house begin to dance around Mrs. de Winter chanting “Rebecca” over and over.
The film follows as unevenly as its first half and ultimately just begs the question of, why? When the original was of such grand quality, why make this film? I may be called too harsh for asking this question, but when the product is so haphazard, I can think of no other avenue to approach this discussion. Where Hitchcock was inclined to thrill Wheatly is all too willing to brood and stylise and it simply doesn’t work, neither in comparison nor generally.
Though its very existence is baffling, there are some positives to this Netflix effort. First and foremost is the cinematography and production design overseen by Laurie Rose and Sarah Greenwood, respectively. Their efforts are undoubtedly overdone at points, but overall they combine to produce some wonderful shots that prove to be the only true and memorable highlights. Kristin Scott Thomas is too an exception to my scorn, she stuns at times and is the only performer of the main three who keeps up with the material, and she does so with a wretched poise borne from the dread-inducing capabilities of her character. James and Hammer are admirable throughout, but neither managed to strike me as Fontaine and Olivier did. I don’t think they were miscast; I just think they suffered from an unfortunate style over substance approach, and perhaps they would have found themselves more at home in roles such as these later in their careers.
All in all, Rebecca never justifies its existence. The effort is admirable at points, but for the most part, this is an uneven attempt at adapting something that was already so brilliantly done.
Isaac Ward (Josh Bangle) lives in a world of black and white, he goes about his days just like everybody else not expecting anything bad to happen and generally hoping for the best. Then one day Isaac is shot in the street and he starts bleeding red. Rushed to hospital, the doctor says he’s never seen anything like this before and Isaac is quarantined.
His wife, Victoria (Cat Merritt) is understandably worried about him, but she knows he can pull through and overcome the virus of colour that is spreading throughout his body. However, Isaac doesn’t feel any different and once he recovers for his wounds, he escapes the hospital finding that there are others like him that are being hunted down.
Monochrome: The Chromism is a science fiction drama shot in black and white, written and directed by Kodi Zene. Cleverly using colour to get its points across, Monochrome feels like a dystopian sequel to 1998’s Pleasantville and one that speaks to a modern audience who feels the tightening grip of hatred and intolerance coming from all sides.
What could have been a rather heavy-handed analogy though, comes across as much more balanced because of the way the world feels today. It seems that today no matter what gender, sexuality, race or political standpoint may be, there is always somebody passionately opposing your view so Monochrome never tells its audience what to believe.
Instead it lets the characters experiences be an imprint of the audience’s own. No matter how you feel, Monochrome’s message of communication over hatred and prejudice is something we all share.
Josh Bangle and Ryan Barnes play their parts well as brothers forced onto different sides with the latter chasing down the former. Although they don’t physically resemble brothers all that well, their performances shed light on their characters’ points of view, keeping the audience watching as their conflict escalates.
However, there are parts that feel a little out of place, such as the villain and his masked henchmen which certainly have different connotations today as to when the movie was shot. Also, the monologues from Isaac that bookend the movie make it feel more like an extended pilot for a television show rather than an insightful and clever science fiction movie which it is for the most part.
Caitlin Kramer (Kourtney Bell) has a good life, a great relationship with her father, (Orlando Eric Street) and Josh (Skyler Hart), a wonderful man who loves her. Then one day as her father is visiting, Caitlin opens the door and has her home invaded by a group of masked thugs. In a matter of seconds, they have knocked her down and killed her father.
Sometime later after Caitlin has recovered and is going to grief counselling, she takes a stroll through the park and sees a handsome man and she smiles and turns away to go about her day. However, as soon as she does the man is brutally attacked and beaten to death. There are many onlookers, but nobody seems to want to get involved to stop the attack with some even filming the attack, but Caitlin starts to feel guilty about what she witnessed and did nothing.
She then decides to go to an open-air vigil held by Lucas (Will Stout), the brother of the man who died and from that point Caitlin starts experiencing supernatural visions. Not to mention she starts fearing for her life when the other witnesses that were in the park that day are being killed one by one by what she thinks is a supernatural force.
Don’t Look Back is a horror movie with a made for television quality and an incredibly predictable plot. Whereas some horror movies try to do something different, Don’t Look Back is a horror movie that anybody could happily watch with their grandparents on a Sunday afternoon.
There are attempts at jump scares, but they just seem to be inspired by other horror movies and are somewhat inconsistent. So, if you are looking for a good horror movie which will at least unnerve you, Don’t Look Back may not be for you.
However, if you are looking for a horror movie that’s incredibly cheesy, predictable and easy to watch then Don’t Look Back is perfectly fine.
You may know exactly where it’s going by about the first ten minutes, but sometimes there’s something comforting about something so familiar.
