The Kingdom (Riget) (1994)

Stig Helmer (Ernst-Hugo Järegård) is the chief consultant neurosurgeon at the Kingdom hospital in Denmark. He has just transferred from Sweden, having gotten into some trouble for plagiarism, and is plagued with a recent mishap that led to a girl he was operating on suffering severe brain damage. Helmer has various problems to deal with at the hospital, including junior registrar Hook (Søren Pilmark), who lives in the basement performing various errands and making ends meet for everyone in the hospital, whilst gathering potential blackmail information on everyone in any place of power. There’s also Mrs. Drusse (Kirsten Rolffes) a recurring patient with a fixation on the occult, and Moesgaard (Holger Juul Hansen), Helmer’s boss, who is midway through a new initiative to increase morale at the hospital, and continually pesters Helmer to join the hospital’s elite lodge. There’s also the ghost of a little girl and a dog, a phantom ambulance, a pregnancy that increases at a worryingly rapid rate, a surgeon trying to convince the family of a dying patient to donate his liver that contains a rare affliction, some business with a severed head, Haitian zombies and two dish washers who seem to know a great deal more about what’s going on than anyone else.
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Faeries

Nellie and George (Carley O’Neill and Geoffrey Williams) are children forced on a countryside holiday, staying with family friends whilst their parents move house. Nellie is very much opposed to the idea, but the slightly younger George embraces it for all the fun it could be. Immediately upon arrival, Nellie and George go and play in the nearby woods, and George accidentally stumbles into a fairy world. With the help of the house’s secret hobgoblin Broom (Tony Robinson), Nellie must retrieve George before he eats anything in the fairy world, which will make him have to stay there forever. Of course, George eats something, but the Fairy Prince (Dougray Scott) makes an exception for George: if he and Nellie can complete three tasks for him, George can go free, with most of these plans involving the farmhand Brigid (Kate Winslet). However, the Prince’s evil brother The Shapeshifter (Jeremy Irons) has other plans, and wants to take over the Fairy Kingdom.
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Bad Land: Road to Fury

This review was originally written for Blueprint: Review.

Sometime in the future, the world has been left barren and dry. The population is but a tiny fraction of its former size, and water is the most valuable commodity. Ernest Holm (Shannon) is a farmer and courier, transporting goods to the workers drilling for water for the government, and lives with his son Jerome (Smit-McPhee) and daughter Mary (Fanning), and occasionally visits his hospitalised wife. When the family donkey – the sole reason Ernest is able to maintain his job – has to be put down, Ernest is forced to buy a new mechanical quadrupedal carrier, outbidding his daughter’s boyfriend Flem (Hoult), which changes the family’s life forever.Shannon Continue reading

The Cloud-Capped Star (Meghe Dhaka Tara)

Neeta (Supriya Choudhury) lives in Calcutta with her parents, two brothers and her sister. She goes to college and works as a tutor on the side, and has a steady boyfriend, who she plans to one day marry, leave the family home and make a life for herself. However, literally everyone she has ever met or had any contact with is a complete and utter shit of a human being.cloudcapped1 Continue reading

Sling Blade

This review was originally written as part of my USA Road Trip series for French Toast Sunday.

Karl Childers (Billy Bob Thornton) was sent to a correctional facility at the age of twelve. He grew up living in a shed out the back of his parents’ property, sleeping in a hole in the ground he’d dug himself and being picked on by pretty much everyone, especially his father and a local boy named Jesse Dixon. One day, Karl saw Dixon apparently trying to rape his mother, and killed Dixon with a sling blade but, when his mother seems distressed and angry, Karl kills her too, and is thus locked up. Some years later, Karl has grown up and served his time, and is due for release into the world. The only problem is, he doesn’t know anyone willing to take him in. His doctor sets him up with a minimum wage job and limited accommodation, but can Karl make it on the outside, and does he even want to?2
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Face/Off

FBI Agent Sean Archer (John Travolta) has been on the hunt for career criminal Castor Troy (Nicolas Cage) for years, a search that was intensified six years previously when Castor accidentally killed Sean’s young son whilst trying to kill Sean. Finally, Sean has managed to catch and apparently kill Castor and incarcerate his brother Pollux Troy (Alessandro Nivola), but not before the pair have planted a bomb somewhere in L.A. With only a few days before the bomb is due to explode in an unknown location, the only way Sean can discover the location is to talk to Pollux, but the only person Pollux will trust is his brother. So, the only logical solution is for Sean to remove his own face and replace it with Castor’s, going undercover as the man he’s spent the past few years despising.
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The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

Dobbs (Humphrey Bogart) is a down on his luck American trying to make ends meet in Mexico. He can’t get a job, and lives day to day by begging for handouts from other working Americans he sees around town. After a particularly bad stroke of luck, he and his friend Curtin (Tim Holt), who is in a similar state of fiscal disarray, hatch the idea to go prospecting in search for gold. They convince Howard (Walter Huston), a former prospector, to come with them and offer advice, and he warns the pair of the dangers of too much gold amongst friends, but Hobbs in particular is adamant that wealth won’t change him. That is, until they find some, and discover other people might be after it too.
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Wake in Fright

John Grant (Gary Bond) is the sole schoolteacher at a school in Tiboonda, with nothing for miles around except the bar and hotel on the other side of the train tracks. After breaking up for the 6-week Christmas holidays, John travels to see his girlfriend in Sydney, but gets waylaid in the Yabba (the local name for Bundanyabba), a town that pretty much everyone who lives there loves. The straight-laced John, who is stuck in his teaching job thanks to some legal shenanigans that would require him to pay 1,000 Australian dollars to get out of it, finds himself sinking deeper and deeper in the Yabba’s culture, gradually losing everything he held deer about himself.large_wake_in_fright_blu-ray2 Continue reading

Princess Mononoke

A young prince, Ashitaka (Billy Crudup), defends his home by killing a giant boar-god that has been corrupted by a monstrous force and turned into a demon, but in the process Ashitaka finds himself infected on his right arm. His only chance at survival is to be exiled from his city – to which he can never return – and seek the Spirit of the Forest and ask for forgiveness. However, when Ashitaka finds the forest, he uncovers a war between a nearby town, led by Lady Eboshi (Minnie Driver) and the animals and gods of the forest, led by the wolf-goddess Moro (Gillian Anderson) and her adopted human daughter San (Claire Danes), who is known to the townspeople as Princess Mononoke. In order to achieve the help of the Spirit of the Forest, Ashitaka must help resolve the conflict between the two factions, neither of whom seem to want his help.
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A Star is Born (1954)

Norman Maine (James Mason) is a world-renowned movie star who has it all, including a crippling drinking problem. His latest drunken antics see him disrupting a variety show he was supposed to be appearing at, and he finds himself dancing on stage with Esther Blodgett (Judy Garland), who was singing and dancing whilst accompanied by the Glenn Miller Orchestra. Esther has the wherewithal to turn Norman’s clowning into a comedic routine, and something inside of her catches the actor’s eye. Later that night, when his stupor has slightly worn off and he is scouring his regular haunts for a lady to take home for the evening (or rather, early morning by that point), there’s only one girl in Norman’s head. He finds Esther singing with the band at a deserted club, and offers her the opportunity of a lifetime; if she quits the band the next day, he’ll give her a shot at the big-time and make her a star.
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