A 100 year old cinema wonder, exploring the mysteries of space through cutting edge film effects. We cover the history of human understanding of space, the individual planets, the seasons, moons, and more. It’s truly stunning stuff, although the highlights are all the bits with people in (jumping in low-gravity on Mars! walking on the walls of the spaceship!).
Matthew Bourne’s live moog soundtrack was absolutely wonderful as well.
Well this was utterly ludicrous.
In Porto Alegre, Brazil, Mathias is an aspiring actor, competing for roles with his flatmate, Fabio. Mathias hooks up via an app with a new man, and they quickly discover how much they enjoy the thrill of having sex in public. Unfortunately, this isn’t very compatible with Mathias’ fledgling TV career, and still less compatible with Rafael’s attempt to run for mayor.
There’s some serious points in here about social acceptance of gay men (someone says something like “gay men are accepted now. As long as they’re private”) but its rather buried beneath the lurid, fast-paced plot - with sex in car parks, covert filming, blackmail and violence.
It’s quite good fun.
Very much my sort of horror. This is a solid entry in the “it’s rough being a teenage girl” genre, with a gentle touch of supernatural thrown in. For me, the pacing was spot on. It felt slow but with a constant sense of threat, that only very rarely bubbled to the surface. Natalia and friends are all falling for Diego, but he’s been swept away by worldly, older Silvia. Natalia’s anger and hurt surface in sudden moments of violence and power (or are they just accidents and power-cuts?). It’s menacing and threatening without ever being gratuitously nasty. I loved it.
Though Diego seemed like a berk.
An animated, dialogue-free journey, following dandelion seeds on a (surprisingly cosmic) journey to where they can grow new plants. Or, as an allotment gardener: proof that even if you nuke the planet, the damn dandelions will manage to escape through a black hole to an alternate world and grow more weeds.
This was very beautiful, with a frankly jaw-dropping blend of live-footage and animation. We see ferns unfurl, oyster mushrooms grow, and even make a getaway with a pair of slugs. There’s no escaping that it did still feel a bit long though, even at just 75 minutes. This felt like a very cool 30 minute episode that someone had extended into a film. And I could have done with a bit less anthropomorphizing the seeds. That got old fast.
A curiosity. An Estonian triptych of loosely connected stories. It’s a weird mix of serious issues (Estonian economy, emigrating for jobs, domestic violence) and uh… aliens.
There are some fun bits (removing all of one willing alien-experiment volunteer’s limbs, putting the other volunteer in some sort of alien washing machine), but also quite a lot of ponderous bits.