This rich, beautiful, and inexpressibly sad film is about the friendship between two men who were best childhood friends growing up in the Italian mountains. They now unite as grown men to build a shack in the valley which will be their special place. It is set in the Italian alpine valley of Aosta with breathtaking photography as the two men try to talk about their feelings, rekindle their friendship and deal with the difficult past.
“A movie with air in its lungs and love in its heart”.
(2022). 147mins. Italian, English subtitles. Directors Felix Van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch.
This is a simple but heartwarming story of an ordinary and unassuming elderly man who walks to his local postbox to post a letter to his old friend Queenie, who is dying. But instead he walks the length of Britain to deliver the letter to her in person before she dies. It is a lovely exploration of an ordinary man who passes life on the sidelines until he decides to do something extraordinary. On the way he encounters many people from all backgrounds and walks of life who encourage him in his unlikely pilgrimage.
Starring Jim Broadbent as Harold Fry. Based on the novel by Rachel Joyce.
(2023). 93 mins. English. Director Hettie Macdonald
Two childhood sweethearts are wrested apart when Nora is uprooted from Korea to America. Two decades later they are united for one fateful week as they confront destiny , love and the choices that make a life. An achingly effective love story and rare emotionally mature adult film.
(2023).106 mins. Drama. English/Korean subtitles. Dir Celine Song.
Yes! It’s about Barbie the Mattel doll! A riotously entertaining candy-coloured confection that manages simultaneously to celebrate, satirise and deconstruct its (apparently) happy-plastic subject.
Some call it a feminist fable and it definitely plays on stereotypes, both male and female. You will recognise them! It’s very pink. It’s very funny. And you know there’s some quite serious stuff in there as well.
A Chinese-American film that captures the push and pull between the bonds of blood and the ties of culture as they are explored with a light touch and a perceptive eye in this family story. A hastily convened wedding provides the cover story to bring the extended American- living family back to China to say farewell to their elderly matriarch who is the only one not to know she is terminally ill. A film about balance, a yin and yang of roots and identities, humour and pathos that comes together in a bittersweet drama. Director Lulu Wang. (2019).
