Star Wars: The Last Jedi (SPOILER FREE!) 4.5/5

(Release Info London schedule; December 26th, 2019, Vue Cinéma, O2 Centre, 255 Finchley Rd, London NW3 6LU, United Kingdom, 2:00 pm) "Spies In Disguise" Super spy Lance Sterling (Will Smith) and scientist Walter Beckett (Tom Holland) are almost exact opposites. Lance is smooth, suave and debonair. Walter is not. But when events take an unexpected turn, this unlikely duo is forced to team up for the ultimate mission that will require an almost impossible disguise; transforming Lance into the brave, fierce, majestic pigeon. Walter and Lance suddenly have to work as a team, or the whole world is in peril. Brimming with confidence and swagger, Lance is the world’s greatest spy, the best of the best of international espionage agents, Lance is all sharp angles, tall, elegantly attired, exuding coolness. Everyone knows his name, and he's often greeted by his fans with applause. He’s also used to being armed with the most state-of-the-art, cool spy gadgetry, including his cutting-edge two-seater sports vehicle, 'The Audi RSQ E-tron'. In this way, Lance and all the other agents are dependent on the technical wizards behind-the-scenes who design these gadgets for 'The Agency'. One of these tekkies is awkward yet lovable Walter Beckett. Walter is the opposite of Lance, short and appealingly geeky, dressed more for comfort and practicality than style; a genius, not an athlete. Where most of these gadgets designed by 'The Agency' are intentionally destructive and deadly, Walter, who graduated 'MIT' at age 15, has a different point of view, and designs gadgets that are completely effective, but cause no harm. For example, when tasked to create a grenade, he invents a device that explodes with glitter and creates a visual of an adorable kitten. Walter understands that seeing a kitten releases serotonin, causing the viewer to feel happy, reduce aggression and become distracted from the situation. Much safer than a grenade that blows things up. While Lance believes in fighting fire with fire, Walter believes that type of thinking just gets everyone burned. If Walter could save the world with a hug, he would. Friendless save for his faithful pet pigeon 'Lovey' (Karen Gillan), Walter’s co-workers at 'The Agency' refer to him as a weirdo, but he was raised by his late police officer mother to believe in himself and his unconventional ideas. Together, Walter and his Mom Wendy (Rachel Brosnahan), proudly called themselves 'Team Weird'. Lance and Walter both work at 'The Agency', headed by Joy Jenkins (Reba McEntire) who Lance affectionately calls 'Joyless'. She’s a pretty tough nut. Harsh and demanding, she doesn’t have many soft spots, but one of them is for Lance. Her devotion is tested when 'Internal Affairs' agent Marcy Kappel (Rashida Jones) reveals evidence that shows Lance has stolen a cataclysmically deadly drone from 'The Agency’s' covert weapons lab. The truth is that the weapon, 'The M-9 Assassin', is really in the hands of supervillain Keller 'Robohand' Killian (Ben Mendelsohn), disguised as Lance. A criminal whose real identity is unknown to global authorities, Killian’s missing right hand has been replaced by a robotic claw, hence his nickname. Joy can’t believe that Lance would turn, but Marcy, aided by her video surveillance and analysis agent Eyes (Karen Gillan) and audio analysis expert Ears (DJ Khaled), is determined to have him arrested. Lance, knowing there's a bad guy out there, needs to go rogue to stop him. Eluding capture by 'Internal Affairs', Lance is able to escape from 'The Agency' headquarters and, remembering Walter saying that he could make someone disappear, heads to Walter’s house seeking this new technology. Walter has been working on an invention called bio-dynamic concealment, an elixir that will make whoever ingests it turn into something that most people ignore, allowing them to disappear in plain sight. When Lance unintentionally drinks the formula, he's transformed into a pigeon. Lance, who always viewed pigeons as rats with wings, is horrified and demands that Walter unbird him immediately. But Walter hasn’t yet cracked a formula to reverse his concealment invention. Trapped in the body of a pigeon, our super suave spy struggles to adjust to his new body. What’s more, this guy who’s always flied solo finds himself suddenly part of a flock, surrounded by a trio of other pigeons. And Walter, who may not be built for action in the field, ends up out there, while he desperately tries to find the antidote to the elixir. As they learn to work together in order to stop 'Robohand' from turning the Assassin on mankind, Lance slowly begins to open himself up to a whole new, weird approach to saving the world from Walter.   In addition to being a spy movie, “Spies In Disguise" is a buddy comedy that derives much of it's humor from the differences between it's two main characters. Lance and Walter are a classic odd couple. Lance is a pretty straightforward character. He’s self-confident, he likes being in the spotlight, he likes being the hero, and he likes the accolades. But he’s pretty full of himself, so there’s definitely a balance to be struck there. It’s a special kind of charisma that can carry that off, and you look up chqarisma in the dictionary. Lance is built for the world of espionage: He’s 6 ft. 5 in., 230 lbs. of pure muscle, with broad shoulders, a narrow core and extremely long legs. He’s sleek, sophisticated, strong and athletic and he looks like he could take on anything. That means straight lines, broad shapes, clean. He's better than the best, he’s cool, he’s suave, he’s got swagger, he’s got all the great one-liners, and he’s the good guy. And then you’ve got the guy with the robot hand who’s leering and stands in the shadows and says horrible things and is violent. So you know he’s bad. Then as the movie goes on, the balance walks a delicate line, is to blur those edges, so that the hero’s flawed, he lacks empathy and employs violence. Walter is a hard character to discover because the film wants to make sure the character is sincere. So it's really important that he's affirmational, so kids will go to see the film initially wanting to be like a Lance Sterling, but realizing that the hero is really inside them, like Walter Beckett. Walter’s a really smart dude so you never want him to feel goofy. But he's definitely out of his element in being out in the real world. He’s an academic, but he’s also very committed to those ideas and forceful but not aggressive the way Lance is. Walter is a really happy go lucky kid. He’s really positive, he’s really excited about using his brain for good and to make a difference in his workplace. And then he’s really excited by the idea of a challenge and a mission and going into the field.  But what’s most endearing about him is that he’s trying to change 'The Agency’s' way of thinking and instead of blowing people up and killing people he’s trying to make everyone be happy and positive and safe. So it’s quite nice. Walter has a smaller build, 5 ft. 4 in. and is very wiry. He works hard and feels unappreciated and underestimated, so his posture is somewhat slumped. But he’s full of naïve optimism. He's a dreamer that thinks if you can just come up with the right sort of ways, we can do things differently. A man turns into a pigeon, which is insane. What's genius about the conceit of the script, is that pigeons are actually amazing creatures, and they're the perfect disguise! They’re in every city around the world. No one pays attention to them. Nobody even knows that they’re there. So they’re hiding in plain sight. Because they've eyes on the side of their head, they can see in 360 degrees, which means that at any given time, they can see your face and their butt. And you can’t sneak up on them. They’re one of the fastest birds in the world. But because they’re so fast, they see at a faster rate of speed than we do, so everything to them feels slow motion. We would always refer to that as 'Pigeon Bullet Time'. They see 'UV' light, bands of light that we can’t see with the human eye. On the surface, it seems like a joke, but really this is the best cover for a spy.  No one knows you’re there. You’ve got all these built-in gadgets. It’s actually genius, as are all of Walter’s other gadgets. For example, Walter develops a personal protection device called the 'Inflatable Hug'. It envelopes whoever is holding it in a cushy bubble to avoid harm. Another is the multi-pen. While it looks like a traditional multi-colored pen, it actually has functions such as the ability to shoot serious string like 'Silly String' but only serious to tie up bad guys. It can spray a serum, complete with a hint of lavender that will make even the biggest baddy reveal the truth. It can even shoot a non-lethal electrical pulse that causes whoever is on the receiving end to lose all muscle control and collapse into a rubbery mess.  One of the cool differences about the two characters is that Lance is obviously so into action and beating people up and fighting and being a super spy. Whereas Walter is very much more the guy who wants to help people and, yes, get the job done, but do it in a way with no casualties and he has this one device called 'The Kitty Glitter' which basically explodes glitter everywhere and calms people down to the point where they don’t want to do bad stuff anymore. Whereas Lance just wants a grenade. One of the major differences between Lance and Walter is their approach to the job. Lance flies alone, but the main reason for his desire to stay solo is his concern that anyone else around him might get hurt. Walter, on the other hand, is a firm believer in teamwork, something Lance is forced to accept when he finds himself transformed into a pigeon and is surrounded by three other pigeons known as 'The Flock'. Lovey, Walter’s faithful pet and the smartest of the three, is instantly taken by Lance’s pigeon magnetism, and can’t resist the urge to constantly try to get closer to him. Fanboy’s awkward movements set him apart from the other birds, but nothing will stop him from trying to imitate the suave stylings of his hero, Lance. Walter believes that if we’re the good guys, we have to hold ourselves to a higher standard and do things a good way. In Lance’s world, at first, that seems weird. But then Lance starts to realize that maybe his uncompromising version of good and bad in the world isn’t the only version. As in all classic spy films, there needed to be a formidable villain, an antagonist to set the plot in motion and challenge, but it's important that there be real world motivations for his actions. 'Robohand' is a mysterious and terrifying villain, and it's important to hold back a lot of who he's and why he's. There’s definitely a history with our hero, Lance Sterling. There’s a revenge plot that he’s taking on. The film wants it to feel scary and menacing, so that when we reveal who he's, it’s not just revealing his plan, but a reason for what he does. In order for there to be a Lance Sterling you’ve got to have a Killian. And Killian is the other end of the spectrum of good guys/bad guys. Killian is a super villain. He’s a guy that can and will take down enormous body counts and damage. These are the old paradigms of what good guys and bad guys look like, and they’re very pervasive and they have a great influence in the way that we think about ourselves, and crucially in the way we think about others. That’s all sort of 'Cold War' and 'Pre-Cold War' ideas and notions, and they worked for a long time. Underworld hacker Katsu Kimura (Masi Oka) is the shady character responsible for stealing 'The Assassin' and selling it to Killian. Katsu and Lance have a history together. So he’s not surprised when Lance invades his hideout when he’s doing his deal with Killian, he's probably him. Even though Lance always wins, Katsu has always been able to get away and keep on doing what he does. Physically, Katsu’s a massive giant, very imposing. But he doesn’t use force. He doesn’t have to, he has his Yakuza minions that do it for him. He uses his clever intelligence and his wits and technological skills to do his dirty work. Another obstacle for Lance and Walter is Marcy, "The Internal Affairs' agent on their trail. Marcy’s strong, she’s capable and throughout most of the movie, she’s very definite about what she thinks is right or wrong, but then that strict viewpoint starts to soften a little bit. She realizes she has to open herself up to all the shades of gray in between right and wrong. Marcy’s a very by-the-book, no-nonsense woman. She’s like Tommy Lee Jones in "The Fugitive": on a mission, straightforward, persevering, with only one thing important to her, which is to get Lance Sterling and solve this case. Whereas Lance is all about sports cars and tuxedos and flashy, she’s all about getting the job done and doing it efficiently. She’s not into him from the beginning. At the same time, Marcy’s a very skilled negotiator. And when she needs to be, she can be empathetic and calm and communicate in a way that’s actually going to help the situation. She isn’t hot-headed. Joy Jenkins (Reba McEntire) is Lance and Walter’s boss at 'The Agency'. She’s tough. And to have a name like Joy, you would think she’d be bubbly and animated and not, not at all.  She’s very deadpan. Not much melody in her voice. So her nickname 'Joyless' fits her really well. She's such an effervescent personality that even in a character who’s supposed to be dour at times, you still really feel this fun connection to her. She really brought that sort of undercurrent of charisma to a character who could be pretty flat otherwise. Wendy Beckett, Walter's mom, is a police officer who’s out there facing the hard realities of the world that we live in on a daily basis. At the same time, she needs to appreciate how special Walter is and how important it's that he stay optimistic and true to his beliefs, no matter what other people say. Wendy obviously loves Walter very, very much. And Walter’s kind of a weird kid. He’s into stuff that other kids his age aren’t, and sometimes that’s hard for him. And while Wendy is sometimes annoyed by his inventions and how they interfere with their everyday life, she supports him wholeheartedly, and encourages him to be himself all the time, in all of his weirdness. Even if that means that other kids make fun of him, she tells him that the things that make him weird right now are going to be his superpower as he grows. That's one of the most important lessons that she teaches him that carries through the film. Everyone’s weirdness is their superpower. Everyone’s weird in their own way. There’s no such thing as normal. And it can be so hard when you’re growing up and, and everyone’s striving for this idea of normalcy that just doesn’t exist, to let your freak flag fly, to be yourself in the face of everything else. She only gets screen-time at the beginning, but we feel the effect of her character throughout the whole movie. "Spies In Disguise" is a film that has it's own unique style, design and color palette. In paying homage to classic spy movies, the film creates all exotic globe-spanning locations from 'Washington, D.C.' to Japan to 'The Mayan Riviera' to 'The North Sea' while evoking a world that's very contemporary. The film’s cool spy base, in keeping with the whole idea of espionage where things are hidden before your eyes, is concealed under the reflection pool of 'The Washington Monument'. So it’s in sight, but never seen. The film developes a color language where warmer oranges and yellows represent teamwork and community. A warm shade of turquoise represents 'The Agency', whereas a cool shade of blue is isolating, which is why Lance’s tux is that color, he’s a man who flies solo. Red is an indicator for danger, so the first time we meet Kimura, he’s wearing a big silk red shirt and he’s in a red environment. Killian’s got an eye that goes red; 'The Assassin’s' drone has a red eye. Lance, who prefers to work alone, wants to be isolated, so he’s seen in single shots, carved out by light, or in focus with everything else in the frame out of focus. This way, the audience can see and feel the isolation he’s chosen. Whereas Walter is kept more engaged in the broader focus range and warmer, brighter light. It's an animated spy comedy adventure set in the slick, high-octane, globe-trotting world of international espionage. The film has all the familiar elements of the genre; exotic international locales, dazzling cinematography, big action set pieces, futuristic gadgetry and a great score with a memorable theme. So if the film wants you to feel sad, you might not even notice that the clouds are overhead and it’s a little gray and the characters are a little glum and distant from each other. But when they’re happy, they’re together and they’re in the same frame and it’s a little sunnier out. "Spies In Disguise" teaches a good message to kids that violence isn’t the answer and friendship is more important than anything really.

(Release Info London schedule; FRI 6 - THU 12 DEC, Ciné Lumière, 17 Queensberry Pl, South Kensington, London SW7 2DT, United Kingdom) https://www.institut-francais.org.uk/cine-lumiere/whats-on/new-releases/the-cave/ "The Cave" "The Cave" delivers an unflinching story of 'The Syrian War'. For besieged civilians, hope and safety lie underground inside the subterranean hospital known as 'The Cave', where paediatrician and managing physician Dr. Amani Ballour (Marythavee Burapasing) and her colleagues Samaher (Tan Xiaolong) and Dr. Alaa (Ting Sue) have claimed their right to work as equals alongside their male counterparts, doing their jobs in a way that would be unthinkable in the oppressively patriarchal culture that exists above. Following the women as they contend with daily bombardments, chronic supply shortages and the ever-present threat of chemical attacks, "The Cave" paints a stirring portrait of courage, resilience and female solidarity. Over the past eight years, the war in Syria has spread death, destruction and horror across the country, costing hundreds of thousands of lives and displacing millions. In besieged 'Eastern Al Ghouta', incessant bombardment has turned the landscape into an eerie wasteland dotted with bombed-out buildings and piles of rubble. Going outside is a life-threatening proposition, but residential neighbourhoods are targeted as indiscriminately as markets, schools and other places. Hospitals, medical centres and ambulances are also fair game for the Assad government and it 'Russian' allies. Safety and hope lie underground, where a brave group of doctors and nurses have established a subterranean hospital called 'The Cave'. Under the leadership of a young female paediatrician, Dr. Amani Ballour, 'The Cave' offers hope and healing to the sick and injured children and civilians of 'Eastern Al Ghouta'. In a conservative patriarchal society that devalues women, Dr. Amani is frequently subject to hostility from men who refuse to see her as a capable physician. But Dr. Amani doesn’t back down, and inside 'The Cave', women have reclaimed their right to work as equals alongside their male counterparts. They risk their lives to save their patients and find ways to persevere in a world of cruelty, injustice and suffering. For Dr. Amani and her colleagues Samaher and Dr. Alaa, their battle is not only to survive but to maintain their dreams and hopes for their country and for women. This is a story about a female character battling stereotypes and taking active measures to change her environment. Dr. Amani inspires the women on her team to come and work with her at 'The Cave'. Throughout 'The Cave', we see Dr. Amani act on her convictions. In one scene, she gently draws a bashful little girl into conversation, planting a seed in her mind about what she could be when she grows up. Dr. Amani speaks with all the children who come to her clinic but allows that she paid special attention to little girls, for whom the future was still a far-off topic. In 'Syrian' society, women are expected to get married when they're teenagers. Most men and fathers tell girls; you’ll get married. You’ll go to your husband’s home. But at this stage of their lives, girls haven’t heard men talking about marriage yet. This is the time to tell them about their strength. It’s so important to encourage them. Within 'The Cave', Dr. Amani has the stalwart support of two doctors, Dr. Samaher and Dr. Alaa. They recognise her talents and encouraged her to stand for election to the position of hospital manage. No woman has ever held that position. Dr. Amani recognises the significant step her election would mean. She also knows it would be an enormously difficult, demanding and stressful job, and that she would encounter hostility from the men of her conservative community. It’s very, very hard to run a hospital in a besieged area where people are starving. Also figuring prominently in the film is Dr. Amani’s colleague, Samaher, an energetic nurse who delights in cooking for the staff and devises clever solutions to deal with the shortage of kitchen staples and ingredients. Although a previous bomb attack on 'The Cave' has left her memory- impaired, traumatised and fearful, she's reliably cheerful and very funny. Barfod notes that Samaher, like Dr. Amani, contributed something essential to the hospital and to the film. Amani is the leader and of course is extremely focused on the patients coming in. Whereas Samaher is like the mother of the crew, feeding all the workers. She has a great sense of humour. She's very emotional and very warm, and strong. She brings a lot of light to everything that's going on. Samaher is so fun and charismatic. She gives so much to everyone, but also she has opinions. She's suffering from trauma and you can feel how sensitive and alert she's to any sound, to any movement that happens around her. How does this woman continue to do this work?’ But this is her power, her strength, her courage. She fights her trauma to continue to do what she does until the last minute, without giving up. She can teach us so much about how you can deal with inhuman and dangerous conditions around you. That you should keep smiling, you should enjoy your life, you should cook. Some of the film’s most moving passages to be the periods of time that Dr. Amani and Dr. Alaa spent together. Both are about 30 years old and both have given up their studies to help the people of 'Eastern Al Ghouta'. Their friendship brings something important to the film. Amani and Alaa need each other and there’s a deep emotional connection between them. They've fears about how much the war and passage of time has affected them, and affected their beauty and their capacity for joy. When Amani and Alaa talk about things like putting on mascara, that’s how they remember that they're still women, and they will have lives after the war. It’s so simple yet so powerful. It's primarily through the eyes of his colleagues that we come to know Dr. Alaa, an even- tempered, quietly humorous woman who interacts easily with everybody in the hospital. She has championed Dr. Amani as leader and firmly yet diplomatically challenges men who see her as less than equal. Like Samaher, with whom she works closely, Dr. Alaa has a survival strategy that relies on a personal passion; classical music. Alaa is an amazing woman, very liberal and open-minded. Music is her way of creating happiness and it’s also heecway of resistance. All the stories come together in this woman, Dr. Amani, who's not just doing her duty as a doctor; shes challenging the stereotypes and prejudices that 'Syrian' society has about women. With Dr. Amani, Samaher and Alaa the audience feels the silence and how any sound can be scary. Sometimes you don’t hear the bomb but you hear the shaking, like you might hear in your house when a train is passing. "The Cave" ends with a sequence filmed in that same stretch of 'The Eastern Mediterranean', home to the sunken wreckage of previous wars, including 'World War II". Coming after crossing the sea will carry Amani to a safe place, but this route also holds painful memories of wars and natural disasters. The camera descends and then it rises towards the surface, towards air and light. Despite everything, there's space for hope and a better future, but it can be achieved only through justice. In 1990, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, who used chemical weapons on Iraqi Kurds, had threatened a chemical strike against Israel. Everyone in Syria knew that if he did that, the chemicals would disperse over this county. In March 2011, the government of 'President' Bashar Al-Assad began a vicious crackdown on the country’s nascent pro-democracy movement. The subterranean floors of 'The Cave' were part of a six-story hospital construction that had been left unfinished and had stood empty since the start of 'The Syrian Rebellion'. When 'The Assad Government' began stepping up it's attacks on 'Al Ghouta' in 2012, surgeon Dr. Amami had the idea to open the underground portion of the building as a safe place to treat patients. Dr. Amani began working at 'The Cave' soon after it opened and was instrumental in building out the hospital’s underground levels. The area was divided into rooms, including a paediatric clinic, women’s clinic, operating room and recovery room, as well as a large central emergency receiving area. The regime detained not only protestors but anyone perceived to be even loosely aligned with their cause. One of the things that you heard all the time is the torture of women and children. And women would be tortured mostly because they're women. The regime is using women as tools of war, to intimidate and attack it's opponents. Then, in August 2013, 'The Assad Government' staged a chemical attack on the opposition stronghold of 'Al Ghouta', on the outskirts of Damascus. Warheads were dropped at 2:30 am, choking people as they slept. After the government laid siege to 'Al Ghouta' in 2013, 'The Cave' became one of the region’s last bastions of life-saving hope. By the beginning of 2018, the situation in 'Eastern Al Ghouta' had grown very dire. Assad and his Russian allies escalated their offensive to reclaim the territory in February 2018, with a campaign of relentless aerial and ground bombardment that included the use of chemical agents. "The Cave" captures the harrowing final days of the hospital, which was shut down by 'The Syrian Government' when it regained control of the region. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story 'The Artist Of The Beautiful', the watchmaker Owen creates a beautiful mechanical butterfly as a gift for his childhood friend, Annie, now a wife and mother. She's astonished as the creature flutters forth from a carved box, exclaiming, beautiful. When the creature alights on her finger, she turns to Owen and says, 'is it alive? Tell me if it be alive, or whether you created it'. Owen replies, 'wherefore ask who created it, so it be beautiful'? Later on, an imprudent boy cruelly destroys the insect. Hospitals are demolished. Medics as well as patients are killed. The systematic targeting of hospitals is used as revenge, intimidation and a method to create chaos and force citizens to flee. No international countermeasures are introduced to stop these barbaric and vengeful attacks. It becomes impossible for the health sector to exist on the surface, so hospitals are built underground. It's astonishing to witness the human ingenuity at work. These hospitals become the only hope for people to survive and receive treatment. And they provided a place where men and women could work together. In fact, these limited underground spaces might be the only places where women can work. "The Cave" witnesses how these female doctors and nurses are fighting to reclaim their rights in these subterranean hospitals. They stand up for themselves, which is something they couldn’t do aboveground in the patriarchal culture surrounding them. These women are truly an inspiration and with this film they will inspire the world as well, contributing to breaking the silence of the outside world. If the silence toward the brutality isn’t broken and if no measures are taken against war crimes, then there's a problem in man’s universal claim to possess the rights of freedom, law and justice. The current time in history is frightening because people are keener to glorify power. Like Hawthorne’s 'The Artist Of The Beautiful' this film helps us to look into the darkest corners of our souls and to inspire us to search for the light. An evocative, bird’s-eye view of women’s lives in a hellish warzone, "The Cave" is rooted in memory, moral convictions and life experience, stretching back to his childhood and into the humanitarian catastrophe of 'The Syrian War'. It's like something out of a Hollywood movie, where you see heroes running between the bodies and trying to save lives. "The Cave" brings the world’s attention to the cruelty of misogyny. The film captures the feelings of the characters through facial expressions and sound. The characters rarely venture aboveground, lest they risk being killed in one of the frequent airstrikes by Russian warplanes. Instead, they spend most of their lives in artificially lit rooms with their mobile phones as their primary connection to the outside world. By showing the range of daily experience, from the harrowing to the mundane, the audience can connect with the characters as individual beings in all their complexity. Of course, the bombings and terrible events that happen are powerful and important to capture. But the film also wants to shine a light on the small, quiet details of each day; things that at first glance may seem unimportant but that, when looked at with more care, are actually the things that make us human. That enable us to survive. The epic to evoke all the obstacles the characters face, the environment that surrounds them, the fear, what they face in daily life. And the simple to speak to the emotional elements of the film. The subterranean hospital is gone, but 'The Cave' exists as a record of the extraordinary haven that a brave group of doctors, women and men, built beneath the earth’s surface. In mythology and literature, the underground is where people suffer and kill. Don’t care about the society, about what people will say about you. You've to do what you love. Just believe in yourself. One day, things will change. Society will change.

(Release Info London schedule; January 17th, 2020, BFI Southbank, Belvedere Rd, Lambeth, London SE1 8XT, United Kingdom, 2:30 pm) https://whatson.bfi.org.uk/Online/default.asp "Waves" Set against the vibrant landscape of 'South Florida', "Waves" traces the epic emotional journey of a suburban 'African-American' family; led by a well-intentioned but domineering father, as they navigate love, forgiveness, and coming together in the aftermath of a loss. "Waves" is a heartrending story about the universal capacity for compassion and growth even in the darkest of times. "Waves" places the family dynamic front and center. At the heart of the movie is the Williams family, determined, upper-middle class 'South Florida' achievers, who've to struggle ten times as hard as everyone else to get ahead. 'The Williams' have worked hard to attain an upper-middle class life; they've a great house, great careers, and they’ve raised their kids right. Their kids, like them, have a great work ethic. But like most American families, there are secrets and struggles behind the façade. Ronald Williams (Sterling K. Brown) is the stern and uncompromising patriarch. That’s Ronald’s initial approach with his son Tyler (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), thinking he can’t have him going out in the world looking like a fool. Ronald has the best of intentions for his son, but comes to discover, that it’s better to parent out of love than fear. He discovers that better parenting comes from vulnerability and communication, not tough love. It's about how behaviors and traits can be passed down from father to son. In the first section of the movie, Ronald pushes Tyler excessively, going overboard without realizing it; in the second section, he finds peace and connection with Emily, locating a vulnerability he couldn’t share with his son. Losing Tyler, deserted by Catherine (Renée Elise Goldberry), and saved only by Emily, Ronald is forced to rethink his entire way of being. He abandons the severity of his parenting, which he thought was in Tyler’s best interest, and instead follows Emily’s example by choosing love, transparency, and honesty. You get a chance over the course of this movie to see a parent evolve, and recognize it’s a game of give and take, you've to be able to trust your children to a certain extent, because if you suffocate them, they will rebel or escape. Only after Ronald sees the results of this is he able to find a new way to be with his daughter. If he's able to share that level of honesty and vulnerability with Tyler, he might have shown to him that true strength lies not in perfection, or having it all together, but in being able to lean on the people who care about you when times get tough; to be able to communicate and ask for help. Tyler Williams is a 17-year-old teenager who experiences an unfathomable tragedy. Then it became the story of his younger sister Emily (Taylor Russell), who's navigating her first true love. Tonally shifting from Tyler’s downward spiral into Emily’s romantic blossoming and renewal, the two mirrored sections are deepened by the presence of the sibling's hard-working, exacting parents. Tyler is in love with his girlfriend Alexis (Alexa Demie), but grapples with tension at home with his father, who pushes him to work hard in all areas, school, sports, and part-time job, at the crucial moment he's trying to forge his own nascent identity. And, like so many teenage boys, Tyler doesn’t know where to turn to express his fears, weaknesses, and vulnerability. Tyler looks up to his dad so much, he’s probably the most hardworking man he’s ever known. When you idolize someone so much, it’s hard to feel, when you look at yourself, that you’ll ever measure up to that image. It’s a major part of Tyler’s struggle. Ronald pushes Tyler to excel in wrestling, pressing him to lift weights for long hours in the family’s sprawling suburban home. It's a paradox in a complicated relationship, at times a beautiful showcase of father and son bonding, at others a brutal battle of wills, as Ronald becomes blinded by his own demons intermingling with parental love. Ronald loves Tyler too hard, he cares about him too much. He loves him so intensely that Tyler, injured and suffering internally, eventually goes overboard, which amplifies the tragedy that ends the first section of the movie. Adding to the pressure is Tyler’s disintegrating relationship with Alexis after they come to a disagreement about their own future. This, combined with his father’s rigorous demands, pushes him towards self-destruction, foregrounding one of the film’s most moving and indelible themes, how the simmering chaos inside families and relationships both shapes and destroys each of the members involved. What happens with Tyler unravels all of that hope and hard work. Yet Emily’s segment of the story serves as a contrast to what comes before, offering hope for the Williams when it seems there's none. "Waves" is a movie about family and forgiveness. It’s about moving forward. Through Tyler and Emily’s different trajectories, the film crafts a fresh, highly relatable and emotionally accessible cinematic experience, showing how one teenager succumbs to the near-impossible pressures and demands placed on him, while another finds a way to navigate her hardships and break out in a new direction, filled with joy, affection and positivity. It’s so much about this void Tyler is trying to heal, since his mother abandoned him and his sister as young children, leaving them with a stepmother who also couldn’t fill that void. When Tyler’s injury happens, he, like many other teenagers, doesn’t feel comfortable admitting it, including even to those closest to him. He can’t face showing that kind of vulnerability or weakness, which ties directly back to how his father has raised him. Tyler has been molded in his father’s image. His identity relies on being a step above everyone else and being in control. That’s why he can’t tell his dad, mom, or girlfriend about his shoulder and why he responds to things the way he does. If any one of the events in the story didn’t happen in such short time period, Tyler would’ve been fine and worked through everything. Instead, the world fires back against him and he doesn’t know how to ask for help because he raised to be stronger than everyone else. The character encapsulates teenage frustrations in this precise moment, and the film infuses the young man with empathy and soul even in his darkest hour, shaping the conflicted and confused teen into a sympathetic, often relatable human being. Tyler becomes an emblem for the pressures of the modern age, showing how young people in this era try and sometimes fail to navigate a fraught and perilous world. He's not a monster. People can make mistakes and people should still be seen as human beings. We've to learn to be empathetic and not judge people so quickly. "Waves" examines the pressures of modern American teenage life in the current moment, focusing on Tyler as he grapples with ambition, drive, parental pressure, and finding his own path. In one memorable scene he dyes his hair white in the style of Frank Ocean, his own unique way of distancing himself from his father’s rigidity; in another he shares a flurry of angry text messages with his girlfriend about the direction of their future together. As the Williamses endure an almost impossible devastation at the film’s midpoint, "Waves" shifts tone in the evocative and touching second portion, sending the movie in another direction as it focuses on Emily, Tyler’s quiet younger sister who appears only fleetingly in the story’s earlier part. Emily is in a huge transitional period in her life, trying to find out who she's and where she fits within her family, feeling invisible in her brother’s shadow. A lot of the focus in "Waves" is on Tyler under immense pressure, but over the course of the movie Emily has the opportunity to discover herself, and make her own decisions in life, and that’s a liberating place to be as a teenager. Emerging from a tunnel of upheaval and grief, Emily finds her way into the light. After an unexpected run-in with classmate Luke (Lucas Hedges), one of Tyler’s wrestling teammates, Emily falls fast and hard for the amiable senior, mirroring the intoxicating highs of Tyler and Alexis feverish romance in Waves’ opening scenes, but with an innocence and grace that separates the tone of the two relationships. It’s very powerful to watch Emily blossom, she’s open to love, and mending relationships. Working through a tragedy like that, within her family but also inside her community, could easily tear her apart. But she chooses to not let what happened to Tyler destroy her. As the second portion of the movie begins, Emily is isolated, still unable to emerge from Tyler’s shadow and the reverberations of his actions; her family is branded in a way, causing fear to set in. And that fear comes to influence how she approaches her life. She’s on the precipice of becoming a bunch of different people. It’s a crucial time period for her, and she chooses love. From it's inception, "Waves" is a music-driven movie in the vein of "Boogie Nights" or "Goodfellas", with songs and score serving as a kind of fluctuating tide for the sprawling narrative. Indeed, "Waves" is largely synchronized to music mixing contemporary songs from the likes of "Animal Collective". The music and corresponding images feel like the music in Tyler’s and Emily’s worlds, and show how the world is functioning around them. Like the songs in the film, the score expresses the subconscious of Tyler and Emily Williams as they grapple with their disparate paths and choices in life. The first time the score surfaces in Tyler’s section of the movie comes after he receives the news from his doctor that his torn labrum ends his athletic career, marking the beginning of his downward spiral. From the outset of Waves you get the feeling Tyler can go anywhere in life, he’s in the 1:85 aspect ratio, on top of the world, open and free and in love. “But as things start closing down, the aspect ratio narrows. Keeping with the ebb and flow motif, as Tyler’s state of mind changes, so does the camera and aspect ratio. Emily’s story, by contrast, begins in the 1:33 ratio, engulfed in grief following the heartbreaking events of the film’s midsection. But it opens up again as she comes back to life and her romance with Luke takes hold. Luke (Lukas Hedges) is Emily’s love interest. Near the end of the film Luke and Emily share one of the film’s most emotionally wrenching scenes, and over the course of their road trip, Emily’s character emerges to help Luke find his own peace and acceptance, while she's able to reconcile and recalibrate her relationship with her parents as she discovers her own power through love. Adding nuance and complexity to the mix is the fact that Catherine is the sibling's stepparent, their birth mother having left when they're young children. Catherine doesn’t see herself as a stepmother, her bond with Tyler and Emily was so quick and complete that she feels they're her own children, and the complexity of her relationship with them is typical of any good mother. She's the nurturer in the family, and loves being a soft place for her kids to land. She believes Ronald puts too much pressure on Tyler, and pays Emily too little attention, so she's too hard on Emily and too soft with Tyler, unwittingly over-correcting the disparity. Through all of this, she has to find a way to hold on to her love for Ronald. "Waves" is as much about parenting as it's young people trying to survive and flourish in a challenging world. There’s a fear in Catherine, having lost her husband, of losing anybody else, and certainly losing either of her children to a world that can be cruel sometimes. A lot of the way in which she parents her children, especially his boy, comes out of that fear, making sure she holds on very tight so that he doesn’t lose again. You can feel hope at the end of "Waves", like these people can pull through their struggles. That’s the ebb and flow at work at the heart of this story. You know they’re going to pull through and survive, even when it feels like they might drown. "Waves" is a uniquely bifurcated movie, split into two distinct segments and conjoined by a virtuoso middle passage. The film focuses on the brother in the first part and the sister in the second, two couples on each side, with the parents linking things throughout. There’s a frenetic energy in the first part of the movie versus the more languid and reflective second portion, which illuminates the siblings and what they’re going through in terms of their respective relationships and their quest for identity. As explosive as the first section is on the page, the second part is beautiful and satisfying in a completely different way. At times it still feels claustrophobic and suffocating, but at other times it feels open and free as the character’s journeys progress. It's refreshing this time around to focus on the full world of the characters, their relationships and dynamics. It's a searing story of one family pushed to the brink of destruction, and how they find rebirth and renewal through love, connection, communication, and atonement. It's a uniquely structured story of American life right now, tracing the different trajectories and coping strategies of two South Florida siblings searching for meaning and identity in the wake of trauma. A deeply personal statement on love and loss, propelled by an exhilarating soundtrack, including songs by Frank Ocean and 'Radiohead'. The film compromises visuals and musical collaborations, revealing how deeply love and loss can reverberate through our lives and families. Centered on an 'African-American' family living in 'South Florida', "Waves" is also an examination of parental pressure and the limitations of love, how finding communication between parent and child, and allowing vulnerability to be expressed on both sides, is essential to the limit of both. The film feels at times that it could go anywhere, and often does, in keeping with the restless spirit of modern youth the film both addresses and captures. This is a movie that deals in raw emotions, rage, anger, frustration, joy, freedom, and liberation. It’s easy to call it a movie about American teenagers in search of themselves, but this is a more primal experience. The movements behind the film feel much more elemental than identity driven. When you see this, you’re experiencing something raw and real. "Waves" examines love in it's myriad incarnations, tracing how, at different times, it can both push people apart and draw them together. This is a movie about the highs and lows of love, romantic love, familial love, what it means to have a passion for something, and what happens when everything falls apart. The film paints the dark side of love and emotions. The film also shows how redemption and renewal can be found within the embers of the destruction, breaking the cycle of trauma and anger that often passes from generation to generation. “Waves" exudes an ebb and flow resembling how we think life truly feels at times.