(Release Info London schedule; March 15th, 2019, Prince Charles Cinema, London WC2H, 7 Leicester Place, London, WC2H 7BY, 12:35 PM) "Under The Silver Lake" From the dazzling imagination that brought you "It Follows" comes a delirious neo-noir thriller about one man’s search for the truth behind the mysterious crimes, murders, and disappearances in his 'East L.A'. neighborhood. Sam (Andrew Garfeld) is a disenchanted 33 year old who discovers a mysterious woman, Sarah (Riley Keough), frolicking in his apartment’s swimming pool. When she vanishes, Sam embarks on a surreal quest across Los Angeles to decode the secret behind her disappearance, leading him into the murkiest depths of mystery, scandal, and conspiracy in 'The City Of Angels'. On one level, this is the story of a young man searching for a missing woman, a man who seemingly might be losing his mind while uncovering some bigger meaning. Sam is a very interesting and layered central character, one who's in many ways not immediately knowable. He's 33-year-old on the cusp of being evicted from his apartment complex on L.A.’s eclectic 'East Side'. With a dog killer terrifying his 'Silver Lake' neighborhood, and a missing billionaire dominating the evening news, Sam falls under the spell of his neighbor Sarah, a mysterious ingénue obsessed with Marilyn Monroe and 'The Golden Age Of Hollywood'. Sarah is a mysterious and beguiling woman. She's a special character, you can’t really place her in a specifc time or location. After her sudden disappearance, he turns amateur detective, embarking on a quest across Los Angeles to find her, discovering a strange cast of characters along the way as he journeys from one party, and conspiracy, to another. Is he losing himself as he slips further down the rabbit hole, or is he coming into his own as he goes about solving some of the most confounding mysteries of our time? Sam is an 'Everyman' who's looking for his place in the world, he wants to find his deeper purpose and sense of belonging in a world that seems to reject him at every turn. He refuses to live as a zombie like so many modern people; he won’t be a herded sheep. But hes constantly coming up against his own sense of powerlessness. Anybody who’s come to Los Angeles to pursue a certain ambition can relate to Sam, and imagine how fame and fortune might go in the opposite direction. He’s out of money, and while he could probably land a job if he wanted one, he’s drawn towards something more exciting; this sense of adventure in solving the mystery of Sarah’s disappearance that lies at the heart of the movie. Obsessed with pop culture, Sam’s quest deepens when he stumbles on a handcrafted zine called 'Under The Silver Lake' in a downtown bookshop. Documenting L.A.’s showbiz myths and legends, the publication plunges Sam into a murky underworld of Tinseltown lore that may or may not echo Sarah’s disappearance. Tracking down it's kooky creator, a hoarder of celebrity ephemera and crackpot conspiracy theories, Sam becomes convinced there are secrets underneath 'The Silver Lake' reservoir, and atop the mythical 'Hollywood Hills' surrounding his home. Sam follows the mystery through iconic locations in 'The City Of Angels', from the portal into downtown that's 'The Second Street Tunnel', a staple of classic crime fction, to the stargazing destination that's 'The Griffth Park Observatory', and the repository of dead stars known as 'The Hollywood Forever Cemetery', where long-dead luminaries share lawn space with aspiring hopefuls at movie screenings and events. Like Philip Marlowe in 'The Big Sleep', Jake Gittes in 'Chinatown' and even Betty Elms in 'Mulholland Drive', Sam becomes a detective in the sunshine and shadows of 'Southern California', delving beneath the surface of Hollywood artifce to unearth deeply entrenched corruption at the city’s core. Sam feels so specifc and unique. He’s full of contradictions and deep longings, as well as superfcial ones. He's absolutely a product of his times. As the film follows Sam on his surreal journey beneath the surface of Los Angeles, the score aims to present all the absurdity, mystery, and complexity that may or may not exist at any given moment, while honoring some of the simpler, more earnest emotions and themes at play between the characters and the world. The protagonist believes that his place in the world should be bigger or more important than it's. Sam is out of sync with his surroundings and he’s wondering why that's. Featuring a panorama of memorable characters, "Under The Silver Lake" narrows it's focus on Sam and Sarah, who share only a few intoxicating moments of screen time before she suddenly vanishes and he begins his obsessive quest to find her. Lanky, curious and often impenetrable in action and intention, Sam’s demeanor required a lead actor who could bring depth to the Los Angeles archetype of the Hollywood striver. Los Angeles is a mixture of beauty and horror, and extreme wealth and it's opposite, which is apparent everywhere you look. It’s beautiful out here, but there are some ugly spaces as well. There are mansions in 'The Hollywood Hills', but you might be looking at them from your small apartment in the Flats, like Sam does. There’s a separation in L.A., one of the key elements of film noir; degrees of wealth and striving, and the crimes that can occur when people struggle to achieve wealth. You've to discover the city through the movies, watching film noirs and old musicals. Los Angeles is built upon dreams as much as nightmares, and Sam experiences his share of each in the form of his vision of Sarah frolicking in a swimming pool, a loving but distorted nod to Marilyn Monroe in "Something’s Got to Give", the unfinished 1962 movie that abandoned production at the time of Monroe’s tragic death. "Under The Silver Lake" is awash with similar tributes, nods, and emulations of classic Hollywood movies and stars. Since we experience the movie from Sam’s 'POV', the film tries to refect Sam’s emotional state into the photography and create a version of Los Angeles that’s both familiar, but somewhat unique and mysterious. Overall the film creates a style that shadows and deep contrast and uses references from "The Third Man", "A Touch of Evil" and "The Big Sleep" , at the same time delivering a stylized but motivated look that wasn’t completely a period feel. Hardcore cinephiles will detect echoes of classic Hollywood movies by Hitchcock, Cukor, De Palma, Borzage, and many others. It's a part of that time-honored tradition of highlighting how weird and beautiful and scary L.A. can be. You recognize a certain spot at a certain point in time, and then you see it in real life and maybe a building has changed, or it has somehow stayed the same. There’s something really nice about contributing to the movie history of Los Angeles in terms of it's locations. Los Angeles is very much a place about movies. "The Myth Of The American Sleepover" was set in a teenage world, and "It Follows" was a horror movie, incorporating teenage themes. "Under The Silver Lake" shows Los Angeles over a decade ago. The common thread in all three works is the unique but relatable worlds Mitchell creates in which these stories take place. Both of Mitchell’s previous features employing a meticulous attention to detail in everything from yearbook inscriptions and photos in "The Myth Of The American Sleepover" to the anachronistic cellphone that became a curiosity among devotees of "It Follows". "Under The Silver Lake" amplifes this handcrafted tendency to include such innovative concoctions as the titular zine, the retro cereal box that helps Sam crack one of the movie’s most confounding codes, and promotional materials for "Jesus & The Brides Of Dracula". It's a triumph of handcrafted indie-culture world building, anchoring Sam in a very specifc world of hipster consumerism. What's real and what’s fake, and our collective obsession with finding the truth amid what we’ve been told to believe. "Under The Silver Lake" is a man’s quest for meaning and a man’s refusal to accept the surface of things. It's a story of a down-on-his-heels Los Angeleno who tumbles down a rabbit hole of intrigue while investigating the disappearance of a beautiful woman he discovers in the swimming pool of his 'East Side' apartment complex. "Under The Silver Lake" is a sprawling and unexpected detective thriller about 'The Dream Factory' and it's denizens dog killers, aspiring actors, glitter-pop groups, nightlife personalities, It girls, memorabilia hoarders, masked seductresses, homeless gurus, reclusive songwriters, sex workers, wealthy socialites, topless neighbors, and the shadowy billionaires foating above and underneath it all. Mining a noir tradition extending from "Kiss Me Deadly" to "Mulholland Drive", the film uses the topography of Los Angeles as a backdrop for a deeper exploration into the hidden meaning and secret codes buried within the things we love. It's a wildly inventive, richly layered thriller, designed to be devoured, debated, decoded, and debunked; preferably across multiple viewings. At the heart of "Under The Silver Lake" is the labyrinthine conspiracy Sam discovers through secret codes embedded in advertising, songs and movies; a real-life phenomenon that has transfxed pop-culture devotees since the heyday of 'The Beatles'. Like "The Da Vinci Code" butting heads with "Kiss Me Deadly", the film delivers a mind-bending comedy-thriller that keeps unrav- eling new twists with each dizzying turn of the plot, or each reverse spin of “Turning Teeth", the fictional 'East Side' glitter-pop group that's a recurring presence in the movie. The film weaves together a story of conspiracy, corruption, and secret codes in the showbiz capital of the world. A world of sunlit swimming pools, dark shadows, secret passages, debutante daughters, mysterious murders; the iconic imagery of a city built on dreams and moving pictures. “Under The Silver Lake" is about the hidden meaning buried within the things we love, the movies, music, and magazines that define our culture. Pop culture is now the only culture, a lake we all swim in. But there are things happening, unbeknownst to us, beneath the surface of the waterline. The film has a sharply observed sense of the world we live in now, with our collective interest in conspiracies and power dynamics. It also has some cinematic touchstones from classic Hollywood movies. There's something special about the way the script taps into cultural elements past and present. The film has many hidden elements waiting to be discovered. Some are literal and some are thematic. The film avoids providing obvious answers, and that’s intentional. The story explores a world of hidden messages in everyday objects and products. The movie itself is layer upon layer of secrets and codes. You might not figure everything out on first viewing, but after subsequent views you come to see the bigger story.

(Release Info London schedule; February 28th, 2019, Olympic Studios, 117 - 123 Church Road, Barnes (West London), 20:30 PM) "The Aftermath" "The Aftermath" is set in postwar Germany in 1946. Rachael Morgan (Keira Knightley) arrives in the ruins of Hamburg during the bitter winter, to be reunited with her husband Lewis (Jason Clarke), a British colonel charged with rebuilding the shattered city. But as they set off for their new home, Rachael is stunned to discover that Lewis has made an unexpected decision; they will be sharing the grand house with it's previous owners Stefan Lubert (Alexander Skarsgård), a German widower and his troubled daughter Freda (Flora Thiermann). In this charged atmosphere, enmity and grief give way to passion and betrayal. It feels like a fantastic collision of an extraordinary and inspirational backdrop with a very personal and credible story. After the end of 'The World War II', in the late 1940s, control of Germany is divided among 'The British', 'The Americans', 'The Russians', and 'The French', their combined mission is to help rebuild the war-ravaged nation. We'd never really considered that moment in history before, nobody could have known what the future held, least of all the defeated German people. The port city of 'Hamburg', Germany’s second largest city after Berlin, had suffered a devastating five-day bombing raid by 'The Allied Forces' in 1943 that killed 100,000 people and caused the destruction of 6,200 acres. Millions of German citizens were either homeless or without food, fuel, or other necessities when 'The British' arrived. After the cessation of hostilities, 'The Native Population' is barred from having any involvement in running their own affairs. It's under these circumstances that Rachael Morgan travels from England to the ruins of Hamburg to be reunited with her husband Lewis, a British colonel charged with rebuilding the shattered city after the end of 'The Second World War'. As they set off for their new home, Rachael is stunned to discover that Lewis has made an unexpected decision. The couple will be sharing their residence with it's previous owners, the architect who designed the grand house, Stephan Lubert, and his troubled teenage daughter, Freda. Although the sprawling estate offers plenty of room for both 'The English Couple' and the displaced Germans, the unconventional arrangement breeds tension and discomfort, with Rachael harboring a simmering resentment toward the guests she views as interlopers. The arrangement makes Rachael deeply uncomfortable. She resents the presence of outsiders she perceives as suspect, and she longs instead for time alone with Lewis to help heal the wounds that have taken a toll on their marriage. But the charged atmosphere soon takes on a different tenor. Lubert discovers that Rachael is locked in a prison of sorrow over the death of her young son in a London air raid, while Rachael learns that Lubert lost his beloved wife in an 'Allied' bombing campaign. Remarkably, the one person to sense the profound isolation Rachael feels is Lubert, a man who now haunts the rafters of his home like a ghost. Unable to practice his chosen profession without clearance from British officials, Lubert is forced to take a factory job as a metal press operator. He’s a shadow of himself, struggling to hold together a façade of strength in the face of tremendous uncertainty as he waits for the next chapter of his life to begin. As she begins to absorb the weight of what they, too, lost in the conflict, Rachael’s stance toward 'The Germans' begins to soften, slowly, evidenced by small gestures. She invites Freda to practice piano in the main living quarters any time she would like. Slowly, the tension between Rachael and Lubert begins to take on a different dimension, as she begins to see him as a kindred injured spirit and finds herself drawn to him. Lewis, meanwhile, remains oblivious to the blossoming relationship between Rachael and Lubert, too consumed by his duties and too closed off from Rachael to take note of her infidelity. Only too late does he realize what his neglectful attitude might have cost him. Rachael and Stephen’s two wounded souls find themselves in the grips of a reluctant attraction that pulls them ever closer to one another. Finally, enmity and grief give way to passion and betrayal, changing the course of their lives forever. Rachael Morgan is a woman struggling to deal with the death of her young child and baffled and shocked by her husband’s decision to share a house with someone she sees as the enemy. In drama, you normally deal with the bit that leads up to the dramatic moment, in this case the death of their son. But this film asks, what happens after that? How as a couple do you come out of something that's so unimaginably horrific? How do you rebuild a relationship? She's a woman who's forced to hide her wildly turbulent inner life behind a mannered mask of composure. This is a story of a woman who’s been married some 15 years and is therefore quite a mature woman and also a woman who's a mother. Regarding the complexity of Rachael’s emotions, the film remarks on the simmering hatred and loathing that lived just below the surface. She's, for all intents and purposes, prejudiced. She’s lives through the war, through being bombed in London. What she’s never seen is the catastrophe that had happened in Germany. In her mind, it’s us and them. She despises them. She blames them for the death of her son and the entire war. She comes in with her fixed idea of who these people would be and then suddenly is forced to confront the fact that they're people who are grieving in the same way that she's grieving, who've suffered incredible loss in the same way that she has. The relationship with Lubert begins with a sexual need. But also he’s somebody who understands what she’s going through and will confront it, as opposed to her husband, whose way of dealing with his grief is to simply not talk about it, to shut down and not in any way give her the support that she needs. That pushes her into finding solace somewhere else. You can’t really understand Rachael’s resurrection from the ashes of her grief unless you understand the scale of horror that she’s thrown into. It's an intimate story about a woman who, having suffered a cataclysmic experience, finds a way to rebuild her life and move toward a more hopeful future. Lewis Morgan is 'The English Army' colonel in charge of 'The British' district of post-war Germany whose idealism masks an inability to grieve for his dead son. Morgan is a soldier who fought on the front line and has moved into administration, he’s risen through the ranks. Over six years, he’s become a soldier, married, and lost his child during the bombing in London. Lewis is sensitive to the plight of Europe and Germany, but not to his wife and what they’ve been through, they’re trying to cope with their own loss. How do they find meaning? How do they put their lives back together? How do they find a way ahead after they’ve lost a child? How does a country? How does a world? He's a strong, rather traumatized man whose civility has been ruptured by the violence he’s experienced and has to somehow accommodate this woman who’s come back into his life who has no knowledge of his war. He lived through the horrors of battle and has a different, more sympathetic perspective, underlining once more the estrangement that has developed between husband and wife. Like finally, Rachel is open. She’s showing herself to her husband, to everyone. She feels free to express herself. Lewis never quite finds the same sense of liberation or abandon. Although he does eventually come to look differently at his marriage and the upheaval he and Rachael have experienced, his outward appearance is largely unchanged. Even at his most casual, he remains every inch 'The British' officer. He feels so good in the uniform that, whenever we see him at home, he’s still wearing it, but without the jacket, without the tie, sleeves rolled up. Lewis understands that you can’t blame a whole nation, that a whole nation is not responsible. At a certain point, he feels like he’s going to lose his wife if he doesn’t change, if he doesn’t do something, but that comes too late. It’s a beautiful meditation on love and on being human. The other man in Rachael’s orbit is Stephan Lubert, the dignified German architect who comes between 'The British Couple'. Lubert is a very sophisticated man, very intelligent, and highly educated. But he’s a broken man. He has lost almost everything, his beloved wife, his job, and his house. In a way, he’s lost his daughter Freda because she blames him for the death of her mother. He's struggling to reach her and connect with her. Although Lubert is not a 'Nazi Sympathizer', he’s someone who turned a blind eye to the atrocities happening all around him, focusing instead on the welfare of his own family. He’s morally corrupt in a way. He didn’t know what was going on in the camps, but at the same time, he’s carrying this guilt of not doing anything. He wasn’t part of the resistance. He wasn’t fighting against fascism. He just put his head down and got on with it, which he has to now live with and that's very difficult for him. Adding to the strain is the animosity directed at Lubert by his 16-year-old daughter Freda, who blames her father for her mother’s death and feels nothing but hatred for 'The English Couple' taking over their family’s home, feelings that eventually drive her into the arms of Albert (Jannik Schumann), a young Nazi in hiding. Freda feels there’s no one she can talk to about what has happened. Barely concealing her hatred toward Lubert, Rachael tries to establish something resembling a normal life, but normalcy proves elusive in a foreign land. Even her friendship with the socially-minded Susan Burnam (Kate Phillips), wife to Lewis colleague Major Keith Burnam (Martin Compston), offers her little in the way of candor. Rachael can never honestly reveal her innermost thoughts without worrying about becoming the subject of gossip or scorn. The most important of any of the film’s locations, however, is 'Villa Lubert', the immaculate residence where the bulk of the story unfolds. The house is much more a character itself. The size of the house is important to demonstrate their wealth, but also for practical purposes, who make sure the décor reflected Lubert’s appreciation for the modern art movement of the 1930s and ’40s. It’s a house that Rachael doesn’t understand. It’s meant to frighten Rachael because she knows nothing about any of the things in it. There were lots of patterns everywhere, and they really added texture to the background. The house really illustrates the characters. This film is based on the 2013 novel 'The Aftermath' written by Rhidian Brook. Brook used the seed of his own grandfather’s improbable history to inspire this story. Colonel Walter Brook was one of 'The English' officers dispatched to Germany to get the country back on it's feet after years of death and destruction. Governor of a district near Hamburg, Walter Brook, requisitioned a house for his family but chose not to have it's German owners evicted. Thus, two families, who months before had been on opposite sides of the deadly conflict, found themselves sharing a home, an arrangement that lasted for five years. Walter Brook is the inspiration for Colonel Lewis Morgan, the enlightened and altruistic army officer who allows Stephan Lubert, an architect awaiting official permission to work again, to stay on in his mansion on 'The Elbe'. There was an 'English' occupation of Germany after the war. When you’ve been enemies for so long, do you suddenly see people as people again, and not simply as evil and on the other side. It’s an extraordinary moment, the world’s been absolutely laid flat in a way it never had before. 'The British' in particular felt very strongly that we shouldn’t repeat what happened at the end of 'The First World War', so the idea of punishing Germany was off the agenda. That makes it an astonishingly generous, positive, and far-sighted moment in British history. It’s a really difficult thing to do when you’ve lived through such incredibly violent times and everybody has experienced such loss. How do you see the humanity in people that you’ve been raised to believe are evil. How do you bring a nation back from destruction? How do you respond to the aftermath of something so monstrous and horrific? How do you get through to the other side? We've read a lot of 'Second World War' stories, and a lot of them are very black and white. It’s very much 'The Germans' are all evil, and 'The Allied' soldiers and civilians all good. To see Hamburg in 1945, the devastation, half the city was levelled and feral kids were running around the streets desperately trying to find food, that misery is heartbreaking. It shows the horrors of war on both sides. It’s not clear cut, and it’s not about winners and losers. It feels like a very different insight into 'The Post-Second World War Period'. Of course, 'The European Union' came out of this moment, and it feels like this is something that speak to us very directly now. It’s a beautiful story of love and loss and human resilience; about our capacity to, after going through the most horrific chapter in human history, reinvent yourself and begin again. But it’s also a film with a larger message about the importance of forgiveness, compassion, and the fundamental need for human connection. We live at a time when we've a refugee crisis on our hands, our politics are shifting and we've a crisis of international understanding across 'The Western World'. We've a responsibility to the future, just as the generation had in 1945, and their challenge was much larger than ours, and they rose to it.

(Release Info London schedule; March 1st, 2019, Peckham Multiplex, 95 a Rye Lane, 15:45 PM) "What They Had" From first-time director Elizabeth Chomko, "What They Had" centers on a family in crisis. Bridget Erzt (Hilary Swank) returns home to Chicago at her brother’s Nick (Michael Shannon) urging to deal with her ailing mother Ruth (Blythe Danner) and her father’s Burt (Robert Forster) reluctance to let go of their life together.     After her ailing mother wanders off during a blizzard, Bridget returns to her childhood home in Chicago, accompanied by her rebellious college-age daughter. Forced to referee between her father’s stubborn insistence that his wife remain at home and her equally determined brother’s efforts to place her in a sought-after memory care facility, Bridget struggles to make sense of a lifetime of family conflict. With her mother’s decline becoming increasingly obvious, long-simmering resentments make an already difficult decision close to impossible. Bridget, a California chef, is called home to Chicago when her ailing mother Ruth disappears in the middle of a blizzard. With her rebellious daughter Emma (Taissa Farmiga) in tow, Bridget arrives to find Ruth safe, but increasingly confused and disoriented. Ruth’s latest excursion is the last straw for her son Nicky, who believes she needs to be in a memory care facility, but her husband Burt (Robert Forster) insists that her place is with him at home in the life they have made together. Bridget struggles with her own troubled marriage, her complicated relationship with Emma and her guilt about having left her family in Chicago. As Nicky pushes her to put Ruth in a nursing home and Bert grows angry with her interference, Bridget searches for a solution that will make everyone happy. Then, the family faces one more unexpected crisis that forces her into an impossible position. "What They Had" is an intimate and tender story of a challenge faced by many families. A poignant look at a heart-wrenching and familial dilemma. At the center of "What They Had’s" family drama is Bridget Ertz, a 40-something chef contemplating the next stage of her life. Women especially are inclined to put others first and often lose touch with their own needs, just as Bridget has. “What They Had" is about a family and about a woman in her 40s coming into her own in a very nature way. Then there's a family crisis that serves as a kick-starter for looking at how she’s been living her life. She learns how differently we see our parents at each point of our lives. We've all these beautiful revelations that we've as we mature that give us respect for our parents’ journeys. The message at the heart of the film is universal. Ruth, provides the heart of the family and the soul of the movie with seemingly little effort. She was a working woman with a highly responsible position, and you can imagine the frustration, confusion and anger that losing her mental acuity would bring. When we first meet Ruth, she's already on her way down the road. She's always outgoing and cheerful, which is a major chord in her life that she's somehow able to hang on to. As her memory fades, Ruth has become increasingly dependent on her husband, Burt. Burt adores her and treats her like a doll. He paints her toenails, colors her hair and maintains her in a loving way. But it has to be traumatizing for such an accomplished person to start to realize how completely needy she's becoming. The way Burt looks at life is that you do the right thing. You do it with commitment and fierce loyalty. There’s a nobility in doing what you're supposed to do and getting to the important stuff now, including taking care of your family. Start there. Because life is an arc. When you’re born you depend on your parents to take care of you. Then you learn to take care of yourself. Then it’s your turn to take care of others and finally, you've to rely on the ones you've parented. Burt is protecting his wife and putting up the fight of his life, according. Because Nicky stayed in Chicago while his sister slipped away to 'The West Coast', he has been managing his elderly parent's situation alone. With his mother’s condition deteriorating and his father weighed down by his denial of the seriousness of the situation, Nicky has turned to his sister for some support. Nicky is that critical voice we all have in our heads that chatters away about our perceived failings. Nicky is not the antagonist in the story; the only antagonist is time; but he does serve as that voice, confronting them all with painful truths. And he’s usually right. And that pushes them all to grow, to come of age. Coming of age is not something we do once; we’re always coming of age. That’s what the film is in many ways, three generations coming of age. While Bridget’s husband remains in California, her sulky daughter Emma accompanies her to Chicago. Emma is a girl on the brink of adulthood struggling hard to live up to her mother’s expectations. So hard that she hasn’t taken the time to figure out her own expectations. She’s about to enter the world, but her mother has been smothering her with her own thoughts and opinions and anxieties. She and her mother aren’t that different. They are both so busy worrying about others that they haven’t taken time to think about their own happiness. We didn’t have the real estate for a deep expositional dive on what's going on with Emma. In "What They Had", director Elizabeth Chomko transforms her family’s history into an intensely personal, often funny and lovingly optimistic story about love, duty and self-discovery. When Chomko’s beloved grandmother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease 17 years ago, her family rallied to support her and her husband as they faced one of the biggest challenges of their lives. Knowing little about Alzheimer’s, one of the most common forms of dementia, Chomko feared that her grandmother was destined to become a shell of her former self, stripped of all the important moments of her life. Chronicling her grandparent's story feels like an opportunity for Chomko to spend time with them again. It's heartbreaking, of course, but it's also life-affirming, and spiritual, and absolutely hilarious. It brings you family closer together, and pulls you apart, and forces you to reckon with things we never wanted to look at. It prompts all of us to sort of come of age, no matter how old we're. What are we without our memories? It's a fight against fading memory. The film is an intergenerational love story, tells the story of a loving couple slowly losing the life they built together. It's also about the love between mothers and daughters, and about a woman learning to love herself. There’s heroism in everyday people. Caregiving is a truly heroic act. It’s challenging and often thankless and we don’t have a formula for it; there's never an easy answer for the questions it poses. As our world grows older, more of us will find ourselves suddenly parenting our parents, co-parenting them with our siblings. In the saddest moments of our lives, the heaviness has to be broken and that’s often with laughter. We should always be asking ourselves what we want out of our lives. Are we being fulfilled? Are we connecting? Because life is short, and we should try to live it to the fullest and be grateful to those who help us along the way. On social media, everyone has a perfect life, so you try and be perfect. This family is handling painful, complicated things and becoming better people by doing that. The film looks a bit of a documentary-like approach with the shooting, so it feels like you're there, but the film wants to make things a bit more beautiful than in real life; colors more saturated, certain images more classically composed. Because when you look back, things always seems more beautiful in your memory than it did when you lived it. And as with any family, there are secrets in closets, shadows in corners; there are creaky old resentments. The film captures that darkness, shoot through doorways, find shadows in the shots. The story is relatively simple, which allows everything else to be complex and sticky and odd-ball and human, the way only real life can be. So very many of us are affected by memory loss. There’s something in the film that makes people laugh and cry and perhaps walk away with the same sense of hope.

The latest instalment added to the Marvel Cinematic Universe library, showcases Marvel’s response to the successful DC female empowering superhero film WonderWoman. Captain Marvel tells the story of Vers, a female being associated with the Kree empire, an alien race whose planet is far, far away from planet C53 (Earth). Her memories have been wiped due to an unknown event in her past, and as the film progresses, Vers tries to find out who her true self really is. Set in the 90’s, Captain Marvel will answer questions needed in order to watch the next MCU film (Avengers: Endgame). Overall, the film was O.K., which in terms of MCU films is not great. Various humorous scenes and a couple of fight sequences (particularly the train scene emphasised in trailers) kept us briefly on our toes, but everything else was so bland. The most disappointing aspect were the visuals. Set in the 90’s, this film should have oozed a lava field of happy nostalgia. Images of Fresh Prince of Bel Air, shell-suits, Spice Girls, 90’s R&B/Hip-Hop first spring to mind, things abundant with whacky, bright colours. Instead, the style was overly grey, dark and dull, optimised towards the end where action scenes were so dark and edited so badly, it was difficult to see what was really going on. Apart from the Blockbusters store and a humorous computer download scene, not a lot of the visuals were reminiscent of the 90’s most of us remember. Brie Larson wasn’t exactly a rainbow of joy. A good actress, but someone who lacked fun, spunk, and great on-screen charm compared to other Marvel characters we’ve come to love. The depth of the film’s message was to inspire girls (and boys) to keep trying, to keep getting up no matter how many times you fall down. A good message, but with Brie Larson being the messenger, dilutes and forces it onto audiences, as opposed to a message being connoted in affective semiotics. Audiences will unashamedly compare this lone female Marvel superhero to DC’s WonderWoman, and it maybe unfair to say, but Captain Marvel is no WonderWoman. Audiences will be waiting for that heroic, uplifting moment that would make them love Captain Marvel, like when WonderWoman crossed ‘No Man’s Land’ in order to save the village, but no such event occurs. The storyline itself was fine, but more depth and back story from both the protagonists and antagonists is needed to make us more emotionally attached. Perhaps more history into Captain Marvel’s forgotten past (like who her father was, whether she had any siblings, any past loves) would have helped us feel more connected to the character, but the lack of backstory (maybe due to the storyline itself where she has forgotten her Earth past) brought a lacklustre of any sentiment or emotion we would have had for her. It wasn’t all bad. Samuel L. Jackson gave another great performance as Nick Fury. The CGI to make Samuel look almost 30 years younger was incredible, and we find out how Fury lost an eye, which audiences will either love or hate (I personally loved it). Admittedly, the unconventional pairing and chemistry between Brie and Samuel was quite warm, fun and endearing, but it just wasn’t enough to save this film from being such a blah MCU film. The film just felt like a quick simple filler to help explain why Captain Marvel hadn’t appeared in previous MCU films, and it also probably didn’t help that there were two directors, Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck. It would have been better to let Anna Boden (the FEMALE director) take the full rein of Marvel’s first FEMALE superhero film, as Patty Jenkins did for DC’s WonderWoman. How I would rate this film within the realms of MCU, it stands between the really bad first two Thor movies, and the average MCU films such as Dr Strange and Spider-Man: Homecoming. Optimism to end on, is that if you stay to watch the post-credit scenes, what is really intriguing and exciting to see is how Captain Marvel, the most powerful superhero character we have seen thus far, will interact with the rest of the Avengers, as the contrast between Captain Marvel and the others is so drastically different, similar to the anticipation we had to what the interaction would be like between Dr Strange and Iron Man, and Guardians of the Galaxy and Thor. Rating: 6/10