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(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

Even if you never had to learn police work like the rest of us plebs, anybody with a TV knows that it takes three bodies to make a serial killer. You know what I’m saying, you’re just being pedantic. Take the brilliant movie “Se7en” and replace the two inspectors Somerset and Mills with a duo that can’t get along and where one of them is female, then you get something similar as “Charismata“. Only it’s far from brilliant in terms of acting and the narrative. And even though Mills was a bit cocky and a wiseass in “Se7en,” there was also mutual respect. That doesn’t really apply to Rebecca (Sarah Beck Mather) and Eli (Andonis Anthony). Eli is an arrogant and obnoxious guy who always sees an opportunity to belittle his partner. The movie is filled with unfriendly people. But honestly, most people in this film are blessed with an ugly personality. The two inspectors, who assist in the investigation, constantly spit sexist statements and never take Rebecca seriously. She’s the daughter of the commissioner. So remarks about her job being dropped in her lap, are commonplace. Even the pharmacists are terribly unfriendly and snippy. I’m starting to believe the U.K. is inhabited with bad-tempered and unfriendly people. But believe me, the constantly unfriendly atmosphere started to annoy me. First, it’s a genuine war-movie Also in “Charismata“, they have to deal with an insane serial killer. The victims follow each other rapidly. The one murder even more horrifying than the other. Unfortunately, the first one shown, is the only one that’s off the same level as those in “Se7en“. A dark room in a dilapidated building where the rats have feasted on a half-decayed corpse. This looked fairly realistic and horrifying. The satanic images and carved numbers in the wall make it mysterious. Unfortunately, the design of the following victims wasn’t so successful. They were just stand-ins covered with lots of fake blood. Probably the budget for special effects was already exhausted after the first corpse. Michael Sweet. Such a charming person. What are the most successful aspects of “Charismata“? First, there’s Jamie Satterthwaite, who plays the snobbish Michael Sweet. A yuppie and partner of a company trading in real estates. And their estates are mostly the location where a victim is discovered. Michael Sweet is for me the most sublime appearance in this movie. His charisma and mysterious smile. He’s as innocent as a lamb and laughs off every accusation. A character who could easily play the role of Bateman in “American Psycho“. Hallucinations? Or not? The next positive point in this movie is the way in which Rebecca’s mental instability is portrayed. The reason why she has a psychological problem is solidly substantiated. A messy divorce. A brutal ex. Selling her apartment goes awry. Unfriendly colleagues who treat her disrespectfully. And then also a stressful case with a serial killer with nauseating crime scenes as a result. Then there’s the fact that she takes antidepressant medication with a lot of alcohol. So it’s no surprise she’s having hallucinations. And those hallucinations are worked out magnificently. No exaggerated effects and some adequately executed scare moments. Or aren’t these hallucinations? It had potential. Is “Charismata” a decent film you should definitely watch? Looking at the plus and the negative points, you’d say that it’s well balanced. Such that it can be called an average film. Indeed. Even though the acting is sometimes of a “Coronation Street” level and the story is rather superficial, you can’t say it’s extremely bad. But that feeling is completely undermined by the terrible, meaningless ending. It’s flat n’inane beyond belief. The run-up to this wasn’t bad. It even became gross at a certain moment. But the denouement creates some forehead-frowning, after which you wonder why on earth you’ve watched it. It seemed as if the makers realized they needed an end and there was no creative inspiration left. Too bad, because the film surely had potential. My rating 4/10 Links: IMDB

(Release Info U.K. schedule; March 15th, 2019: ● Everyman 96 - 98 Baker St, Marylebone, London W1U 6T, 10:15 AM ● Red Carpet Cinema, Barton under Needwood, Barton Marina, Staffordshire, DE13 8AS, 13:25 PM ● Hyde Park Picture House, Leeds, 73 Brudenell Road, Headingley, Leeds, West Yorkshire, LS6 1JD, 18:10 PM) "Ben Is Back" Nineteen-year-old Ben Burns (Lucas Hedges) unexpectedly returns home to his family's suburban home on 'Christmas Eve' morning. Ben’s mother, Holly (Julia Roberts), is relieved and welcoming but wary of her son staying clean. Over a turbulent 24 hours, new truths are revealed, and a mother's undying love for her son is tested as she does everything in her power to keep him safe. On 'Christmas Eve' morning, 19-year-old Ben Burns unexpectedly returns to surprise his family at their cozy suburban home. His mother Holly is thrilled to be reunited with her son but wary about his ability to stay clean, while Ben’s distrustful sister Ivy (Kathryn Newton) and common-sense stepfather Neal (Courtney B. Vance) fear he will wreak havoc on their lives as he’s done so many times before. After Ben launches a charm offensive that wins over his young half-siblings, Holly agrees to let him stay for the holiday on one condition; for the next 24 hours, she will personally monitor his every move. That evening the family returns from a church Christmas pageant to find that their house has been ransacked. Worse still, their beloved dog is missing. It’s a message that Ben’s past has caught up with him and old debts must be paid. Heading into the frigid night, Ben and his mother embark on a quest to recover the dog from whichever of Ben’s former associates may have taken him. Along the way, as he tries to make things right and she learns unsettling truths about her son’s life, Holly does everything in her power to keep Ben safe. "Ben Is Back" is an intimate look at a mother struggling to protect her son from himself. What happens in one day if a young man in recovery comes home when it’s probably too early for him to return. What it’s like to get to the point where you do these really harmful things to yourself just so you can get high. Going in and out of rehab, struggling. Have no business taking on a daily basis. What you didn’t realize is that it's just as prevalent, if not more, in suburban and rural parts of America. The film shows the contrast between Ben’s wholesome family life and the gritty subculture in which much of the film’s third act takes place. It's a homeless tent city. But the deeply conflicted look on Holly Burns face when she arrives home to find her oldest son Ben on her doorstep makes it instantly clear that this family faces a profound challenge of it's own, one that cuts across economic and social strata. That’s not to say that Holly does everything right. She makes a lot of questionable choices. But she never makes them with malicious intent. They always come from this aching hope to be a protector and a provider for her children. This mother who will not give up on her child no matter what. Ivy is not just be the bratty perfect sister. She’s disappointed in Ben but at the same time she loves her brother and cares deeply about him. That said the core of their relationship. Neal is Ben’s level-headed stepfather. He sees what’s going on in this family with the most clarity. He loves his wife and loves his family, so the question becomes; is tough love the best solution? Are we enabling Ben, or protecting him, or saving him? We've to make some very tough calls. "Ben Is Back", opens on a family that seems at first glance. Affluent, attractive and loving, with their talented teenage daughter singing in the choir and their adorable younger children dressed up for a Christmas pageant, the Burnses evoke a modern version of a 'Norman Rockwell' painting. Hedges compresses his story into a single 24-hour time frame, starting the movie on 'Christmas Eve' morning. The script really speaks to the myriad ways addiction can impact a family. This is a complex story about a flawed family of all shapes and sizes and the unique struggles they face. It's a funny tale of an imperfect family doing their best in an imperfect world. The film explores how one broken, hurting person can impact all the members of his family. It’s a thriller with lots of twists and turns, lots of surprises, lots of gasping. It's a riveting story of love, forgiveness and redemption. Home may be where the heart is, but it’s also the source of pain, confusion and psychological turmoil. One thing is certain; this will be a 'Christmas Day' to remember..Above all, "Ben Is Back" is a really good yarn and very moving. "Ben Is Back" forces audiences to put themselves in the position of a parent who would do anything to help their child, but doesn’t know how, or if, they can. There are a hundred different narratives for every family. But the one concept to put across in this movie is just to not give up on each other. It's a non-judgmental portrait of characters who are each suffering from a disease that’s often perceived as a moral failing. There's a stigma around people who struggle with addiction. The film creates some sense of understanding around how hard it's to be dealt that hand. Rather than offering simplistic answers, "Ben Is Back" aims for a nuanced look at how well-meaning people often respond imperfectly to situations beyond their control. The kind of movie where when you leave the theater, you feel more alive and more open to other people’s experiences and you’re reminded of the fragility and beauty of life.

(South By Southwest Film Festival, March 14th, 2019, Austin, TX, Zach Theatre, 2:00 pm) "Apollo 11" From director Todd Douglas Miller comes a cinematic event fifty years in the making. Crafted from a newly discovered trove of 65mm footage, and more than 11,000 hours of uncatalogued audio recordings, "Apollo 11" takes us straight to the heart of 'NASA’s' most celebrated mission; the one that first put men on the moon, and forever made Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin into household names. Immersed in the perspectives of the astronauts, the team in 'Mission Control', and the millions of spectators on the ground, we vividly experience those momentous days and hours in 1969 when humankind took a giant leap into the future. From director Todd Douglas Miller comes a cinematic event fifty years in the making. Crafted from a newly discovered trove of 65mm footage, and more than 11,000 hours of uncatalogued audio recordings, "Apollo 11" takes us straight to the heart of 'NASA’s' most celebrated mission; the one that first put men on the moon, and forever made Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin into household names. Immersed in the perspectives of the astronauts, the team in 'Mission Control', and the millions of spectators on the ground, we vividly experience those momentous days and hours in 1969 when humankind took a giant leap into the future. Miller works closely with 'NASA' and 'The National Archives' (NARA) to locate all existing "Apollo 11" footage when 'NARA' staff members make a startling discovery that changed the course of the project; an unprocessed collection of 65mm large format footage, never before seen by the public, containing stunning shots of the launch, the inside of 'Mission Control', and recovery and post-mission activities. The footage is so pristine and the find so significant that the project evolved beyond filmmaking into one of film curation and historic preservation. The other unexpected find is a massive cache of audio recordings, more than 11,000 hours, make by two custom recorders which captured individual tracks from 60 key mission personnel throughout every moment of the mission. The film creates a code to restore the audio and make it searchable, then began the multi-year process of listening to and documenting the recordings, an effort that yielded remarkable new insights into key events of the mission as well as surprising moments of humor and camaraderie. The digitization of the 65mm collection, as well as the re-scanning of 16mm and 35mm materials, is undertaken at 'Final Frame', a post-production house in New York City, which helped create a custom scanner, capable of high dynamic range scanning at resolutions up to 8K. The resulting transfer, from which the film is cut, is the highest resolution, highest quality digital collection of "Apollo 11" footage in existence. Constructed entirely from archival materials and eschewing talking heads, "Apollo 11" captures the enormity of the event by giving audiences of all ages the direct experience of being there. When John F. Kennedy pledged in 1962 to put Americans on the moon by the end of the decade, he described it as a bold act of faith and vision. "Apollo 11" bears witness to the culmination of that pledge, when America and the world came together in an extraordinary act of unity and resolve, to achieve one of the greatest and most complex feats in human history. A lot of films have been made about 'Apollo 11', the first mission to land humans on the moon, but what sets this film apart is the fact that this is history being made again, new footage that's previously unknown has been expertly restored and scanned at the highest resolution possible, presenting never-before-seen footage from what many consider the crowning achievement of humankind to date. We're able for the first time in history to get new glimpses and new information about how we landed men on the moon. The original source material was 70MM, which is the widest-format film you're going to find. The detail that's brought out is considerable, for example, there's a scene capturing the astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins suiting up for the mission. We knew that scene was filmed, but when it was shown to the public, it had been cropped to 35MM in order to match the other film that was available. Many scenes like this have been expanded to a widescreen view, and we see them in high-definition for the first time. For the viewing public, this means a more visceral, you-are-there feeling, including being in the room with the astronauts as they're getting ready that July morning. For historians, it's an opportunity to see the whole layout of what was happening that day, featuring details that weren't previously available. The fact that these new reels were discovered by coincidence sitting in 'The National Archives' so close to 'Fhe 50th Anniversary' of the moon landing makes for a wonderful discovery, giving us the ability to celebrate it properly. Originally 'NASA' held the footage in a storage facility but over the years it was transferred to 'The National Archives', where it was more or less forgotten. Some of the footage was prepared for a documentary released in the 1970s, but once again the footage was cropped. This is the raw footage as it was originally taken, and since 'NASA' didn't have the funds or interest to produce more material, it sat unused. Fifty years later, the possibility of finding footage we've never seen before is becoming more and more rare, if not impossible. Because it's such a famous, iconic event in history, one would think that all footage that was ever to be seen from it would have already been discovered. The audio footage is something we knew existed, it had not been lost to the years like some of the images, but we've only had access to it recently. When the astronauts went to the moon, there were several different tracks of audio, including the space-to ground audio, or the voice of the astronauts being broadcast to the ground, and the singular voice of the representative from 'Mission Control' being transmitted back up to the astronauts. There were other tracks that were known to exist which had not been released to the public, including the flight director's loop, featuring all the voices from 'Mission Control' consoles talking to him. In addition, there was footage of the astronaut's voices from space as well as the back-room audio loops coming from 'Mission Support'. 'NASA' made hours of this audio available, and the film remastered it and synching it up with available film footage. For the first time, you can watch flight controllers speaking from 'Mission Control' and actually hear what they're saying because the audio has been meticulously synched with the corresponding moment in time. There's spectacular footage of average Americans watching the launch from parking lots and Florida beaches. A film team from 'NASA' captured the estimated one million people who showed up for the launch, the most people ever to show up for an event like this. This was the same film team that was documenting the astronauts preparing for the launch, for a project named 'Moonwalk One'. While this footage had been previously released, it was cropped, sometimes dramatically, so we're seeing a much wider view than ever before, we've a fuller record of what was filmed, in the widest format and highest definition possible. We can see more details than ever before. Watching the crowds outside J.C.Penney and along the beaches, you can see how people dressed at the time, what cars they drove. You can even see the reflection of the launch in the sunglasses of spectators as they watch it take off. You experience a tremendous mix of feelings watching these scenes, which are almost hyper-real. In one sense you know you're watching footage that's 50 years old, it exudes that sense of age and time, but what's most striking is how state-of-the-art it looks, like it's shot with the highest-quality camera you can find today. We all know how the launch sequence is going to turn out, we know going in that they will make it to the moon and back, but you're on the edge of your seat all over again because it looks and feels like a live event unfurling in the present. It feels like something entirely new, even though this is some of the most famous historical footage ever recorded. The centerpiece of this movie is the moon landing, and the moonwalk. We're seeing these scenes presented in a new way. The space footage is not new, but it was treated like the rest of the film, scanned at the highest resolution possible and placed into the context of a movie that draws you forward through existing archival footage, not through someone looking back and describing how it occurred. A lot of documentaries have depicted the moon landing and the moonwalk using narration or talking heads, contemporary commentary, which frames the footage so it feels like you're watching history. Because this film is 'cinema vérité', you're watching archival material telling the story itself in an approximation of real time, the sensation is like watching it unfold for the first time. For the first time, this is bona fide footage that we've not seen before, so the discovery alone was exciting. Add to that the latest in film technology, the ability to present this footage in high resolution, and large format, which looks amazing on the big screen and almost beyond belief on in a large- format presentation. Simply being able to bring the mission back to life and see it on a scale this huge is probably the most exciting factor. Scanning the rows inside the launch control center, being inside the suit-up room with the astronauts, getting a wider and more audible perspective of 'Mission Control' during the launch, and being on board 'The U.S.S. Hornet' as the astronauts returned from the mission; you can even spot Nixon in the crowd here. We've photographic documentation from these aspects of the mission, and other 16MM film taken from different vantage points, but the fact that we're seeing this from a new perspective, with new details to catch in a much wider frame, with clearer resolution, these are the moments you long for in a movie like this. This mission was well documented but now you've the opportunity to pick out details that tell a whole new story. The race to the moon unfolded in what was a perfect storm of events in the late 1960s, if all those events did not occur, we probably would never have reached the moon. We didn't go because we're scientifically interested in the moon, we went because we're in a cold war with 'The Soviet Union' and it was a testament of our technological prowess that we could send someone to the moon; it might have unfolded differently if this happened during peacetime. This was the crowning achievement of a race between two world powers fighting each other in a way that no one was actually hurt. From a cultural standpoint, the moon has been a symbol of many different things to people throughout humanity, it has always been that unreachable world and we're fueled by the notion that if we can send a man to the moon, we can do anything. John F. Kennedy saw it as a political need in order to beat 'The Russians'. When he was assassinated it became the vision and goal fallen hero, and it was untouchable from a political standpoint because it would have been seen as stomping on the legacy of a slain president. This was the culmination of a goal set out by someone that Americans, and the world, looked up to. If anything is going to be remembered about 'The 20th Century', it's going to be the fact that we took our first steps on another celestial body, because this is the future of humanity, the promise of going further. 'Apollo 11' was only the first step. The mission of 'Apollo 11' is one of the greatest achievements in human history, hundreds of thousands of people spread across tens of thousands of companies all focused on putting the first humans on another world. At times it feels like the film has just as many moving parts. What started out as a simple editing exercise, the film tells the entire story of the mission using only archival materials, turned into a cooperative effort by an international team of experts to create the definitive work on 'Apollo 11' for the screen. The remarkable discovery of a cache of untouched large format film and audio recordings added another dimension to the project; it's more than just a film now, it's an opportunity to curate and preserve this priceless historical material. We remind us that great things can be accomplished when people unite for a common goal. Fifty years later we've changed focus. Our original visions of how to go into space were not to go directly to the moon, it had to do with what came later, which was to establish a space shuttle and space station, then establish ourselves in orbit and go out even further. But a confluence of events changed our priorities. We haven't been back to the moon since 1972, after the sixth moon landing, but we're on the verge of returning, not as singular nations but in privatized missions. We've come to the point where there are companies that are building the rockets that will take private citizens to the moon. Countries like China are sending rovers to the far side of the moon, were no one has ventured before, as recently as January 2019. Later this year, the first Israeli moon lander will be launched from 'Kennedy Space Center' here in 'The U.S.' So we're having a lunar renaissance in the way that we're having more and more countries and organizations sending missions to the moon. Meanwhile, 'NASA' is looking in coming years to send astronauts back to the lunar orbit in cooperation with it's European, Canadian, Russian and Japanese partners with the intention of pushing on to Mars. After 50 years, we're at a new crossroads where we're ready to travel beyond flags and footprints toward more permanent lunar settlement. Soon we'll have a lasting presence there, pushing out into the solar system with the goal of always having humans exploring space.

(Release Info U.K. schedule: ■ Saturday 16 March 11.00am - Oxford | Ripon | Soho | Victoria | Wimbledon ■ Sunday 17 March 11.00am - Canterbury | Colchester | Knutsford | Mayfair | Richmond | Sheffield ■ Sunday 24 March 11.00am - Aldgate | Bloomsbury) "At Eternity's Gate" A look at the life of painter Vincent van Gogh (William Dafoe) during the time he lives in Arles and Auvers-sur-Oise, France. On February 20th 1888, Vincent van Gogh arrives in Arles. Before that, he lived in Paris for two years, where he developed a thoroughly modern style of painting. During the more than fourteen months which he spent in Arles, he creates a multitude of paintings and drawings, many ofwhich are nowadays seen as highlights of late 19th century art. Tired of the busy city life and the cold northern climate, Van Gogh heads South in search of warmer weather, and above all to find the bright light and colours of Provence so as to further modernize his new way of painting. On October 23rd, Paul Gauguin (Oscar Isaac) comes to Arles. The two artists live and paint together for two months. It's a time filled with great mutual inspiration, but in the end their characters and artistic temperaments clashed. On December 23rd, Van Gogh sufferers a mental breakdown, probably a first sign of his illness, and cut off a part of his left ear. Gauguin leaves, and Van Gogh’s dream of a studio with other painters is shattered. He spent some more time in the hospital after a second breakdown in February 1889. He continues to work in Arles for a few more months, but has himself interned voluntarily in the asylum in Saint-Rémy on May 8th 1889. It's a deep dive into the emotional core of Vincent Van Gogh. It's the story of a man who's foremost a human being. Vincent goes through this mix of creative explosion and personal implosion. He falls in love with 'The South Of France" all over again and take it in with all of his senses on overdrive. He's ferocious in his desire to touch God through color, through light, through perspective, through responding fully to the landscape and his surrounding world. He's trying to capture a reality that to him felt closer to God than what we normally see. When Vincent is communing with nature, he’s a rich man and it doesn’t matter if he’s sold paintings or not. Van Gogh has a depth afection for his brother Theo (Rupert Friend), the one person he could always talk to about art and life, in pleasure or despair. He cares for him in so many ways. It's a very loving relationship. And Theo sees in his brother what other people didn’t yet see, never wavering in his confdence of his brother’s talent. Vincent struggles in many ways throughout his life, which is evidenced in his letters to Theo. The story includes another 'immortal' painter; Paul Gauguin, who joined Van Gogh in Arles, becoming for a time his housemate. He's a central figure in Van Gogh’s later life. Much has been made of their tempestuous relationship, and it's role in Van Gogh’s apparent bouts of madness. What’s most in evidence is that Van Gogh and Gauguin both paint a lot in those weeks. Van Gogh paints from models, but Gauguin paints from memory and imagination. It's two diferent ways of seeing and we imagined how they might have talked to one another about those diferences. Gauguin is someone who recognizes an artistic and intellectual equal in Van Gogh. In most movies, Gauguin has been shown as sort of a jerk who couldn’t handle Van Gogh. Gauguin wrote some very beautiful things to and about Van Gogh after he left Arles. There’s a letter that Gauguin wrote to Van Gogh, when he's in the asylum saying he wanted to trade a painting with him. And that letter is really the best review that Van Gogh could get, because Van Gogh cared about what Paul thought. And the fact is that Gauguin cared about Van Gogh, too. This time Gauguin and Van Gogh spent in Arles has taken on such mythical proportions because the outpouring of creativity is so condensed and pressurized. Van Gogh is so alone much of the time, so locked in his own brain, that Gauguin in that moment is really almost a lifeline for him, the one person who could maybe understand some of what he's trying to do. When you see him out in that feld smiling while pouring dirt on his face, he's not a poor man. He's a man who feels he's in the right place at the right time, in complete connection with being alive. They’re literally sitting right next to each other, but Van Gogh is painting what he sees in front him in his own wild way and Gauguin is completely inventing something. They’re both grappling with what it means to be a painter and why they do things as they do. The film is a portrait of anybody who has ever sat down to create something, whether you’re a painter or not. In the film, Vincent’s audience is not born yet, but that doesn’t stop him from doing what he was compelled to do. This movie is an accumulation of scenes based on painter Vincent van Gogh’s letters, common agreement about events in his life that parade as facts, hearsay, and scenes that are just plain invented. The making of art gives an opportunity to make a palpable body that expresses a reason to live, if such a thing exists. Even with all the violence and tragedy that has been associated with Van Gogh’s life, there's no doubt, his was a life lived rich with magic, profound communication with nature and the wonder of being. His unique perspective is one whose belief and vision make visible and physical the inexpressible. This is not a forensic biography about the painter. It's about what it's to be an artist. Can a movie speak to, in it's own kinetic, time-altering way, the intense swirl of feeling and aliveness that goes into painting? When you stand in front of a particular work, each one tells you something. But after you look at 30 paintings, the experience becomes something more. It becomes an accumulation of all those diferent feelings put together. Each event you see happening to Vincent aggregates, it feels as if this entire period of his life is happening to you in a moment. Van Gogh in the last years of his life was totally aware of the fact that he had a new vision of the world, that he was no longer painting the same way as other painters. The film captures some things that have often evaded movies about artists. Van Gogh’s final days is a view into the artist unlike any other. This is a story that pursues what the act of creation, that visceral, searing magic that defes all words and obliterates time, feels like from the inside, the strenuous physicality of painting and the devotional intensity of the artist’s life, especially the way painters see. The result is a kaleidoscopic and surprising movie experience, one that becomes just as much about the role of the artist in the world, about being alive and reaching for the eternal, as it's about the beauty and wonder Van Gogh left behind, never knowing his profound impact. The Van Gogh seen in the film comes directly out of the personal response to his paintings, not just what people have written about him. The film does draw on letters, biographies, the legends we’ve all heard as well as the innumerable perspectives to the history. But at heart, this is a work of sheer imagination, an ode to the artistic spirit and to having a conviction so absolute that you must devote your life to it. It’s a film about a painter, Van Gogh, in which the fil tries not to provide a biography of Van Gogh, that would be absurd, it’s so well known, but to dream up scenes that might have taken place, in which Van Gogh might have participated, might have taken part, in the course of which he might have spoken, but which history does not record. The film goes beyond a classic biopic. It's truly a painter’s film, the vision of an artist giving us an insight into the process of artistic creation. If you look at Van Gogh’s paintings and drawings you see a view of someone who's far away from society but in the middle of nature. We needed to take his walk and follow his physically demanding path, in order to see what he saw. Silence is as important as dialogue, landscape as much as portraiture. As you keep walking you get pushed a little further and further, until you can see past what you thought you could see, and maybe even see what he saw. We all have a terminal case of life. Painting is a practice that in some ways addresses death, because it's related to life yet diferent from the rest of life, so it gives you access to this other place. Art can transgress death.

McCleary said you were brutal. I can be. I want you to hurt them. It’s not just the fact that defenseless young children are victims of unscrupulous people who use them in networks for pedophiles. The most disgusting aspect of this is that these circuits are visited by people who occupy important positions in daily life. Individuals who show a respectable and neat appearance to the outside world. But once they show up in this nauseating business, their fortune is their entrance ticket so they can abuse these innocent children. Joe (Joaquin Phoenix) is someone who wants to set things straight. Armed with a heavy hammer, he beats those perverts from their victims. But “You were never really here” is not just about the existence of children’s networks. The film also tries to paint a picture of the person Joe who is daily tormented by his own demons. Every time Joe gets on screen, you just feel that heavy burden on his shoulders. He’s suicidal and exposes a murderous resentment. And this because of a youth full of violence, which is sporadically portrayed in haunting flashbacks. But also because of his war record. His scarred upper torso is probably caused by these events. And perhaps mentally there are even more profound wounds. Hence his fatalistic attitude. A “Je mon fou” posture which makes him walk into a lion’s den without hesitation. And as a result, he also carries out life-threatening or self-mutilating actions. Pulling a plastic bag over your head isn’t exactly something normal functioning people do on a regular basis. It’s clear that PTSD also has something to do with this. Are you expecting to see explicit violence? You’ll be slightly disappointed. Violence is abundantly present but is always kept out of the picture in a strategic way. There are a modest number of bloody scenes, but predominantly the violent and repulsive images are kept out of sight. But don’t doubt it. Joe is an aggressive and insensitive (At least at that level) disposer of persons of poor moral character who’ll split the skull of these persons in two without hesitation. However, his last intervention sets an influential mechanism in motion where he himself threatens to become a victim. Perhaps for some, it’s a tad too arty and the speed of the film a bit too slow. Yet Lynne Ramsay knows how to make a stylistic revenge film. The entire film is filled with dreamy (almost hallucinatory) fragments and perfectly framed snapshots. A child’s voice counting down softly. The sinking of a human body into the water. A close up of dripping wet hair. Joe staring into the distance. The biggest part of the film is also filmed in a dark and murky set-up. Probably as dark as the deformed and pained spirit of Joe. The interpretation by Joaquin Phoenix is breathtaking. Maybe rough around the edges, but deep inside a softy. A man without too many words, with a raw personality and with an impressive beard. As he strolls through New York, he looks like a homeless bum on his way to the soup kitchen at some community center. In reality, he’s a man with a well-defined mission. “You were never really here” certainly doesn’t belong in the list of boring uniformity that’s lately being produced in Hollywood. The film is more a character study than simply a revenge film. It’s the kind of film that gets under your skin. I was a fan of Joaquin Phoenix anyway, but because of his undeniably fantastic acting performance in this film, he rises a bit more into the leading group of actors who are unmatchable in terms of acting. My rating 8/10 Links: IMDB More reviews here