Ariel Rodriguez

VIP

Oscar-winning director and screenwriter Emerald Fennell creates a story about envy that is entertaining, interesting and surprising.

Oliver Quick is a newly arrived student at the University of Oxford, England, who struggles to fit into student society due to his inexperience with the ways of life of upper-class society. He almost by chance befriends Felix Catton, a popular and wealthy student who feels sympathy for Oliver and ends up taking him to his family's mansion after the death of Oliver's father. This is how we arrive at Saltburn, the Catton house where the life of rich eccentrics will lead Oliver to make decisions that will make the film interesting.

The choice of Barry Keoghan as the protagonist did not seem appropriate to me. Although he is a great actor - he already demonstrated it in The Banshees of Inisherin- and that he perfectly achieves each of his scenes as this ambitious, misplaced and emotionally broken young man, I feel that his age gives him away. He can't be Jacob Elordi and Archie Madekwe's college buddy. On the other hand, Rosamund Pike is the star of the film, with a wonderful performance as the Cattons' mother, eccentric, jovial, very accustomed to her high society ways. Hence her 9 nominations for critics' awards in the United States and England, in addition to the nominations for the Satellite, Golden Globes and BAFTA for best supporting actress.

I also enjoyed the soundtrack by Anthony Willis, nominated by the Society of Composers and Lyricists of America. The film also has decent editing, cinematography, and costume design, which, while I didn't find them outstanding, help build up the frenetic life of this English high society family.

As its promotional tagline puts it: Saltburn is a beautifully wicked tale of privilege and desire.

When the ambition of parents hangs over their children so that through their descendants they can achieve the goals they did not achieve, things generally do not end well. You could say that this is the case of the Von Erich family of fighters, on whom the movie Iron Claw is inspired. The patriarch did not manage to become a world wrestling champion, so he dedicated himself, intelligently, I must say, to instilling in his four children the idea that they should become professional wrestlers to obtain the title that he did not obtain. It ends badly, very badly.

The selection of the cast is accurate: Holt McCallany as the patriarch Fritz Von Erich does an excellent job, showing himself to be tough, impetuous, demanding and very intelligent as it seems that he is not the one who forces everyone to do things, but rather seeks the best for his children. Maura Tierney, as his wife, Doris, is also excellent, playing the wife who either has the same thoughts as her husband, or has already been completely dominated and supports his every decision. The brothers are played by Stanley Simons, Harris Dickinson, Jeremy Allen White and Zac Efron, who is actually the protagonist of the film. All of their performances are good and Zac Efron takes the lead without problems. However, I found Cammy Crochet's hair work very unfortunate and was distracting in every scene.

Sean Durkin served as writer and director on his third feature film and, although after halfway through the film, the script seemed unnecessarily long to me for around fifteen minutes, after this the dynamism and interest resumed. I liked the soundtrack by Richard Reed Parry and the photography by Mátyás Erdély in the prologue of the film that begins with black and white scenes, and a close-up frame of the wonderful young Kevin Von Erich.

Iron Claw received some nominations for its overall cast in the 2023 Awards Season, but ultimately failed to earn any nominations in the 2024 big awards.

One of the most indescribably horrible chapters in human history was, without a doubt, the Nazi expansionism that led to World War II. The number of stories full of real-life heroes and villains are surely countless. The fact that it was a movement that subjugated several countries implies that there are multiple stories of different nationalities. How the horror was experienced in Germany, and in Poland, and in France, and in Austria, and in Czechoslovakia.

One Life is the story of Nicholas Winton, a Briton of German descent who, after visiting a refugee camp in Prague, decided that his plan to stay for a week to volunteer at the office of the British Refugee Committee in Czechoslovakia would change radically, because he could not allow the children to live not only in the terrible unsanitary conditions of those camps, but with the constant threat of a Nazi invasion. He then decides to launch a plan to bring as many children as he can to the United Kingdom with the help of a network made up of his mother and volunteers from the committee in both the United Kingdom and Czechoslovakia.

It was to be expected that the film would touch sensitive chords that would lead the viewer to shock and latent tears. Who is not capable of being moved by stories where ordinary people - just as Nicholas Winton describes in one scene - become true altruistic heroes without whom hundreds and thousands of lives would have been ended in indescribably atrocious ways?

In this film we see two Nicholas Wintons: the young 29-year-old, played quite well by the South African Johnny Flynn, and the old 79-year-old, played wonderfully - obviously - by the legendary Anthony Hopkins. The cast is completed by a set of actors and actresses in well-selected supporting roles: Helena Bonham Carter, Romola Garai and Alex Sharp.

I liked the narrative construction of the script by Lucinda Coxon and Nick Drake that shows us Nicholas Winton in 1988 remembering what he experienced 50 years ago. There is no incomprehension in the facts or in the ties of his memories, since everything is subtly linked to what he is experiencing. This adaptation of two eras in three different main settings is well done thanks to the production design of Christina Moore and the costume design of Joanna Eatwell. Volker Bertelmann's music also shines in some scenes.

It was impossible not to remember Schindler's List, but they are actually quite different stories, so I was able to appreciate One Life for itself, and not only be entertained, but moved by the work that James Hawes did as director of his first major distribution film with the BBC.

It is interesting to think how this man who rescued 669 children from the horrors of Nazism lived to be 106 years old. Save one life, save the world.

Fear of the dark is perhaps the fear most experienced by children. Lack of vision at night fuels the imagination and the appearance of shadows does not help. If we add to this sounds that break the silence, and the fact that the night lasts many hours, we have the nightmare scenario of thousands of people who, as they grow, assimilate all this and can become functional adults in the night atmosphere. What would happen if the dark was not a visual perception but an entity with corporeality, voice, will and feelings? What would happen if this entity found out that many are afraid of it without deserving it?

In Orion and the Darkness, screenwriter Charlie Kauffman (famous for 2000s classics like Being John Malkovich?, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Adaptation - I know: with that background, what is he doing in an animated children's film?-) adapts Emma Yarlett's children's book of the same title, in which a boy, Orion, has anxiety problems because many things make him afraid: bees, falling from a skyscraper, giving the wrong answer in class and his classmates make fun of him, the toilet gets clogged and water starts coming out of it until his entire school floods, his parents move out of the house while he is at school and leave him alone , and, obviously, to the darkness. Tired of a scene full of screams being repeated every night, Dark arrives at Orion's room. Turns out he's a pretty friendly entity who doesn't understand why Orion, and many other people - he has scrolls full of names of all of them - are afraid of him, if he's just doing his job. Plus, thanks to Dark, many other things can happen too. So Dark invites Orion to take a 24-hour journey so that he realizes that there is nothing to fear. Faced with the alternative of living in fear for the rest of his life, Orion decides to take a chance and accept the invitation. Thus he meets Sleep, Strange Sounds, Silence, Insomnia and Sweet Dreams, the companions of Darkness.

It doesn't take long until we discover that this story is the one that an adult Orion is telling to his daughter Hypatia, who is also afraid of the Dark, and, when Orion is running out of ideas, it is Hypatia who helps him continue telling the story.

With a very beautiful animation, full of colors, despite being set almost entirely in darkness, obviously, DreamWorks and Mikros Animation generate audiovisual help to understand that darkness is not only pleasant for everything it entails, but also it is necessary. Can you imagine if we only had the day and not the night? With a cast led by Jacob Tremblay, in the voice of Orion, and Paul Walter Hauser, giving life to Dark, Orion and the Dark results in a children's film that fulfills its mission of leaving a lesson, perhaps even therapeutic.

However, although the idea of ​​mixing two stories: that of Orion and the Dark, with that of adult Orion and his daughter Hypatia, seemed interesting to me; I was not convinced by the way in which the narrative developed from there, until reaching an ending that could be fun for children, as it completely departed from the structure of the entire film, but that I did not like, not giving a logical closure to the entire adventure lived.

It remains to be seen who, after seeing it, will be able to happily sing “Hello, darkness, my new friend.”