Latest news with #THEPROJECTOR
Straits Times
25-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Straits Times
At The Movies: Food for thought in 28 Years Later, My Sunshine a heartfelt coming-of-age drama
At The Movies: Food for thought in 28 Years Later, My Sunshine a heartfelt coming-of-age drama 28 Years Later (M18) 115 minutes, showing in cinemas ★★★★☆ The story: British director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland revisit the Rage Virus of 28 Days Later (2002) they created more than two decades earlier. Great Britain is now quarantined from the continent: who needs Brexit? A community, which survived the cannibalistic undead, has settled on a feudal fortress island connected to the mainland by a tidal causeway. Spike (Alfie Williams) is the boy hero of 28 Years Later, the third entry following 28 Weeks Later (2007) in the auteur zombie series. On his 12th birthday, his dad Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) takes him on a manly rite-of-passage hunt on the mainland. It is his introduction to the ghastly Infected roving the wilderness. The blubbery belly-crawling humanoids are easy targets for his arrows. Not the Alphas: they have evolved to be faster, smarter, feral and near-unkillable. Spike, however, has heard rumours of a physician, and he is soon sneaking back outside the safe zone, determined to save his long-ailing mother (Jodie Comer). That the mythical doctor is a kook played by Ralph Fiennes would be an encounter worth any danger, even, possibly, the Alphas chasing him down to rip his head off with spinal column attached. The movie in all its punk-rock helter-skelter viscera was filmed using iPhones and amplified by military footage. What is the Rage Virus if not Boyle's parable of humanity eating itself alive with its anger? And violence here becomes an entryway into a moving rumination on mortality for Spike, an innocent who has never known disease or death. Wherever Hollywood director Nia DaCosta (The Marvels, 2023) leads him next in 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, the second in a new trilogy due in 2026, Boyle has reaffirmed himself as a vital innovator of a seminal horror lore. Hot take: There is food for thought, not just flesh-chomping frights. My Sunshine (M18) 90 minutes, opens exclusively at The Projector on June 26 ★★★☆☆ (From left) Kiara Nakanishi and Keitatsu Koshiyama in My Sunshine. PHOTO: THE PROJECTOR The story: During one winter in a Japanese island town, two adolescents pair up for an upcoming skating competition. Taipei Film Festival's 2024 Special Jury Prize winner will not be the usual underdog sports drama. My Sunshine is an understated movie constructed of glances. Takuya (Keitatsu Koshiyama), a shy schoolboy with a stutter, is with his ice hockey team at the local recreation centre when he sights figure skater Sakura (Kiara Nakanishi) elegantly gliding on the rink. He is spellbound. The older girl has eyes only for her coach Arakawa (Sosuke Ikematsu), who later sees Takuya clumsily attempting Sakura's manoeuvres and is moved to mentor him. A former skating champion, he also sees something of himself in Takuya's passion. The lad is so endearing that haughty Sakura, a rising star from big-city Tokyo, needs little persuasion from Arakawa to begin training with him for a mixed duo contest. They become a family. An excursion to a frozen lake is a joyous high as the threesome cavort madly and embrace tightly against the magic hour light. But then comes another, unhappier glance: Sakura espies Arakawa with his male partner. The idyll is over even before the season's snow has melted. Japanese writer-director Hiroshi Okuyama's sophomore feature had seemed just a sweet, nostalgic coming-of-age confection, one that is suddenly very grown-up and deeply sad in confronting Japanese society's conservative gender norms and homophobia. The sensitive performances play the emotions for real because they are: Okuyama based the screenplay on his experiences as a junior skater. Hot take: This youthful romance, slender though it is, holds heartfelt feelings, tender and sorrowful. Join ST's Telegram channel and get the latest breaking news delivered to you.
Straits Times
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Straits Times
At The Movies: K-occult thriller Holy Night: Demon Hunters packs a punch, a bittersweet Happyend
Holy Night: Demon Hunters (NC16) 92 minutes, opens on May 8 ★★★☆☆ The story: Holy Night is an elite team of exorcists in Seoul and the South Korean capital's only defence against the rise of a devil-worshipping criminal network. A psychiatrist (Kyung Soo-jin) calls on Holy Night when her sister (Jung Ji-so) begins exhibiting disturbing symptoms no medical diagnosis can explain. The K-occult thriller Holy Night: Demon Hunters, which began as a 2024 webtoon, introduces Don Lee as the star detective and agency boss Ba-woo: His physical strength is his superpower. Sharon (Girls' Generation pop idol Seohyun) is the psychic shaman aswirl in boho-chic gowns, while young sidekick Kim Gun (David Lee) provides technical support plus comic relief. They operate, charmingly, out of a shabby antique mall, and theirs is a recognisable world of downbeat realism however fantastical the exploits as they investigate and then battle to save the possessed girl contorting and levitating in billows of smoke. The action is intense and atmospheric, until it becomes a repetitive cycle of Ba-woo punching the invading demon and Sharon bellowing 'return to hell'. They should know, after an hour in, that this approach is not working. Sharon goes all in nevertheless with her incantations and exorcism kit of knives, mirrors, copper bells and bronze rattles. Writer-director Lim Dae-hee marries Eastern mysticism with Western tropes for the detailed rituals. The first-time film-maker has also scripted an intimate backstory for Ba-woo, whose tragic boyhood is connected to the cult spreading the dark forces. The three heroes are each a captivating personality, dynamic in their synergy. The sequel hinted at in the end credits is certainly not unwelcome because they are capable of much more than just this one job. Hot take: Don Lee of The Roundup film series (2017 to present) may have found himself another hit franchise. Happyend (PG13) 113 minutes, opens exclusively at The Projector on May 8 ★★★☆☆ Hayato Kurihara (left) and Yukito Hidaka in Happyend. PHOTO: THE PROJECTOR The story: In near-future Japan, two students at a Tokyo high school prank their humourless principal (Shiro Sano), who installs an invasive surveillance system to identify the culprits. The boys' contrasting responses fissure their lifelong bond. 'Something big is about to change,' warns the prologue. It will not be due to a devastating earthquake, which is a constant threat seized on by the government to expand its emergency powers. The changes in the J-teen drama Happyend are Kou's (Yukito Hidaka) and Yuta's (Hayato Kurihara) central dynamics, with city-wide civil protests against authoritarianism the backdrop. Kou is a working-class Zainichi Korean. His people were massacred by the thousands in the wake of the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake, and the darkening national mood is rekindling the xenophobia: 'hikokumin' (traitor) is graffitied outside his family restaurant one night, rousing him into political activism. He becomes serious and distant. Seems like only yesterday he and Yuta were horsing around, and Yuta still is, this coddled aspiring deejay without a care. The tensions expose the fundamental differences between the boyhood best friends. Their rift is perhaps inevitable. Also in their tight circle of half-dozen sharing a love of underground music are a half-black American (Arazi) and a Chinese girl (Shina Peng), all of them destined to go their separate ways: Japanese writer-director Neo Sora limns the shifts during their final graduation weeks, at that wistful transitional moment between adolescence and adulthood. Kurihara is the winner of Best Newcomer at the 2025 Asian Film Awards, and Sora's subtle, observational debut feature is deceptively simple in story. It is titled after a composition by his father Ryuichi Sakamoto, and the score, too, honours the late musical mage in synching with the youthful vitality of the cast. Hot take: Here is a bittersweet coming-of-age experience, unassuming but emotionally textured. Join ST's Telegram channel and get the latest breaking news delivered to you.
