Six-year-old Sebastian lives on the mountainside with a kindly but gruff caretaker and no real family of his own. As such he is left to his own devices and is often found roaming the countryside. Belle is a wild mountain dog who has escaped from her cruel owner. The villagers have mistaken her for a “beast” that has been killing their sheep.
When Sebastian first crosses paths with Belle he must keep their friendship a secret and the two of them form an unshakeable bond. Their adventures take them through the mountains and ultimately they become pivotal in the successful escape of refugees fleeing Nazi Germany for the safety of Switzerland.
BELLE & SEBASTIAN was the second highest grossing French film to be released in France last year and has also captured the hearts and mindS of movie lovers at the Alliance Française French Film Festival earlier this year.
Thanks to Icon Film Distribution, we have double passes to Belle & Sebastian to give away. Keep an eye on our Twitter feed (@TheLennoXFiles) for your chance to win. Note: Competition will be open to Sydney residents only. Belle & Sebastian will be screening at Dendy Newtown and Dendy Opera Quays.
Only at the movies July 3.
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Live. Die. Repeat. It's a simple concept and not an entirely new one, but what Doug Liman's Edge of Tomorrow -- a sci-fi actioner based on a Japanese novel -- lacks in originality it makes up for with above-average blockbuster smarts and a surprising level of fun.
And admittedly, most of that fun comes in witnessing Tom Cruise die, over and over again. Cruise plays William Cage, a military PR supremo who gets busted down to Private when he refuses to join the forces on the beaches of France for a D-Day like assault on an invading alien force.
The Mimics, as they've been dubbed, crashed in Europe some years earlier and since then the metallic, arachnid-like extraterrestrials have been advancing across -- or rather, under -- the Continent. The Normandy assault is to be the Earth's united final front to prevent the enemy from spreading across the planet.
Cage, with no military training and even less sympathy from his new commanding officer (Bill Paxton) and fellow soldiers, soon finds himself dropping in to France, into battle and, not before long, dead at the hands -- tentacles? -- of an Alpha Mimic.
But then he awakens at the beginning of that very same day, and events begin to play out as they did before: conversations, a botched D-Day landing, and then death. And again. Live. Die. Repeat. For something happened to Cage during that first D-Day landing which is forcing (allowing?) him to live the same 24 hours over and over.
He still can't manage to avoid his demise but on one such occasion he encounters Rita Vrataski (Emily Blunt), the so-called Angel of Verdunn: a soldier who took out several Mimics during an earlier campaign and has been the face of the military's propaganda machine. "Come find me when you wake up" she cryptically instructs him, and so he does; soon discovering (with a little help from Noah Taylor's scientist) what's happening to him and how he may just be humanity's best hope for defeating the aliens and saving mankind.
Yes, Tom Cruise's Messiah complex may be somewhat in effect in Edge of Tomorrow but for the first time in a long time (possibly ever?), he is playing a man who is an out and out coward. Cage sells heroism, he doesn't possess it. But with a strong woman at his back, and endowed with a 'gift', war might just make a man out him; if not the first time round then eventually.
That's where Liman's film, adapted from the novel All You Need is Kill by Jez and John-Henry Butterworth and Christopher McQuarrie, draws easy comparison with the classic 1993 existential comedy, Groundhog Day, where Bill Murray's misanthropic weatherman lived the same wintry day over and over until he got it right.
But Edge of Tomorrow's not on the same level as Harold Raimis's film; it's more recent relative is 2011's Source Code, where Jake Gyllenhaal's soldier relives the the same seven minutes on a doomed commuter train in the hopes of preventing a domestic terrorist attack.
And much like Source Code, Edge of Tomorrow fudges the ending; seemingly defying its own internal logic to provide the audience with a 'feel good' out rather than a more "realistic" outcome. But up until that point, Cruise and this sci-fi summer blockbuster are in fine form.
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Now Showing
Not for the first time in recent years has a fairy tale been revisited, re-imagined and viewed through a feminist lens. And there's nothing wrong with that. But much like Snow White and the Huntsman, 2012's retelling of the royal beauty who took up arms against a wicked and vain queen, Maleficent has the original heroine pale in comparison to her nemesis.
But that is very much the point of Maleficent, a re-working of the Sleeping Beauty tale. More specifically, the 1959 animated feature by Walt Disney with events this time around told from the point of view of Maleficent (Angelina Jolie), a peace-loving woodland fairy who swears vengeance on mankind -- and one man in particular (Sharlto Copley's King Stefan) -- when she is literally and figuratively broken; Stefan removing her wings and breaking her heart in order to ascend the throne. Hell hath no fury like a fairy scorned and deformed!
Cursing the King's first born, Aurora, on the day of her christening -- she will fall into a sleep like death upon pricking her finger on a spinning wheel prior to her 16th birthday -- Maleficent then spends the next 16 years keeping a curious watch over the child, who has been spirited away to a small cottage to be raised incognito by three well-meaning but absent minded pixies (Imelda Staunton, Lesley Manville and Juno Temple).
But the more Maleficent, and her crow-manservant, Diaval (Sam Riley), watch the child (whom she comically dubs 'Beasty') grow -- eventually into the pretty but rather dull Elle Fanning -- the more she feels her hardened heart softening. Not that Jolie's wronged fairy is any kind of pushover. Imperious and with cheekbones that could shred lettuce, Jolie floats through the film (above it almost); not quite chewing the scenery, nor camping it up, but archly presiding over the intermittently beautiful but mostly dull proceedings.
Robert Stromberg, a visual effects artist and production designer making his directorial debut, worked on James Cameron's Avatar (2009). He also worked on Alice In Wonderland (2010) and Oz The Great and Powerful (2013), two less than successful re-imaginings of childhood classics that should have been some kind of portent that Maleficent would be less than magnificent (although to be fair, Linda Woolverton's screenplay, with its annoying narration (by Janet McTeer) and lack of tension, is not without blame).
Maleficent has the one trick up its sleeve and that's Angelina Jolie. She sells the fairy tale 'girl power' message; the rest of the film is green smoke and mirrors.
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