Women Talking – Movie Review

TL;DR –  A stunningly devastating film, brimming with empathy and power in equal measures  

Rating: 4.5 out of 5.

Post-Credit Scene – There is no post-credit scene

Disclosure – I was invited to a press screening of this film

Warning – This film contains scenes that may cause distress

A mother comforts her daughter.

Women Talking Review

When I walked in to see Women Talking, I was unsure exactly what I would see. Oh, I expected it to be heavy in tone and subject matter. But I had no idea how they would address that subject, given the immense complexities baked into the scenario. A scenario that was inspired by actual events of the worst kind. However, as I walked out of the theatre, I knew I had witnessed something profound.   

So to set the scene, in an isolated Mennonite colony in rural USA, the women have been plagued by attacks where they wake up covered in bruises on their legs. The community leaders say it is demons or that the women are making it up until one of the attackers is captured trying to sneak into a teenager’s bedroom. The police round up many of the community’s men accused or fingered in the attacks, but instead of supporting their women, the men gather up everything they can sell to go into town and post bail for the attackers. They will return in two days, and the women must forgive the attackers or be excommunicated. They have three choices, do nothing, stay and fight, or leave, which have dramatic repercussions on their lives.

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Movie Review – Lion

TL;DR – A beautiful story of loss, exploitation, grief, and trying to find out what home means, in the absence of any real information of where it could be.

Score – 4.5 out of 5 stars

Lion. Image Credit: Transmission Films.

Review

It might be one of those universal experiences, you’re walking through a shopping centre, theme park, city street, etc. with your parents and then you look up and realise you don’t know where they are. That feeling of being lost as a real and palpable fear and thankfully for most of us it short lived. However, this is not the case for Saroo, indeed for Saroo it was not a momentary fear, for him it was a life changing event. Lion tells the story of Saroo Brierley (Sunny Pawar & Dev Patel) who one day after working in rural India with his brother Guddu (Abhishek Bharate), joins him on a train ride to a nearby settlement so Guddu can find some night work for them to help their mother Kamla (Priyanka Bose) who works as a labourer to make ends meet. Then Saroo ends up getting stuck on a train which is not going to the next station, but instead travelling 1500km to Calcutta, a place where no one speaks the same language, and as you are five years old as far as you know your mum’s name is ‘mum’. This is a heartbreaking tale of loss, exploitation, and the struggle to find what home means. Now due to the nature of the film, its structure and the very nature that it is based off a true story it becomes quite hard to talk about aspects of the film without discussing the second half of the film. So for this reason from here on into the end, a SPOILER warning is now in place.

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Movie Review – Pan

TL;DR – I feel like I have seen this movie, this is the same story over and over again, but it has its moments

Score – 2.5 out of 5 stars

Pan. Image Credit: Warner Bros.

Review

Pan is a story of how Peter Pan became the boy that never grew up, how Hook becomes Captain Hook and how Hugh Jackman decided that we was just going to have fun and ham it up for an hour and a half.

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