The Peasant’s Revolt of 1381 is a curious episode of history as it represents likely the closest the peasantry of Medieval England actually got to overthrowing their aristocrats. It was a full-on movement that swept the countryside and made its way to London in very dramatic terms. But, like with almost any rebellion against the crown it was ultimately a failure. And the serfs continued to live in severe poverty and servitude to the upper classes for several centuries to come. It is an interesting thing to dramatize, hard to make into a cathartic story about class revolution that has resonance for a modern audience. That is what Paul Greengrass grapples with in The Uprising , a rare period film for the director known for his gritty true story modern action films (although he did make News of the World a few years back). His particular visual language is odd to see in a medieval context, specifically his use of shaky handheld camerawork which feels rather dissonant and distracting in t...
Though it is unusual for him, Sheep in the Box is not the first time that Hirokazu Kore-eda has dabbled in the realm of speculative fiction. His second narrative feature, After Life , entertained a curious concept on the space between life and death and the figures who ferry along souls about to rest. A little later he made Air Doll , a Pinocchio story about a sex doll that comes to life -but is much more innocent than that sounds. Sheep in the Box feels like a continuation of the themes touched on in Air Doll especially, specifically its depiction of an artificial intelligence looking for meaning in their existence. The film it resembles much more potently though is Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence -down to having roughly the same premise as its starting point. As a science-fiction device, A.I. itself does not have the same speculative innocence that it once did, and stories about the humanity of androids or artificially intelligent beings ring just a little differe...