Film Picks: Documentary film Frida, The Raid and Showing Up

Free screenings at ArtScience Cinema

This is your last chance to catch the free June screenings of four films at ArtScience Cinema.

The most recent title is the documentary Frida (2024, 87 minutes, NC16, screens on June 22, 23, 29 and 30, various timings). Peru-born film-maker Carla Gutierrez saw that no previous biographical work about iconic Mexican painter Frida Kahlo had told her story from the first-person point of view.

Drawing on archives and material from Kahlo’s diary, Gutierrez has Kahlo – who died in 1954 at the age of 47 – talking about her life and art with the help of voice actors, sound designers, animation and archived interviews.

Two black-and-white films featuring renowned Chinese-American actress Anna May Wong (1905 to 1961) are also being shown. Condemned to play Oriental temptresses, indigenous natives and foreign slaves for much of her career in 1920s and 1930s Hollywood, Wong also could not be shown kissing a character of another race because of American prohibitions on race mixing.

While she plays a vamp in the British film Piccadilly (1929, 109 minutes, screens daily till June 30, various timings), the silent film has since become known for the pioneering storytelling technique of director E.A. Dupont, who presaged the style that would be known as film noir.

My China Film / Bold Journey: Native Land (1936, 30 minutes, screens daily till June 30, various timings) saw Wong feature as star, director and producer in a documentary travelogue showcasing her first and only trip to China, the land of her parents.

She made it in response to being rejected from taking part in the China-set film The Good Earth (1937), which employed white actors in yellowface make-up. Two decades later, in 1957, My China Film was screened during a TV programme titled Bold Journey: Native Land. The screening includes an interview with an older Wong filmed for television.

And for families, there is the Oscar-winning Pixar animated film Coco (2017, 105 minutes, PG, screens from June 26 to 28 at 2 and 4.30pm). Set in Mexico, it tells the story of Miguel (voiced by Anthony Gonzalez), a boy hoping to be a musician against his family’s wishes.

Where: ArtScience Cinema, Level 4 ArtScience Museum, 6 Bayfront AvenueMRT: BayfrontWhen: Till June 30, various timingsTickets: Free, on a first-come-first-served basis, subject to venue capacity
Info: str.sg/qmTt

Golden Mile Revisits: The Raid (M18)

101 minutes, limited screenings at The Projector

Remote video URL

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Released in 2011, this Indonesian work has become a byword for brutality and athleticism in martial arts films. Other than its sequel, The Raid 2 (2014), few movies have dared to show fights with the same bone-breaking, blood-spurting intensity.

The four John Wick films (2014 to 2023) may have better production values and the star power of Keanu Reeves, but the indie movie that Welsh writer-director Gareth Evans made for a tiny US$1.1 million budget surpasses the Hollywood franchise in thrills many times over.

Iko Uwais, Joe Taslim and Yayan Ruhian, The Raid’s actors who are also exponents of the Indonesian martial art pencak silat, now have careers at home and overseas. Yayan, for example, has been in space fantasy Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) and John Wick 3: Parabellum (2019).

The story follows a police special forces team as they carry out a surprise attack on a skyscraper controlled by a drug kingpin. After they are spotted, the attackers become the attacked, assailed on all sides by wave after wave of henchmen.

Where: The Projector, 05-00 Golden Mile Tower, 6001 Beach RoadMRT: Nicoll HighwayWhen: June 23, 5pm and June 28, 8.30pmTickets: $14 (weekend concession), $16 (weekend standard)
Info: theprojector.sg/films-and-events/the-raid

Showing Up (M18)

108 minutes, now showing at The Projector
4 stars

Remote video URL

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There will be no flashes of inspiration, no sparks of genius. American indie cinema darling Kelly Reichardt is the bard of the quotidian, and Showing Up is a droll serio-comedy of a ceramicist named Lizzy, so distracted by mundane dramas she barely has time for her art. The director’s muse, Michelle Williams, returns from Wendy And Lucy (2008), Meek’s Cutoff (2010) and Certain Women (2016) to star.

Lizzy mediates between her divorced parents (Judd Hirsch and Maryann Plunkett) and frets over her delusional recluse brother (John Magaro), while working a thankless day job as her mother’s administrator assistant at an arts college in Portland, Oregon. Her increasingly agitated reminders to get her water heater fixed are brushed aside by her self-absorbed landlady-neighbour Jo (Hong Chau), a popular installation artist.

Reichardt’s gentle, minimalist satire is like the heroine, easy to overlook. The movie is candid about the frustrations and resentments within the insular art community – frenemies Lizzy and Jo’s perfectly played rivalry is the central comic relationship – but also art-making as a spiritual vocation.

Whang Yee Ling