97 minutes, now showing 4 stars In this bouncy, often poignant, sequel to Inside Out (2015), Riley (voiced by Kensington Tallman) is now 13 and yearning to be accepted by a group of popular girls led by her idol, Valentina (American actress Lilimar), captain of the ice hockey team. In her head, the old team of Joy (Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Anger (Lewis Black) and others now has to share the console with new teenage emotions – among them Anxiety (Maya Hawke), Envy (Ayo Edebiri), Ennui (Adele Exarchopoulos) and Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser). In the new film, older viewers can continue to play the game of seeing Joy as a mental defence mechanism.
She represents wilful ignorance or rose-tinted glasses, doing what she does best – throwing painful imagery down the memory hole. Younger viewers can enjoy the adventures when the gang has to trek from the back of the mind to the front, along the way overcoming various mental blocks, each one represented by a clever pun or portmanteau word playing on the idea of a geographical obstacle, as well as a mental construct. If nothing else, one steps away from this movie fully aware of words borrowed from nature applied to abstract concepts of the mind.
111 minutes, ArtScience Cinema Screened as part of ArtScience Cinema’s Goddess programme that spotlights women who break boundaries, Sakuran (2007) is the debut feature of photographer-turned-director Mika Ninagawa. The screenplay is based on a manga series of the same .
