Chickenhare and the Secret of the Groundhog review – time-travel fun for plucky hybrid critters

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A half-chicken half-hare, a skunk and a tortoise go in search of a 3,000-year-old groundhog in this wholesome animation with a surprisingly complex plot Although this animated feature doesn’t have a title as utterly awesome as its predecessor, Chickenhare and the Hamster of Darkness , it’s still a perfectly adequate 90-ish minutes of creamy pastel-coloured picaresque entertainment. It feels like it’s skewed in the direction of younger viewers given the simple character designs, general wholesomeness and easy-on-the-jokes tone, but the plot is surprisingly complicated. The lead character is named Chickenhare because of course he is half-chicken half-hare, although in practice he looks more like a hare than a chicken other than a tuft of feathers on the crown of his head. He is best friends with a skunk named Meg, equipped with the awesome power of stink and who is very butch-coded with her waistcoat, faux-hawk and tomboy characteristics; there is also a tortoise named Abe, who as you mi...
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Grace review – monumentally odd father-daughter odyssey via mobile cinema

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Travelling across Russia in mostly silence, Ilya Povolotsky’s debut feature has a strange confidence in its own insistent dispiritedness

With long journeys in a red camper van, long unbroken shots of shattered Caucasian landscapes, and very long silences between its alienated father and daughter, Ilya Povolotsky’s debut feature has a strange confidence in its own monumental dispiritedness. “I want to know that you have a plan,” says the teenager. “And that we won’t get stuck somewhere outside Khabarovsk with a chicken and a sad librarian woman.” This being a Russian art film, you wouldn’t bet against it.

The two unnamed characters, played by Maria Lukyanova and Gela Chitava, are making their way across the country for unspecified reasons, other than her desire to see the sea. They run a small mobile cinema out of their van for wan residents of purgatorial steppe towns and flog snacks and porn by night at sketchy truck stops for the hauliers who aren’t with sex workers. The father has transient liaisons of his own, adding an accusatory edge to his daughter’s faraway gaze, frequently fixed on nothing. Things aren’t looking up when they reach the sea; local people are scooping dead fish off the foreshore. “Fish plague,” says a police officer. “You’d better leave now.”

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