Category: Movies

I spent this past week binge watching Schitt’s Creek from season 1 but also catching up on the new season of Physical and Futurama. Physical is great, Futurama on the other hand, even though it used to be my favorite animated show, I’m just not into it anymore.

Other shows I’m watching are Foundation and Swagger. Both great shows and the new season has been good although the last episode of Foundation was a snoozer.

In other news, Barbie is now officially banned, so if you want to watch it you need to drive down to Saudi and watch it there where it’s being released today.

What have you watched this week?

Movies at the Cinemas
The movies below are now showing at the local cinemas:

New This Weekend:
Gran Turismo (7.0)
Run Rabbit Run (5.0)
Til Death Do Us Part (5.8)

Other Movies Showing:
Black Lotus (4.2)
Cats Museum (4.4)
Cobweb (6.1)
Elemental (6.8)
Haunted Mansion (6.3)
Hidden Strike (5.8)
Insidious: The Red Door (5.9)
Meg 2: The Trench (6.0)
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (8.2)
Oppenheimer (8.7)
The Secret Kingdom (5.0)
The Super Mario Bros. Movie (7.4)

The classic films below are currently showing at the 1954 Film House:
Flubber (5.3)
Training Day (7.7)

The numbers in brackets refer to the IMDB rating at the time of publishing.

News on an Australian film being banned in Kuwait has been popping up on my news feed all morning. A horror film called “Talk to Me” is supposedly banned in Kuwait because one of the actors identifies as nonbinary and is a transmasculine (a female that identifies as a male). According to the news articles there isn’t any LGBTQ+ content in the film, and there is also no mention of the actor’s gender identity, it’s just banned because one of the supporting actors is trans. Source

I’m now curious if, moving forward, all movies that contain openly gay actors will also be banned in Kuwait. If X-Men or Lord of the Rings came out today would they both be banned because they star Sir Ian McKellen who is openly gay? There are a lot of gay Hollywood actors and directors so I’m really interested how this is going to play out.

Similar to what happened with Oppenheimer, there are currently rumors circulating that the Barbie movie is banned in Kuwait. As of now, that isn’t true and it’s just rumors.

According to a source of mine at the cinema, the Barbie movie is coming out in Kuwait at the end of the month, but it will be censored. My understanding is the scenes that will be censored are LGBTQ+ related and that the studio already approved the removal of those scenes last month. The only reason the movie was going to be banned in Kuwait is if Saudi Arabia decided to ban it, but yesterday according to @kuwaitnews, Saudi said the movie will be released so thats good news for us.

If everything goes according to plan, the movie will be released in Kuwait on August 31st. On a side note, with my pink colored blog I kinda feel like I need to be collaborating with Barbie somehow, maybe a Barbie launch day takeover or something, I need ideas!

Update: And it has now officially been banned. So if you’re looking to watch it you’re going to have to drive down to Saudi or head to Bahrain where the movie will be premiering today.

Has anyone watched the documentary ‘After Work‘? I just found out about it now and only because Kuwait is part of the documentary. You can watch the trailer below, Kuwait makes an appearance 47 seconds in.

Thanks Dina

Yesterday I booked my tickets for Oppenheimer so I could watch it when it’s released this Thursday. The film was shot in the IMAX format and so thats the recommended way of viewing it. The only cinema I found that will be showing Oppenheimer in the IMAX format in Kuwait is Cinescape at Al-Kout Mall. If you’re thinking but VOX are showing it in their MAX theater, well that’s not IMAX. MAX is just what VOX calls their large screens, but they’re not IMAX screens. I also asked Scientific Center if they’ll be showing Oppenheimer since they have the largest IMAX screen in Kuwait, but according to them they don’t have any plans to do so at the moment.

So if you want to watch Oppenheimer, the best theater is the IMAX one at Cinescape at Al Kout. Obviously make sure you book the IMAX theater and not the Standard or Eleven theater.

Contrary to rumors, Oppenheimer is not banned in Kuwait. Even though it’s not listed on the local cinema websites (as of this post), I just got confirmation that Oppenheimer is in-fact still launching this weekend.

If you want to book tickets for the first showings, according to Cinescape they will start selling tickets today before 3:30PM. So keep checking their website.

Update: Tickets are now on sale.

The Yarmouk Cultural Centre will be screening the short film “One Small Visit” tonight at 7PM.

The true story of an immigrant Indian family who unexpectedly passes through the tiny Ohio hometown of Neil Armstrong in the wake of the ’69 moon landing and the civil rights movement and ends up on the Armstrong’s doorstep.

The film is based on a true story and one of the family members on which the film was based will be at the screening for a Q&A.

Based on the trailer the film looks like it would be fun to watch and entry is free. This is the first showing in the Middle East, for more info on the screening, click here.

The Cinema Hall at JACC is back with a new film schedule for the month of January and this month’s films include:

EO (Poland) (Cannes Jury Prize Winner)
Egyptian Shorts 1 (Egypt) (short films produced recently)
Our River… Our Sky (Iraq)
Saint Omer (France)

The movies have English subtitles.

Tickets cost KD4 and can be purchased from jacc-kw.com.

“How I Got There” is a dramatic action thriller set in a colorful high energy version of modern Kuwait. I just watched the trailer and it looks pretty great and even stars Ron Perlman from the Hellboy movies.

The film is premiering next month at the Red Sea Int. Film Festival in Saudi Arabia and you can follow them on Instagram @howigotthere

Thanks Zaydoun

The movies below are now showing at Cinescape, Grand Cinemas and VOX:

New This Weekend:
Joker (2019) (Re-release) (8.4)
Lamborghini: The Man Behind the Legend (N/A)
Super Furball 2 (6.4)
The Bunker Game (3.5)

Other Movies Showing:
Black Adam (7.5)
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (7.4)
Boonie Bears: Back to Earth (5.9)
Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile (6.5)
Prey for the Devil (5.0)
Smile (6.6)
The System (3.6)
The Woman King (6.3)

The classic films below are currently showing at the 1954 Film House:

Classic Movies Showing:
The Shawshank Redemption (9.3)

The films below are also showing at the JACC Cinema:

Classic & Indie Films Showing:
Beirut Hold’em (6.1)

Numbers in brackets refer to the IMDB rating at the time of publishing.

Kuwait is in the news again and this time censoring the film Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. There were three scenes cut, the first is a 10-second LGBTQ scene where one of the female characters kisses another female character on the forehead. Another scene cut out is of a woman giving birth and the final scene removed involved the line “A god to his people.”

Only one minute in the 2 hour and 41-minute film was taken out which isn’t too bad, but the odd thing is, Kuwait is the only country in the region that doesn’t have these scenes. Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Oman, Bahrain and Qatar all are showing the unedited version of the movie. How bizarre. Source

The November schedule for JACC’s Cinema Hall is out and this month they have 5 indie films playing:

90 Days – Saudi Arabia
Farha – Jordan/Palestine
Beirut Hold’em – Lebanon
Frère et Soeur – France
Official Competition – Spain

There is only one showing per movie so if there is one you’ve been meaning to watch don’t miss it. You can book your tickets on Jacc-kw.com

The Jordanian film “Daughters of Abdul-Rahman” will be screening tonight at The Cinema Hall in JACC. The filmmaker Zaid Abu Hamdan will also be in attendance and a live discussion will take place after the screening.

Storyline: Years after escaping a dictated life, four estranged and offbeat sisters are forced to come together to find their suddenly-missing father. In their secret searching journey, secrets are revealed and more question marks are raised.

The film has won various awards and currently has a rating of 8.4 on IMDB. It’s in Arabic but has English subtitles. If you’re interested in attending the screening at JACC tonight, the film starts at 9PM and tickets are for 5KD. You can book your tickets by visiting jacc-kw.com/whats-on/

For those of you who’ve been reading the blog for a few years, you might remember the Cinemagic Rooftop Movie Nights that used to take place in old Salmiya. That closed down years ago and since then no other venue really took over the role of focusing on indie films. But now JACC have launched something similar called “The Cinema”.

Every Saturday and Tuesday night JACC will be holding movie nights at their cinema where they will be playing mostly indie films or cinema classics. Last night I watched the 2021 film “Costa Brava, Lebanon” at the theater, and this coming Saturday I’ll be heading back to watch “Casablanca” in 4K as part of the 80th-anniversary showing. The other movie I’m interested in seeing is the original 1960 “Psycho” which also got remastered in 4K and will be showing at the end of the month.

The JACC cinema is actually fairly large for a small cinema and if I remember correctly can hold over 400 people. The screen isn’t the largest and the sound was a bit of an issue last night, but both didn’t stop me from enjoying the movie. The only major negatives were the stale popcorn and the freezing theater. MAKE SURE YOU BRING A JACKET OR HOODIE. THIS IS IMPORTANT. But other than that the seats were pretty comfy and if you get there early you can chill outside the building which is really beautiful at night.

The whole movie schedule for this month is on the JACC Instagram account @jacc_kw and you can purchase tickets (5KD) from the JACC website jacc-kw.com. To get to the cinema, you need to enter JACC from the very last parking entrance which I’ve highlighted in the photo above. Let me know if you have any questions and before you ask, yes movies do get censored.

Update: They’re calling “Cinema Hall”

Lessons of Darkness is a film about the Kuwaiti oil fields in flames directed by Werner Herzog and released in 1992. I posted about the movie 8 years ago but it wasn’t available to stream online back then, and now it is.

The style is similar to movies Baraka and Samsara where footage is combined with beautiful music except, in this case, the beautiful footage is mostly of horror and destruction. The first few minutes look like a scene out of a sci-fi film and it’s really an epic-looking film overall.

The film is available on YouTube and in HD. I have no idea how long it will be up there until it gets pulled for copyright reasons so if you haven’t watched the film this is your chance to do so. Here is the link.