At The Movies: Forrest Gump stars and director back for Here, The Uniform a bittersweet teen romance

Here (PG13)

104 minutes, opens on April 3
★★★☆☆

The story: In a single location passes the entirety of human history from the primordial age through the millennia, until the plot of land is a suburban house in the United States occupied by the Young family. Tom Hanks and Robin Wright play high-school newly-weds Richard and Margaret, who move in with his alcoholic war veteran dad (Paul Bettany) and housewife mum (Kelly Reilly) in 1963 and raise their daughter.

American director Robert Zemeckis reunites his Forrest Gump (1994) stars Hanks and Wright with screenwriter Eric Roth. Richard, though, is no Gump, who toured 20th-century America’s epochal events and won Hanks a Best Actor Oscar.

He and all other characters are for the duration confined Here – in the living room, where the camera observes their joy, sadness, love, discord, holiday celebrations and changing tastes in sofas.

Hanks, 68, and Wright, 58, are digitally aged from teens into octogenarians over the six decades of their intergenerational drama based on American graphic artist Richard McGuire’s 2014 structurally groundbreaking novel.

Zemeckis is an innovator, a Hollywood pioneer of live-action animation (Who Framed Roger Rabbit, 1988) and motion capture (The Polar Express, 2004). One can feel him thrilling to the challenge of the adaptation.

In a simulation of the comic panels, he montages insets of the building’s residents past and future alongside the Youngs. It is a fascinating conceit, that of an enclosed frame, infinite in scope, connecting the universal human experience across time.

But the experience played out is inert and mawkish, and the movie is in the end mainly a technical experiment: a film of a book that traps the quality cast in a stage act.

Hot take: Life is like a boxed cinema screen in a static domestic saga.

The Uniform (PG)

109 minutes, opens on April 3
★★★☆☆

The story: Two girls share a desk at a high school in 1997 Taiwan, becoming fast friends and falling for the same handsome boy.

Ai (Buffy Chen) in The Uniform is a bespectacled freshman struggling through night studies at First Girls’ High, having failed the entrance examination to the selective day class where self-assured Min (Chloe Xiang) is her “deskmate”. The new besties take to swopping uniforms, initially to play truant.

But Ai likes the respect she gets as a perceived day student. People treat her differently. So, she perpetuates the lie of her borrowed identity, which makes her seem good enough for her wealthy crush Luke (Chiu Yi-tai) from the gifted programme.

No mere garment, the uniform signifies status and seeds elitism in a school setting that is a microcosm of Taiwan society.

Taiwanese director Chuang Ching-shen drew on his adolescent experience during the 1990s for this thoughtful coming-of-age story on broken friendship – Ai and Min will turn rivals for Luke’s attention – and bashful first love.

Ai has to eventually reckon with the unhappy consequences of her deception, although her biggest issue is her feeling of inadequacy as an academic underachiever from a poor single-parent home. She is ashamed of the hand-me-downs in her rickety flat, and spars with her exhausted widowed mother (Chi Chin) who tutors to support them.

The characters are perfectly cast and believably rendered, especially Chen from the Netflix political drama series Wave Makers (2023) in the lead. It is a rewarding four-year journey watching petulant, insecure Ai learn hard work and responsibility and grow into herself.

Hot take: This nostalgic, bittersweet teen romance drama is one for the (year)books.