Animol review – gritty young offenders drama challenges conventional machismo

Institutional menace and an idealistic take on redemption sit side-by-side in Top Boy actor Ashley Walters’ empathic and occasionally over-earnest film The lawless brutality of a young offender institution is the setting for this British movie written by Marching Powder ’s Nick Love and directed by Ashley Walters. It’s a place where terrified newbies realise they can survive only by abandoning their innocence and decency, and submitting to the gang authority of a psycho top G, naturally involving a horrible loyalty test. This is a place where drugs arrive by drone, where facially tattooed men meet each other’s gaze with a cool opaque challenge in the canteen, and where the cues and balls on the recreation area’s pool table have only one purpose: to give someone a three-month stay in the hospital wing while underpaid guards in lanyards and ill-fitting v-neck jumpers look the other way. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/CLu4l65 via IFTTT

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed review – Nan Goldin takes on big pharma

Documentary follows Goldin, the artist who became addicted to OxyContin, as she confronts the wealthy art patrons who profited from its sale

The part of the Sackler family behind the company Purdue Pharma have become notorious for their addictive opioid painkiller OxyContin which blighted innumerable American lives, while the Sacklers culturewashed the resulting colossal profits with conceited museum donations. There was hardly a museum in any first world capital city that didn’t salute their narcissism with a “Sackler wing” or a “Sackler courtyard”. Their story was first substantially told by the New Yorker’s investigative journalist Patrick Radden Keefe in his book Empire of Pain.

Purdue’s creepy genius lay not in science, or pharmaceuticals, or medicine – but marketing. It wasn’t that they invented opioids; these had existed in various forms but had long been considered too dangerous for any but the most extreme pain management, or in terminal palliative care; Purdue simply persuaded the US medical profession to prescribe them in pill form for much less serious cases. Then the nation’s addiction agony was recycled into art-world prestige.

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