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

Husband review – family-man study is Made in Chelsea meets Curb Your Enthusiasm

Docu-comedy follows married directors Josh Appignanesi and Devorah Baum to New York in a subtle follow-up to The New Man

Film-maker Josh Appignanesi has in the past made successful movies: Song of Songs, in the high arthouse mode in 2005, and popular satire The Infidel in 2010. But co-directing with his wife, author and academic Devorah Baum, he has recently got in front of the camera and hit a rich new seam of autofictional or possibly autofactual docu-comedy. The New Man documented – or sneakily semi-fabricated – Appignanesi as the hyper-annoying expectant dad with madly dishevelled hair who is unable to help his pregnant partner in any practical way, and feels existentially undermined by the whole process.

Now Appignanesi and Baum are back: it is three years later and they have two children. Baum is going to New York on a prestigious signing/lecture tour to promote her book about feelings: Appignanesi is going along (and so are the kids, and a niece to look after them) to make a film about his own feelings on the matter. Baum thoughtfully paces the New York streets with Appignanesi capering beside her, jabberingly excited and yet weirdly and pre-emptively depressed about anything disappointing or bad that might happen in the future. To his wife’s exasperation, he is once again the massively unhelpful overgrown manchild.

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