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

Jethica review – stalker meets his deadpan match in comedy-horror

A largely improvised script gives this low-budget feature spontaneity, as it deftly moves from creepy to comic by way of the supernatural

This low-budget comedy-horror feature gives most of its cast “screenplay by” credit, so it’s quite likely they sort of made it up as they went along, or at least substantially improvised a pre-agreed story. Nothing wrong with that, especially since that spontaneity is really felt in the performances, particularly from Will Madden as a manic stalker with a slight lisp named Kevin who won’t shut up. Disgorging an unceasing, frenzied torrent of verbiage, Kevin has followed Jessica (Ashley Denise Robinson) from Los Angeles to New Mexico where she grew up. The title is a not especially amusing reference to Kevin’s speech issue; he stands outside her window calling for her at all hours, ranting about his feelings for her, emitting passive-aggressive fumes of toxicity that grow increasingly more aggressive-aggressive.

Luckily, Jessica is staying with her friend Elena (Callie Hernandez, a mistress of deadpan disdain who recently appeared in Shotgun Wedding). Elena knows exactly what Kevin’s problem is and knows how to get rid of him and it doesn’t involve appeasement or calling the police. Let’s just say there’s a supernatural component to the story. Her grandmother knew all about this stuff.

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