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

Last Tango in Paris at 50: Bertolucci’s controversial drama remains troubling

The Italian director’s knotty drama remains a provocation, a film filled with lyrical beauty but also repulsive cruelty

Revisiting films on the occasion of major anniversaries can be a disorienting reminder of time’s too-swift passage: that film is now 20/30/40 years old? How can that be? Why does it still feel so much younger than I do? In other cases, however, the film wears its advanced age in a way that makes complete sense, and so it is with Last Tango in Paris, released in cinemas in 1973. Now a half-century old, Bernardo Bertolucci’s lightning rod for scandal and debate has dated in many of the ways you might expect, but that’s not quite what I mean: at 50, the film’s age has now caught up with the overriding air of middle-aged despair and disarray that it always carried. In a sense, it was a film made to be forgotten, and then remembered with bittersweet, conflicted feelings, its significant beauty curdled over time.

Bring up Last Tango in Paris in cinephile circles today – especially those reckoning with the gender politics of the artform post-MeToo – and you won’t hear that many fond endorsements. When it’s brought up at all, the conversation swiftly narrows to its most notorious scene: the one where Marlon Brando’s Paul, a recently widowed American abroad, holed up in a desolately furnished Parisian apartment, forces himself on Maria Schneider’s Jeanne, a 20-year-old ingenue whose name he refuses to learn. Grabbing a dab of fridge-cold butter for lubrication, he anally rapes her.

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