State of Statelessness review – Dalai Lama presides over intimate dramas about Tibetans’ life of exile

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Tibetan directors, who all live outside Tibet, deliver a quartet of films that explore the pain of separation and migration The wrench of exile is the theme of this quartet of short films from Tibetan directors, who themselves all live outside Tibet. Their intimate, emotional family dramas tell stories of separation and migration. In two of them, the 90-year-old Dalai Lama smiles out from photographs on shrines, a reminder of the precariousness of Tibet’s future. As a character in one of the films puts it bluntly: will there be anything to stop China erasing Tibetan identity when its rock-star spiritual leader is no longer around? In the first film a Tibetan man lives in a kind of complicated happiness in Vietnam. He loves his wife, and they both adore their sunny-natured little daughter, but he has mournful eyes. Home is a town on the banks of the Mekong River, which has its source in Tibet. The river is a constant reminder of the region – and of Chinese might too, since Chinese hyd...
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Ambush review – battle fatigued Nam actioner fights worn-out war tropes

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This low-budget effort featuring phoned-in turns from Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Aaron Eckhart ticks off all the cliches while lacking a moral perspective

Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Aaron Eckhart, the big-name stars of this on-the-cheap Vietnam-war actioner, are definitely on a cushy number here. They live it up above ground as, respectively, an elite tracker and a no-nonsense general, while poor old Connor Paolo has to scurry around in the Củ Chi tunnel system for most of the running time. Hopefully his contract demanded access to a chiropractor.

Paolo plays US army engineer Ackermann, sent with his fellow “construction workers” into the netherworld to retrieve a stolen classified binder containing the names of south Vietnamese operatives undercover in the north. He’s got two hours to dodge the punji stake traps and get the job done – at which point, unknown to him, Eckhart’s expedient Gen Drummond is planning to blow the entire complex and the sensitive intel along with it. Up top, Miller (Rhys Meyers) and other special forces goons are patrolling the forest to make sure the “tunnel rats” don’t get any nasty surprises.

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