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

You Resemble Me review – portrait of the ‘female suicide bomber’ who wasn’t

Expertly blending fiction, news footage and interviews, this potent debut pieces together the events leading to Hasna Aït Boulahcen’s killing by French police

Dina Amer is a former Vice News journalist making a fierce feature debut with this vehement, focused and often disturbing movie, plausibly and sympathetically creating a backstory for a real-life case and finally aligning the fictionalised mise en scène, news footage and interviews with expert assurance and care.

You Resemble Me is an imagined response to the case of Hasna Aït Boulahcen, a young French woman of Moroccan descent who had been radicalised by Islamic State and was killed in 2015 during the raid on a Paris apartment building after the terrorist attacks on various targets, including the Bataclan theatre. The siege culminated in a shootout and an explosion; afterwards excitable media reporters claimed Aït Boulahcen was Europe’s “first female suicide bomber”, with much prurient commentary about her former troubled life as a “party girl”. In fact, forensic evidence showed the bomber was an unidentifiable man.

Continue reading...

from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/zkvFs4i
via IFTTT

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Miracle Club review – Maggie Smith can’t save this rocky road trip to Lourdes

BREAKING: Interstellar back in cinemas due to public demand; Dune: Part Two to also re-release on March 14 in IMAX

‘I lost a friend of almost 40 years’: Nancy Meyers pays tribute to Diane Keaton