Birds of War review – war journalists find love among the ruins

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This documentary tells the story of the long-distance relationship between a BBC correspondent in London and a photographer on the ground in Syria with charm and humanity Politics is to some degree set aside here in favour of matters of the heart; this is a story of romantic love among the ruins. London-based Lebanese journalist Janay Boulos, while working for the BBC’s Arabic service, fell in love from afar in 2016 with Syrian activist and photojournalist Abd Alkader Habak. He, during the Assad regime, was putting his life in danger to supply her with dramatic footage from his home town of Idlib and later Aleppo. Habak was himself to make international headlines in 2017 by getting photographed carrying an injured child to safety. Habak’s gruelling images are interspersed with Boulos’s smartphone footage of her thoughtfully going up and down in the lifts at BBC Broadcasting House as well as home-movie material of her childhood in the seaside Lebanese town of Byblos; we get their tende...
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Tod Browning: the film-maker who brought the carnival to Hollywood

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A new retrospective offers another chance to appreciate the daring and often deranged films made by a director who was once the centre of a moral panic

When a kid threatens to run away and join the circus, perhaps upon being forced to eat broccoli or go to bed, they’re fantasizing about more than just independence. The traveling carnival offered an alternative way of life that appealed specifically to those uninvested in the politenesses of the grownup world. No one can make a carny shower, wear a tie or go to church. This liberation from the strictures of civilized society was a must for an ethically spotty line of work reliant on a mix of trickery, hucksterism, prurience and morbid fascination, a low art form that attracted a certain kind of scuzzy personality. The tents of the sideshow provided a home to thieves, oddballs, creeps, chiselers, dope fiends, conmen, women of ill repute, leches, lushes and any other species of degenerate in need of a paycheck. If vaudevillians were the rock stars of the pre-cinema era, then circus folk were van-dweller punks cutting a swath of blithe misbehavior from gig to gig.

Just before the turn of the 20th century, at the ripe age of 16, a bricklayer’s son named Charles Albert Browning Jr decided that these were his people and abandoned his well-heeled family to join their grubby ranks. He would spend 10 years cutting his teeth as a barker, song-and-dance man, clown and contortionist before rechristening himself Tod, the German word for “death”, conferring a ghastly gravitas. Three years later, he’d take leave of the stage with sights set on the burgeoning silent film industry, but he’d carry the lurid spirit of the big top with him through the rest of an illustrious, disreputable career.

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