My Memory Is Full of Ghosts review – deeply moving visual hymn for the bombed-out Syrian city of Homs

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Anas Zawahri’s documentary lays heart-wrenching testimony over languorous shots of bullet-ridden ruins and deserted streets The western Syrian city of Homs is only a husk of its former self. Previously a major industrial centre, the region became a key battleground between 2011 and 2014, for Bashar al-Assad’s army and rebel forces. Amid the immense bloodshed, hundreds of thousands of civilians were either displaced or trapped inside their own homes. Filmed in the summer of 2023, this deeply moving documentary from Palestinian-born and Syria-based film-maker Anas Zawahri maps out the collective trauma and sorrow that continue to linger, even after the shooting has stopped. Unfolding in languorous, largely static shots of bombed rubble, hollowed-out buildings, and deserted streets, the film lays bare the startling extent of wartime brutality. A sense of stillness and stagnancy hangs in the air, and almost every wall is riddled with bullet holes, urban scars that mirror the psychological ...
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The Locksmith review – Ryan Philippe holds the key to straight-ahead noir thriller

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Philippe’s newly released con faces heavy pressure not to go straight as his family grows ever more estranged and the film runs low on fresh ideas

The plot manoeuvres in this léger noir are so boilerplate and predictable that viewers are likely to find themselves expecting much bigger twists than are actually delivered. Surely that nice guy will turn out to be a double-crosser, you assume? Or you might imagine one of the vampy women will turn out to be a triple-crossing femme fatale. But no, it’s all pretty much on the level, which makes the snippets of classic Hollywood crime thrillers such as Touch of Evil, just glimpsed on a TV set, feel seriously undermining, gesturing as they do towards much more sophisticated works of cinema than we have here.

Ryan Phillippe stars as Miller, the titular locksmith, who in the opening scene has been forced into doing a heist that goes very wrong and ends up sending him to prison for 10 years. When he gets out, his now-ex-wife Beth (Kate Bosworth) is a rising police officer and his daughter Lindsay (Madeleine Guilbot) barely knows him. At least old friend Frank (Ving Rhames) offers him a job, but it’s only a matter of time before the past comes round again with Miller under pressure to atone for past crimes by committing entirely new ones. Gabriela Quezada is on hand as a battered sex worker, the surviving sister of a man whom Miller got killed years back. There are good cops and dirty cops, and shootouts at motels that puncture the eerie quiet of what looks like a barely populated desert town.

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