How to Feed a Dictator review – what was on the menu for some of the world’s most evil men

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Andrew Neel’s documentary contrasts the lavish dishes eaten by heads of repressive states – served by largely unrepentant staff – with the starvation faced by their citizens There are moments in this sly documentary that evoke regular food porn, with crisply lit footage of vegetables being chopped and simmered, meat getting grilled, fat bubbling and browning – all the culinary sizzle is on display. Then there are climactic money shots, obligatory overhead views of the finished product, elegantly garnished, accompanied by text identifying the dish as, say, a Chilean country stew, or a whole roast goat, made precisely to suit the taste of a very specific client. It’s just that the clients these chefs served were despots, including Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein, Augusto Pinochet and Kim Jong-il. Charles Otonde Odera once prepared a human heart “perfectly” for Amin, though at the time he thought better than to ask where the raw offal came from. Director Andrew Neel and editor Brad Turn...
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My Fairy Troublemaker review – sweet-tooth animation will be gobbled up by young ’uns

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Story of a misbehaving sprite who gets access to the human world, and a fellow rebel, looks good but the story is a little flat

This German-Luxembourgian animation is a passable if unambitious hour and a half for under-10s, heavily in the orbit of Pixar both in terms of visuals and in its central conceit of the business of tooth-fairying as a Deliveroo-esque big-tech courier outfit. But unlike Inside Out and Soul’s pint-sized explainers of the psyche, there’s virtually no philosophical sprinkling on the cupcake here. Not that that will stop the young ’uns from gobbling it up anyway – but they might have enjoyed something more nutritious.

The exam to become a fully accredited tooth fairy seems easy enough. As the would-be disco earworm at the start of My Fairy Troublemaker has it, “Sneak inside, take the tooth, make the toy, and disappear!” Cookie-scoffing, misbehaving Violetta (voiced by Jella Haase) is the only apprentice who fails to make the grade, unlike her swotty mate Yolando (Julian Mau). Stuck in her belief that she’s really “the most special tooth fairy ever”, she steals a gem that allows her access to the human world. But in hijacking Yolando’s assignment to obtain an incisor from city kid Sami (John Chadwick), she finds an ally in his older stepsister Maxie (Lisa-Marie Koroll) when she is trapped in our reality.

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