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

The American Sector review US road trip to hunt down remnants of the Berlin Wall

This film tells the story of concrete slabs that have been rehomed thousands of miles away in bizarre yet unremarkable locations

Tracking down various segments of the Berlin Wall scattered all over the US, this eccentric yet down-to-earth documentary from Courtney Stephens and Pacho Velez traces how a historic artefact can mutate and splinter into myriad meanings. Transformed by their surroundings as well as the film-makers’ gaze, these concrete slabs are more than a symbol of the cold war; they have come to represent something quintessentially American.

From the midwest to California, state department halls to roadside restaurants, chunks of the wall can be found in the most unlikely of places. Most often positioned as a commemoration of history – and that loaded concept of “freedom” – the fragments are occasionally entirely untethered from their context, re-erected decoratively inside a Microsoft office or in the home of a private collector.

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