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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It Lives Inside review – standard-issue schlock horror has its moments

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This Indian American monster movie has interesting touches of cultural specificity but it’s a mostly familiar formula

There’s a swirl of the old and the new in the hokey pre-Halloween horror It Lives Inside, a balance that could have benefited from a lot more of the latter – because when the first-time director Bishal Dutta does try to add freshness to the familiarity of formula, he manages to carve his film its own place within two overstuffed subgenres, flashes of intrigue as he veers between schlocky curse and even schlockier monster movie.

A wide-releasing horror film centered on an Indian American teenager already gives the film a certain distinction. Dutta, also acting as writer, tries to thread themes of assimilation and identity through a predictable procession of mostly ineffective jump scares and slightly more effective set pieces, the film working better when it’s trying to chill rather than shock. Never Have I Ever and Missing’s Megan Suri plays Samidha, or Sam as she prefers to be called, a girl trying to fit in at a predominantly white high school despite her mother keenly trying to keep traditions an integral part of her life. It’s led to a distance from her other Indian American friend, Tamira and, like Heathers and Fright Night before it, explores that interesting fracture of leaving one friend behind to climb higher socially.

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