The Plague review – water polo camp turns into tween hellscape with impressive stylistic bite

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With Fincher-like intent, director Charlie Polinger scopes out concealed psychological depths in a debut that sees the laws of the jungle play out Set at a boy’s water polo training camp in the summer of 2003, Charlie Polinger’s debut feature plunges beneath the waterline to scope out concealed psychological depths. It may not be news that these kids operate in a brutal, animal-like hierarchy driven by braggadocio, bullying, hazing and gaslighting – but from the stunning initial submerged shot of a pool glittering like a starfield, Polinger brings impressive stylistic bite to this tween hellscape: the kind of trenchant intent you might associate with David Fincher. Latecomer Ben (Everett Blunck) is thrown in at the deep end when he arrives. Desperate to ingratiate himself with the cool crowd lorded over by the impish Jake (Kayo Martin), he aims to avoid the pariah status of house lummox Eli (Kenny Rasmussen), who is supposedly afflicted with a (made-up) disease the brats dub “the pla...
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The Job of Songs review – folk melodies and melancholia in rural Ireland

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Lila Schmitz’s documentary offers a candid look at Irish music and community struggles in a small Irish village known for its bar-room sessions

That The Banshees of Inisherin may apparently be a documentary is the main takeaway of this swift but wide- and deep-ranging investigation into the musical community of Doolin, County Clare. It’s a truism to point out the absorption with the landscape in Irish folk music, and a certain attendant melancholia. But it’s hard not to go back to such ideas when one interviewee says of nearby tourist attraction the Cliffs of Moher: “Who wants to look over a big cliff? Unless you’re thinking of jumping?”

Once a remote scrum of thatched cottages, Doolin is now on the tourist trail thanks to its uninterrupted tradition of bar-room sessions – in which all-comers are welcome to pitch in with whatever musical talent they have. The place seems to lie on a nexus of ley lines in time and space through which song and community irrepressibly well up. Christy Barry, who runs a music centre, reveals how his mother, unpaid, taught the entire village flute and fiddle. Stretching back further than the Irish famine and the subsequent waves of emigration, this melodic heritage draws on what one musician here believes amounts to a millennium of orally transmitted music.

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