Modi: Three Days on the Wing of Madness review – Johnny Depp’s Modigliani as bohemian badass

A lineup including Stephen Graham and Al Pacino seem wasted on this lavish, but hackneyed drama about the Italian artist Some very cliched roistering, life-affirming wine-drinking, bourgeois-defying artistic shenanigans here from the veteran screenwriting couple Jerzy and Mary Olson-Kromolowski who have adapted a 1980 stage play, Modigliani by Dennis McIntyre, about the Italian sculptor and painter Amedeo Modigliani, known as Modi. Johnny Depp directs and perhaps sees his subject as a bohemian badass not unlike Hunter S Thompson, whom he played in Terry Gilliam’s 1998 movie Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – and perhaps not altogether unlike how he sees himself. It is 1916 in Paris and the brutality of war is destroying the belle époque; Riccardo Scamarcio plays Modigliani, a brilliant, sensual but penniless artist facing poverty and casual antisemitism. Having got into a chaotic affray at a pompous posh restaurant – filmed like a deleted scene from Richard Lester’s The Three Musketeer...

Herd review – folk-indie vibe dominates queer backwoods zombie thriller

Despite a fairly predictable story, first-time director Steven Pierce makes some interesting tweaks to the formula with a final act that confounds expectations

Like every zombie-themed movie ever, this low-budget American feature directed by debutant Steven Pierce (co-written by Pierce and James Allerdyce) has a subtext; this one so close to the surface it’s barely sub, about schisms that divide communities. Quite often, the factions in zombie stories cleave along class lines or ethnicity. But Herd mixes the formula up in a number of interesting ways; for starters, by casting as the heroines lesbian spouses Jamie (Ellen Adair) and Alex (Mitzi Akaha), city dwellers on a camping trip trying to heal marital wounds after the loss of a child.

Thus the women are already semi-outsiders in rural Missouri where they’re visiting, although it’s near where Jamie grew up. Not that this puts her more at ease, given an abusive childhood growing up with her father, Robert, (Corbin Bernsen), that inclines Jamie to be suspicious of the locals and assume the worst of people, sometimes with justification and sometimes not.

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