The Mother of All Lies review – pursuing the truth of Morocco’s brutal dictatorship years

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Asmae El Moudir employs a delicate mix of handmade replicas and oral testimony to brilliantly evoke personal and collective trauma Between those who refuse to remember and those who struggle to forget, a tumultuous clash of minds occupies the centre of Asmae El Moudir’s inventive documentary, a prize-winner at last year’s Cannes film festival. Through a constellation of clay figurines and dollhouse-style miniature sets, most of which were constructed by El Moudir’s father, the director recreates her oppressive childhood in the Sebata district of Casablanca. Under the watchful eyes of her domineering grandmother Zahra, all personal photos are banished from the house, save for a picture of King Hassan II. The delicate mix of handmade replicas and oral testimony brilliantly evokes the personal and collective trauma that stem from Morocco’s “Years of Lead” – a period of state brutality under Hassan II’s dictatorial rule. Lingering on the nimble fingers of El Moudir’s father as he puts t
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Leave the World Behind review – Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke’s apocalypto-paranoid thriller

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Roberts and Hawke’s weekend getaway starts to go wrong when two mysterious strangers appear at the door. Then things get weirder

Julia Roberts, Mahershala Ali and Ethan Hawke star in this glossy, Shyamalan-level-10 apocalypto-paranoid conspiracy thriller, adapted from the 2020 bestseller by Rumaan Alam. It’s an example of a growing tendency in the movies: baggy, lengthy, episodic pictures which are starting to split the difference between feature film items and streaming TV. Amat Escalante’s Mexican thriller Lost in the Night is, I think, another example of this tendency: films that go on for a while and, like a shaggy-dog story, leave things open for the possibility of getting recommissioned for season two. (Ridley Scott’s Napoleon epic for Apple TV also straddles film and TV, with extra content for the small screen iteration – although, admittedly, he can hardly be accused of leaving things open at the end.)

Roberts and Hawke play Amanda and Clay, well-off Brooklynites with two teen children; she’s a cynical ad exec, he’s a laidback humanities college professor. On a whim, they decide to take a luxurious weekend break in a luxury Airbnb mansion outside the city. But things get weird; there are storms outside, problems with the phone signal and the wifi and they witness something very disturbing at the beach. That evening, two strangers show up at the door – an elegant sophisticated man and his college age daughter, very well played by Mahershala Ali and Myha’la Herrold – with a very plausible explanation as to who they are and why Amanda and Clay should let them in. Things go terribly wrong.

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