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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Santa Claus: The Movie review – Dudley Moore sparkles like a bauble in Elf prototype

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Playing an early iteration of the fish-out-of-water elf in the corporate world of New York, Moore has just enough perky charm to redeem an otherwise forgettable seasonal offering

Frankly, I would whisper a tiny humbug to a good deal of this gloopy Christmas movie from 1985, directed by Jeannot Szwarc and now rereleased; and only a sentimental loyalty to the seasonal spirit prevents me from demanding to know if there are no workhouses for the people who made it. The whole thing only comes to something resembling life halfway through, when Dudley Moore’s perky elf takes centre-stage.

There are many other and more deserving yuletide films which should be ahead of this one in the queue for a revival, but my own sweet tooth for Christmassy schmaltz won’t allow me completely to reject this admittedly eventful and bizarre origin myth for Santa Claus, starring David Huddleston as the chortling, bearded present-giver himself. He is a kind of vaguely Euro-Scandinavian guy called Claus, much given to distributing gifts to village children, called to his mythic destiny in a fatal snowstorm like Superman arriving at the Fortress of Solitude. Dudley Moore is his devoted elf Patch who suffers a profound vocational crisis, and Burgess Meredith is the ancient chief elf (mysteriously possessed of full human adult height) who in a very peculiar elf ceremony decrees that Claus is “the chosen one”.

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