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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Pigeons! Superheroes! Farts! The best movie moments of 2023

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From angry confrontations to romantic reunions, Guardian writers pick the big-screen moments that have stayed with them the most

Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon is frequently enthralling over the course of its three-and-a-half-hour runtime, sinking into the depths of American shame as it follows William Hale (Robert De Niro) and his unofficial lieutenant Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) as they grasp for the money and land controlled by the Osage tribe in 1920s Oklahoma, which involves slowly poisoning Ernest’s wife Mollie (Lily Gladstone) as they kill off members of her family and community. But just when it seems like the story’s final dominoes are tumbling over with inevitability, Scorsese jumps ahead for his final scene – maybe the most audacious in American movies this year. Rather than a series of solemn title cards explaining what happened to the people whose lives we’ve seen dramatized, the movie cuts to a true-crime radio show in the 1940s, with major figures from the film reduced to cartoonish voiceovers and sound effects. And then, to detail Mollie’s post-narrative life, Scorsese himself appears. It’s not a Hitchcockian wink of a cameo, but a show of respect, as he steps from behind the camera to essentially read Mollie’s obituary; the mood changes from playful to stark in an instant. Seeing this master film-maker visibly grapple with the limits of artistic expression took my breath away. Jesse Hassenger

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