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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Baghead review – ancient face-covered demon emerges from creepy pub’s basement

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A young woman finds the pub she’s inherited is home to a 400-year-old she-devil, but few of the ensuing jump scares will surprise you

The extravagant absurdity of this chiller from screenwriter Lorcan Reilly and director Alberto Corredor might conceivably get it an audience. There are some interesting touches, but horror fans might well feel that it’s just too similar to the recent and frankly superior Australian film Talk to Me – though it must be said that Talk to Me was made well after Reilly and Corredor’s original 2017 short, with the same high concept, on which this is based.

Iris (Freya Allen) is a young woman, bitterly estranged from her widower father (Peter Mullan) and she is astonished to learn after his death that she has inherited from him a creepy old pub. And this pub has a 400-year-old she-devil locked up in the basement, her face concealed by an old sack, nicknamed “Baghead”. On request, and for two minutes only, she can summon up any dead person you want to talk to – but keep talking for more than two minutes, and the spirit of the dead is irreversibly loosed into the world of the living. An angry, intense young man, Neil (Jeremy Irvine) shows up at the pub, offering Iris fistfuls of cash, desperate for the chance to speak just one last time to his dead wife. But things go terribly wrong.

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