The Breadwinner review – Nate Bargatze’s dated dad comedy loses us entirely

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The comedian makes an unconvincing bid for movie stardom in a largely unfunny and old-fashioned feature-length sitcom episode The popular standup comedian Nate Bargatze uses his appealingly deadpan demeanor to convey relatable, family-friendly jokes about his own middle-class doofiness. Funny as he can be, his affect doesn’t seem ideal for performing with others. Back in the 90s, an American sitcom would have been built around him anyway; today, the form isn’t quite so ubiquitous, and sold-out standup tickets have remained his bread and butter. Yet Bargatze has done surprisingly well as a two-time Saturday Night Live host, especially for more writerly pieces that other celebrities might not so perfectly underplay. For his film debut The Breadwinner, Bargatze takes cues from an earlier SNL player – specifically and unfortunately, the suburban dregs of Adam Sandler’s late-2000s/early-2010s middle period. As in vaguely sour-spirited Sandler vehicles like Grown Ups or Jack & Jill, Barg...
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Landscapes of Resistance review – an enigmatic meditation on a life marked by Auschwitz

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This documentary by Serbian-born director Marta Popivoda is a mildly psychedelic drift into the horror of one woman’s deportation and determined survival

Much of this Serbian documentary uses a striking, mildly psychedelic technique: a super-slow dissolve between images that morph near-imperceptibly into the next. Cracks in rendered rural walls appear to shift and Balkan forest vegetation undergoes subtle mutations, as the film’s subject, nonagenarian Sofia Vujanovic, recalls her past in voiceover: one of Tito’s partisans, her wartime activities and subsequent deportation to Auschwitz. It’s as if an ineluctable force – history – is moving through the material world, warping and reshaping it.

These tectonics operate on human flesh too: Vujanovic’s Auschwitz tattoo has slipped down her forearm as the years have gone by. Purpose still weighting her words, she recounts her journey into activism: she was attracted to communism by progressive classmates in the countryside; cherrypicked as a cell leader during the second world war because being a woman allowed her to escape attention; and then sickened by taking her first life, an SS officer during a raid on a supply train. Vujanovic was then captured, tortured and shipped off into darkness in Poland, with Czechoslovak railwaymen taunting the prisoners en route: “Gas, gas!” She thought they were being sent to work at a gas-processing plant.

Landscapes of Resistance is available on True Story on 2 February.

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