Savage House review – Claire Foy and Richard E Grant sell it hard in bewigged 18th-century caper

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The leads are the most watchable thing in this raucous period yarn about a grimy pair of status-obsessed nobles Black-belt performances from Claire Foy and Richard E Grant put some vim and vigour into this haranguingly one-note and unidirectional period romp of the raucously bewigged and be-poxed 18th century. It’s written and directed by American film-maker Peter Glanz, who gives us candlelit interiors like a knockoff Barry Lyndon, and periodic deafening orchestral stabs with a touch of Amadeus as furious people in costume storm down corridors. But Grant and Foy are always there, selling it hard and there are one or two nice lines. They play Sir Chauncey and Lady Savage, who are living in a vast crumbling country estate: he’s a parvenu, an adventurer, a lover of the new Hanover dispensation who loathes Jacobites, but fundamentally a social alpinist who married for money and took his wife’s noble name. She was entranced by his roguish ways and she forgave him everything but is, however...
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Rojek review – unsettlingly intimate portraits of Islamic State militants

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Documentary collects sequence of interviews with prisoners, not all repentant, alongside footage of war-blasted Syrian Kurdistan

Here is an astringent, devastating and truly extraordinary film that is hard work to watch, but entirely worth it. Rojek probes the roots and fallen leaves of the Syrian civil war, a conflict the western media has practically forgotten as news of Ukraine and Gaza-Israel-Yemen dominates international reporting. Director Zayne Akyol, heard off-camera throughout, interviews members of Islamic State, now being held in high security prisons by the Syrian Democratic Forces, about their lives, with some recalling more innocent days when they hunted goldfinches to sell in markets or liked Canadian pop music. Many recount how they were recruited into IS by cells in local mosques in assorted countries – Germany, say, or Saudi Arabia – and came to have positions both high-ranking and menial in the organisation in the part of Syria with a dense Kurdish population.

In the film’s present, some are still unrepentant, believers that they fought honourably in a holy war; others see things differently and are riven with regrets. Some are women who recall their time of service to IS as the happiest days of their lives. In stately procession, each person speaks straight to the camera in almost disconcerting closeup, and however repugnant some of the things they say might be, it’s impossible to not recognise and see most of them as broken human beings.

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