The Drama: sex, secrets and that gobsmacking twist – discuss with spoilers

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Zendaya and Robert Pattinson’s dark dramedy is a stylish acting showcase, but does it do justice to its weighty themes? Ever since its first trailer dropped – and, on certain corners of Reddit, even before that – the internet has been abuzz with speculation over just what goes down in The Drama . The auteur production powerhouse A24 somewhat ingeniously pitched writer-director Kristoffer Borgli’s pitch-black film as a tart romantic comedy, with Zendaya and Robert Pattinson as a seemingly happy couple derailed by a disturbing revelation a week before their wedding. The actors, among a cohort of vanishingly few young movie stars, appeared as their characters in a fake wedding announcement in the Boston Globe; Zendaya’s rumored marriage to actor Tom Holland became a meta discussion point on a press tour that saw her method dressing in “something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue”, her wardrobe slowly darkening in a nod to something gone horribly awry. The Norwegi...
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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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