Evil Dead Burn review – wildly gory horror tears a grieving family to pieces

The latest new chapter in Sam Raimi’s classic franchise goes harder than ever before but there’s something missing With the release of Evil Dead Burn, there are now just as many Evil Dead movies not directed by Sam Raimi or starring Bruce Campbell as there are entries with that original team in place. The next film, Evil Dead Wrath, is already set for a 2028 release, when it will officially tip the balance toward non-Raimi film-makers. And unlike the non-James Cameron Terminators or the Spielberg-free Jaws sequels, these post-Raimi Evil Dead movies (which retain the director’s services as a seemingly enthusiastic producer) have so far enjoyed box office success, decent critical notices and appreciation from their horror fanbase. Yet all three of the post-Raimi Evil Deads still feel as if they take place in the shadows of what came before – specifically, the original 1983 indie horror classic about a bunch of young people who stumble upon the Book of the Dead in a cabin and accidentally...

Rojek review – unsettlingly intimate portraits of Islamic State militants

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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