Primitive War review – it’s Green Berets vs dinosaurs in cheerfully cheesy Vietnam war gorefest

Set to an on-the-nose soundtrack of Creedence Clearwater, an elite squad of soldiers are suitably unprepared for their large-toothed assailants in this jungle thriller Aimed squarely and unabashedly at viewers who love soldiers, gore and dinosaurs – as well as dinosaurs goring soldiers – this adaptation of Ethan Pettus’s 2017 novel is deeply repetitive but weirdly watchable. Although shot in Australia with a mostly Australian cast sprinkled with a few American actors, it’s supposed to be set in Vietnam in the late 1960s as the US armed forces take on the Viet Cong. But there are other forces to contend with, and we don’t just mean covert Chinese or Soviet operatives, although the latter do feature significantly here. It turns out a nefarious scientific experiment by one of the aforementioned factions has accidentally ushered a whole army of dinosaurs into the jungle and they’ve begun gaily munching their way through anyone who gets in their way. When one squad of Green Berets go miss...

Cidade Rabat review – elegant, subtle study of a daughter’s grief

Portuguese director Susana Nobre explores the sadness of bereavement with deadpan obliqueness in this story about a woman’s reaction to her mother’s death

There’s a studied impassivity to this elegant Portuguese movie about grief from Susana Nobre. It’s a film that maintains its near-affectless deadpan style from first to last, and declines to offer a conventional emotional payoff, or indeed the usual narrative shape that might lead to such a climax – although there is an emotional outpouring of sorts. It isn’t exactly that sadness finds its outlet in oblique or unusual ways (the heavy drinking we see is, after all, a commonplace symptom) but the way it is represented on screen is indirect.

Helena (Raquel Castro) is a production manager on a film shoot, dealing with a difficult director. She is divorced, sharing custody of a teen daughter, and in a relationship with a musician who is away on tour. Her elderly widowed mother, who lives in a Lisbon apartment block called Cidade Rabat, where Helena grew up, is talking openly about her approaching death and wants Helena to live in the flat after she’s gone – an idea that stirs up oppressive emotions.

Continue reading...

from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/eTVPL5X
via IFTTT

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Miracle Club review – Maggie Smith can’t save this rocky road trip to Lourdes

BREAKING: Interstellar back in cinemas due to public demand; Dune: Part Two to also re-release on March 14 in IMAX

EXCLUSIVE: Mona Singh gears up for an intense role in an upcoming web series; Deets inside!