Our Fault review – ultra-glossy Spanish step-sibling melodrama is too bland to be annoying

Third film adapted from the romance novels by Mercedes Ron, originally written in Spanish, feels clunky and cliched This is the third film in a series, after My Fault in 2023 and Your Fault in 2024 , that have been adapted from the Culpable trilogy, romance novels by Mercedes Ron, originally written in Spanish. It’s obviously aimed at a specific market that expects a certain blend of melodrama, softcore sex and lush lifestyle porn, and (more importantly) is invested already in the trilogy’s story. Given those parameters, it probably delivers – although the dialogue, at least judging by the subtitles, is super clunky and cliched. Complete outsiders coming to this cold may be a little baffled by what’s going on, since this concluding instalment makes no effort to fill in any blanks. But even total newbies will get the gist that heroine Noah (Nicole Wallace) still has feelings for her ex Nick (Gabriel Guevara) – who also, somewhat disturbingly, was once her stepbrother, although their ...

The Flats review – a powerful look at the unresolved agony of the Troubles

Copenhagen documentary film festival: Alessandra Celesia’s urgent documentary about the residents of an estate in Belfast speaks to the lasting trauma of political violence

Alessandra Celesia’s film is part seance, part news story: a documentary about the run-down New Lodge estate in what the BBC news used to call “Catholic west Belfast”. It is primarily about the families who still live with the unresolved agony of the Troubles a quarter of a century on, the psychic residue of political violence coexisting with sexism, domestic abuse, substance abuse and futile rage against drug dealers in working-class neighbourhoods. But there is something else too. Along with TV news stories about the Queen’s death there is the sensational revelation that for the first time, the Catholic community in Northern Ireland now outnumbers the Protestant. The thought can hardly be said out loud; could it be that times are changing and reunification – that concept which caused so much bloodshed – is actually going to happen without another shot being fired?

At the film’s centre, Celesia shows the day-to-day life of Joe McNally, an ageing republican who has done jail time as an “ordinary decent criminal”, that is, for non-political offences. McNally lives like a ghost, an angry wraith; traumatised by the childhood memory of his uncle’s murder by loyalists. He has lived with the despairing sectarian thirst for revenge ever since. Celesia, perhaps inspired by Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing, gets Joe to stage a reconstruction of his uncle’s wake in the back room with younger generations of the family, having gotten Joe and a friend to carry a coffin into his flat for this psychodrama. But far from exorcising Joe’s unquiet spirits, it only seems to make them even worse.

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