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

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

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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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