Fackham Hall review – Downton Abbey spoof is fast, funny and throwaway

Period drama parody has some decent and often smart gags and benefits from a game cast including Damian Lewis and Thomasin McKenzie Perhaps it’s the feeling of end times in the air: after years of inactivity, spoofs are making a comeback . This summer saw the resurgence of the lighthearted genre, which at its best sends up the pretensions of overly serious genre with a barrage of pitched cliches, sight gags and stupid-clever puns. The Naked Gun , starring Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson in a spoof of a buddy-cop spoof, opened to moderate box office success; the hapless rock band dialed it back up to 11 in Spinal Tap II: The End Continues . Reboots of the horror spoof gold-standard Scary Movie and the Mel Brooks Star Wars rip Spaceballs were greenlit, and there were rumors of a return for international man of mystery Austin Powers. Unserious times, it seems, beget appetite for knowingly unserious, joke-dense, refreshingly shallow fun. The latest of these goofy parodies, which premi...

Camouflage review – the dark past of Argentina’s dirty war detention centres

Author Félix Bruzzone fronts this haunting film about Campo de Mayo, where his mother was among tens of thousands of people who ‘disappeared’ under the dictatorship

The dark past of Campo de Mayo, a military camp that once served as a vast detention centre during Argentina’s so-called dirty war, is excavated in Jonathan Perel’s haunting documentary. Following noted author Félix Bruzzone as he jogs alongside the infamous site, the film is structured around the writer’s run in which the past and the present entwine. His encounters with witnesses of the dictatorship’s atrocities show that history is far from dormant, but a living, breathing thing.

Having lived in the area, Bruzzone was only recently made aware of his family ties to the site. Abducted by the secret police and taken to Campo de Mayo, his mother was among the tens of thousands who “disappeared” under the military regime. This painful memory is mirrored by Bruzzone’s conversation with an archaeologist, who talks about the human bones buried under the base, as well as the lush vegetation that flourishes above ground. The juxtaposition is startling if morbid. Indeed, as an estate agent tells Bruzzone: in spite of the camp’s horrific legacy, the prices of nearby properties have steadily risen over the years.

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