Dead Souls review – Alex Cox rides into sunset with anti-Trump spaghetti western

Rotterdam film festival The Repo Man director relocates Gogol’s surreal novella to the old west in what he says will be his final film English film-maker Alex Cox comes riding into town with this jauntily odd and surreal western which he has indicated will be his swansong, shot on the rugged plains of Almeria in Spain and also Arizona. Cox himself is the star – an elegant, dapper presence – and his co-writer is veteran spaghetti western actor Gianni Garko. The story has obvious relevance to contemporary America, and a flash-forward makes some of this clear. But it is also inspired by the classic novella of the same name by Nikolai Gogol, a mysterious parable of greed and vanity about a man who travels around offering to buy the souls of dead serfs on various estates in pre-revolutionary Russia so landowners can lower their tax bills, but plans to claim that they are still alive and therefore pass himself off as a wealthy man. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://i...

Norwegian Dream review – queer romance speaks for all the oppressed underclasses

This idealistic feature draws parallels between the struggles of immigrant Polish workers in Norway and the homophobia faced by two young lovers, but can’t quite sew up the two seams

Director Leiv Igor Devold makes an unexpected link-up between Norway, the country where he grew up, and Poland, where he attended film school, in this idealistic but sometimes heavy-handed second feature. He also finds invigorating cross-currents in contrasting the collectivist struggles of immigrant Polish fish-processing workers with another oppressed minority: the stuttering romance, in the face of homophobia, between young wage slave Robert (Hubert Miłkowski) and his supervisor Ivar (Karl Bekele Steinland).

Robert finds himself gutting salmon in a factory on a Norwegian island in order to send money back home. But it is Ivar – the black adopted son of the factory owner Bjorn (Øyvind Brandtzæg) – who gets under his skin. A wannabe actor slumming it courtesy of dad, he’s an unbridled karaoke diva and early-morning buster of moves in the factory car park, even with Robert’s dorm-mate Marek (Jakub Sierenberg) heckling him. Robert is fascinated, but it’s not the fear of his compatriots that stops him acting; it’s the self-hating homophobic imp on his back that has him clamming up every time he’s confronted with Ivar.

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