Animol review – gritty young offenders drama challenges conventional machismo

Institutional menace and an idealistic take on redemption sit side-by-side in Top Boy actor Ashley Walters’ empathic and occasionally over-earnest film The lawless brutality of a young offender institution is the setting for this British movie written by Marching Powder ’s Nick Love and directed by Ashley Walters. It’s a place where terrified newbies realise they can survive only by abandoning their innocence and decency, and submitting to the gang authority of a psycho top G, naturally involving a horrible loyalty test. This is a place where drugs arrive by drone, where facially tattooed men meet each other’s gaze with a cool opaque challenge in the canteen, and where the cues and balls on the recreation area’s pool table have only one purpose: to give someone a three-month stay in the hospital wing while underpaid guards in lanyards and ill-fitting v-neck jumpers look the other way. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/CLu4l65 via IFTTT

Hanging around: how Planet of the Apes became Hollywood’s most resilient franchise

The success of Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes shows how, for almost 60 years, the series has managed to sustain audience interest

By pure hot-streak longevity, the most impressive feat in Hollywood franchising is the Mission: Impossible series, which began in 1996 and may – may – finally wrap up next year, after eight entries and nearly 30 years without a single continuity reboot. But true to the fictional history of the Planet of the Apes series, it may be the apes who ultimately inherit this title from the petty, small-minded humans. The original Planet of the Apes came out in 1968 – and based on first weekend box office and positive reviews for Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, the latest installment of a rebooted series that began in 2011, the series will probably remain when the first movie reaches its 60th anniversary in just four years. This may be the most purely resilient series in Hollywood.

Yes, when you factor in reboots, the James Bond series has been kicking around for longer (though not by all that much). But the Bond movies have a lot of things that a lot of people traditionally like in their motion pictures: cars, guns, globe-hopping locations, attractive human beings triumphing over supervillains. The majority of the Planet of the Apes movies have little of this, and instead feature – multi-spoiler alert? – humans losing, badly. It’s a hallmark of the series, whether through the psychological damage inflicted by the original movie’s now-famous twist ending (the ape world isn’t a far-flung planet at all, but Earth!), the deadly Covid-like flu that spreads over the end credits of Rise of the Planet of the Apes, the savage beatings and killings administered for 30 solid minutes at the end of Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, or the total destruction of all life on Earth – amazingly, that last one happens in the second film.

Continue reading...

from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/5gxrOtD
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

‘I lost a friend of almost 40 years’: Nancy Meyers pays tribute to Diane Keaton