My Father’s Diaries review – haunting home-video excavates trauma of Srebrenica massacre

Ado Hasanović’s moving documentary transforms footage filmed during the Bosnian war into a devastating portrait of memory, survival and inherited grief For years, film-maker Ado Hasanović has wanted to ask his father, Bekir, about his harrowing experiences during the Bosnian war but their conversations usually ended with curt, abrupt answers that obscured rather than illuminated the past. Bekir might be uncommunicative, but his collection of self-taped films and diary entries recorded during the height of the conflict tells a different story. Culled from this powerful personal archive, Hasanović’s poignant documentary forges a dialogue not just with history, but also across generations. In 1993, along with two other friends, Bekir formed a film-making collective called John, Ben & Boys in the small mountain town of Srebrenica. As the war escalated, what began as a playful amateur exercise quickly transformed into intentional documentation, as if Bekir was already aware of the genoc...

Sting review – low-budget alien-spider horror offers laughs and out-of-your-skin shocks

A fun-filled terror yarn featuring a flesh-eating alien secretly reared by a 12-year-old that delights in cutting its teeth on the apartment block’s pets

This killer-spider-from-outer-space movie feels like a cross between Alien and TV’s Only Murders in the Building. It’s a mostly fun throwback horror comedy set in a Brooklyn apartment block where 12-year-old Charlotte (Alyla Browne) finds a spider, puts it in a jar and calls it Sting. “Awesome,” she marvels when Sting doubles in size in two hours, hungrily tapping the glass for more cockroaches to chomp on. What Charlotte doesn’t know is that her new pet is a flesh-eater recently hatched out of an asteroid that crash landed on Earth.

At the screening I attended, someone a few rows behind couldn’t hack it and walked out after a few minutes. Which is a credit to first-time feature director Kiah Roache-Turner, who pulls off a couple of moments that will make you jump out of your skin using simple shadow tricks and oh-there-it-is! shocks. But really, the film’s mood is larky, with some big laughs as Sting cuts its teeth on the building’s pets. There’s a majestic fluffy white Persian cat, and a parakeet that steals the show acting-wise with its worried face as Sting scuttles out of an air vent.

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