Birds of War review – war journalists find love among the ruins

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This documentary tells the story of the long-distance relationship between a BBC correspondent in London and a photographer on the ground in Syria with charm and humanity Politics is to some degree set aside here in favour of matters of the heart; this is a story of romantic love among the ruins. London-based Lebanese journalist Janay Boulos, while working for the BBC’s Arabic service, fell in love from afar in 2016 with Syrian activist and photojournalist Abd Alkader Habak. He, during the Assad regime, was putting his life in danger to supply her with dramatic footage from his home town of Idlib and later Aleppo. Habak was himself to make international headlines in 2017 by getting photographed carrying an injured child to safety. Habak’s gruelling images are interspersed with Boulos’s smartphone footage of her thoughtfully going up and down in the lifts at BBC Broadcasting House as well as home-movie material of her childhood in the seaside Lebanese town of Byblos; we get their tende...
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The Shrouds review – David Cronenberg gets wrapped up in grief

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Cannes film festival
Elaborate necrophiliac meditation on loss and longing stars Vincent Cassel as an oncologist who has founded a restaurant with a hi-tech cemetery attached

David Cronenberg’s new film is a contorted sphinx without a secret, an eroticised necrophiliac meditation on grief, longing and loss that returns this director to his now very familiar Ballardian fetishes. It’s intriguing and exhausting: a quasi-murder mystery and doppelganger sex drama combined with a sci-fi conspiracy thriller which comes very close to participating in that very xenophobia it purports to satirise. And among its exasperating plot convolutions, there is a centrally important oncologist who was having a possible affair with the hero’s dead wife and who had also been her first sexual partner as a teenager – but who never appears on camera.

Yet for all this, the film has its own creepy, enveloping mausoleum atmosphere of disquiet, helped by the jarring electronic score by Howard Shore. We are in Toronto of the present or near future in which a wealthy and stylish widower and entrepreneur called Karsh (Vincent Cassel) has founded a restaurant with a cemetery attached: a state of the art burial place where people can bury their loved ones with a new “shroud” whose thousands of tiny cameras can record and transmit real time, 8K pictures of the body’s decay, which you can watch on your smartphone.

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