Landship review – soldiers yearn for tinned pies in muddy first world war drama that stays inside the tank

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It’s too murky to distinguish one stiff upper lip from another in Callum Burn’s drama about a real-life mission that came unstuck Based loosely on a true story, this British first world war drama deploys a few cunning stratagems to keep the budget down – starting with setting almost the entire story inside a tank; this one is nicknamed the Fray Bentos after the popular tinned pie. In addition, whenever the British soldier characters venture outside this extremely confined space, it’s almost always night-time, or exactly the moment when a miasma of smoke and fog is so thick, you can’t see the Germans skulking behind papier-mache hillocks of mud, ready to pounce on our plucky heroes. Unfortunately, all that gloom and grot makes it a little hard to make out what is going on at times. That means the noble chaps become almost indistinguishable from each other – although over time it’s possible to work out that the officers are the ones with tidy, manly moustaches and sound posh, while the n...
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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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