Bone Keeper review – there’s a critter in the caves in serviceable Brit horror

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An unconvincing group of friends is briskly picked off one-by-one while searching for a beastie that hitched a ride to Earth on a meteorite You get the measure early on of the tentacled predator in this British horror film when it makes mincemeat out of a hairy tough-guy Neanderthal. The movie opens with some punching-above-its budget special effects explaining the origins of the flesh-eater, which crash landed on Earth with a meteorite. Like Neil Marshall’s The Descent, it’s a creature that makes its home in caves – though unlike the earlier movie, Bone Keeper lacks a sense of sweat-trickling-down-your-back claustrophobia, despite a couple of good scares. Sarah Alexandra Marks plays Olivia, whose journalist grandfather vanished in the 1970s while investigating reports of a creature in a cave somewhere in the UK. Now years later, Olivia’s mother has disappeared while searching for him. So Olivia heads to the caves with a group of mates, who feel as if they’ve been dreamed up in a 20-...
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The Investigator review – harrowing documentary details search for justice after Balkan wars

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Viktor Portel’s film follows Czech investigator Vladimír Dzuro as he returns to sites of torture and death, and meets survivors as well as supporters of perpetrators

Revisiting the blood-soaked conflicts that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1991, Viktor Portel’s harrowing documentary follows Vladimír Dzuro, a Czech investigator committed to bringing war criminals to justice. Drawing from Dzuro’s bestselling book The Investigator: Demons of the Balkan War, the film primarily focuses on the atrocities committed by Serbian forces; as Dzuro returns to sites of torture and death, his encounters with the survivors as well as supporters of the perpetrators are at once riveting and heartbreaking.

The Vukovar massacre, one of the most infamous incidents of the war, is recounted in eye-opening detail. In 1991, in the final days of a battle between the Croatian National Guard and the Serb-controlled Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) during the Croatian war of independence, the latter vetoed an agreement to evacuate the Vukovar hospital and turned it over to Serbian paramilitaries. In the end, nearly 300 people were executed in cold blood and dumped in mass graves. In 1996, Dzuro was a part of a mission to exhume the victims. Flickering archival footage of the campaign shows piles of bodies laid beneath the ground, a chilling visual manifestation of how history can be buried and erased. In contrast with the lo-fi quality of these newsreels, contemporary footage of Dzuro has the stylisation of a crime thriller. The look creates a gripping atmosphere, even if it also occasionally verges on overdramatisation, which the film’s already shocking true stories don’t necessarily need.

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