Modi: Three Days on the Wing of Madness review – Johnny Depp’s Modigliani as bohemian badass

A lineup including Stephen Graham and Al Pacino seem wasted on this lavish, but hackneyed drama about the Italian artist Some very cliched roistering, life-affirming wine-drinking, bourgeois-defying artistic shenanigans here from the veteran screenwriting couple Jerzy and Mary Olson-Kromolowski who have adapted a 1980 stage play, Modigliani by Dennis McIntyre, about the Italian sculptor and painter Amedeo Modigliani, known as Modi. Johnny Depp directs and perhaps sees his subject as a bohemian badass not unlike Hunter S Thompson, whom he played in Terry Gilliam’s 1998 movie Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – and perhaps not altogether unlike how he sees himself. It is 1916 in Paris and the brutality of war is destroying the belle époque; Riccardo Scamarcio plays Modigliani, a brilliant, sensual but penniless artist facing poverty and casual antisemitism. Having got into a chaotic affray at a pompous posh restaurant – filmed like a deleted scene from Richard Lester’s The Three Musketeer...

The Investigator review – harrowing documentary details search for justice after Balkan wars

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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