My Memory Is Full of Ghosts review – deeply moving visual hymn for the bombed-out Syrian city of Homs

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Anas Zawahri’s documentary lays heart-wrenching testimony over languorous shots of bullet-ridden ruins and deserted streets The western Syrian city of Homs is only a husk of its former self. Previously a major industrial centre, the region became a key battleground between 2011 and 2014, for Bashar al-Assad’s army and rebel forces. Amid the immense bloodshed, hundreds of thousands of civilians were either displaced or trapped inside their own homes. Filmed in the summer of 2023, this deeply moving documentary from Palestinian-born and Syria-based film-maker Anas Zawahri maps out the collective trauma and sorrow that continue to linger, even after the shooting has stopped. Unfolding in languorous, largely static shots of bombed rubble, hollowed-out buildings, and deserted streets, the film lays bare the startling extent of wartime brutality. A sense of stillness and stagnancy hangs in the air, and almost every wall is riddled with bullet holes, urban scars that mirror the psychological ...
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The Last Breath review – Julian Sands’s last film is solid shark-meets-shipwreck thriller

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A group of friends are terrorised by a shark while exploring a shipwreck in an unremarkable film that marks Sands final outing onscreen

In most respects this suspense-thriller with aquatic antagonists is pretty unremarkable, apart from the sad fact that it was British actor Julian Sands’s last film before he died while hiking. It’s a shame that he didn’t have a more interesting role, but few get to choose their swan song. Sands has a strictly functional supporting role here as Levi, a grizzled boat captain originally from Blighty, looking for the wreck of a ship that went down in the Caribbean during the second world war. Unable to dive any more because of an injury, Levi stays onboard supposedly knitting (even though the red hat he wears looks more like a misbegotten crochet project) while his younger crewmate Noah (Jack Parr) searches the ocean floor.

Then not long after they finally find the wreck, a posse of Noah’s friends from New York show up hoping to enjoy a diving holiday. Levi’s chance to get out of debt by charging one of the richer visitors a ridiculously large fee to see the wreck is the act of greed which surely dooms most of the ensemble. That said, we’re clearly meant to root for Sam (Kim Spearman), Noah’s ex who is now a doctor and presumably the most sympathetic of passengers because she gives a local kid with an infected wound sound medical advice and $20 for a tatty bracelet. From the start it’s obvious that obnoxious and entitled finance bro-cum-influencer Brett (Alexander Arnold) is a dead man swimming. The outcomes for supporting characters Riley (Erin Mullen) and Logan (Arlo Carter) are less foretold by genre convention, but given they are all about to meet a huge shark, don’t hold your breath.

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