Is Warfare the most realistic war film ever made?

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In Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza’s brutal and immersive new film, memory informs the events that take place in real time to a unit of soldiers in Iraq Warfare , Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza’s assiduous new film on a single episode of the American war in Iraq, opens with a title card typical to a war picture: date, location, barebones summary – 11 November 2006, in Ramadi, Iraq. Navy SEAL team alpha one is supporting Marines in insurgents’ territory. And then one final, unusual detail in place of the standard “based on a true story” – “This film uses only their memories.” The “only” is an ominous indicator: this is a film working against the Hollywood tide to gloss, simplify or narrativize. Warfare, based primarily on Mendoza’s memories of that day as a former SEAL, as well as those of fellow soldiers and civilians present, is as much an experiment of translation as a cinematic achievement, a movie defined by both what it shows and what it does not. Much of the press surrounding Warfar...
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Alma’s Rainbow review – rereleased gem of black female empowerment

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Pioneering director Ayoka Chenzira gives voice to the inner lives of women at a time when they were mostly ignored, making this coming-of-age story a rare gift to treasure

Ayoka Chenzira is a pioneering black director whose films have been finding a new audience with younger generations as she enters her 70s. Her 1994 feature debut Alma’s Rainbow has now been restored and rereleased; it is a coming-of-age movie that is funny and warm, if a little scrappy. It’s set in a Brooklyn townhouse owned by prim and proper Alma (Kim Weston-Moran), who runs a beauty parlour on the ground floor. In this all-women space, Chenzira luxuriates in her female characters. The fact that historically so few films have been made about the inner lives of black women gives Alma’s Rainbow a precious quality, and the feeling that it’s a gem to treasure.

Alma lives in the house with her teenage daughter Rainbow (played with charisma and spark by Victoria Gabrielle Platt). Rainbow has been skipping school to perform with a hip-hop street dance crew. In the neighbourhood, she’s known as a tomboy, but Rainbow is starting to think about boys. Her mum, Alma, is not impressed; she’s worked to the bone to make a success of the beauty parlour, to be an independent woman and build a better life for Rainbow. It makes her strict: “Keep your pants up and your dress down,” she instructs her daughter.

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