Jaws at 50: Spielberg’s marine masterpiece transformed the movies – and us

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The original blockbuster turned fear of sharks into decades of persecution but, at long last, the tide may be turning Fifty yars ago the world was changed for ever by a shark. On 20 June 1975, cinemagoers in the US were the first to experience the visceral thrills and oceanic spills of Jaws. It’s the original blockbuster, it inspired an entire genre of “sharksploitation” entertainment, and it transformed what millions thought about sharks, for better and for worse. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/ewbpQxs via IFTTT
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And Their Children After Them review – racism and revenge festers in smalltown France

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Venice film festival
Nineties-set drama adapted from the bestselling novel zeroes in on tensions in a post-industrial community, sparked by a feud over a motorbike

Class and racial tensions come to the boil in this potent tale of disaffected youth in smalltown France. Co-directed by Ludovic and Zoran Boukherma from Nicolas Mathieu’s bestselling novel, this is a state-of-the-nation drama dressed up as a coming-of-age tale (or possibly vice-versa); it is at once intimate and expansive in the way in which it connects the low-rise estates to the posh homes on the hill. It also brings a dose of dirty social-realism to this year’s Venice film festival.

The time-frame is the 90s, although its socio-economic tensions still apply, just as the (fictional) burg of Heillange is broadly representative of a thousand other towns in France and elsewhere; living in the shadow of its shuttered steelworks and inhabited by too many people with too little to do. Heillange, we are told, is “a town of hard times”, where the big local news is the opening of an indoor ski slope. The white ex-steelworkers live in humdrum terraced houses and the immigrant ex-steelworkers live in the humdrum block of flats down the road. Neither camp evidently has much to do with the other until a minor crisis triggers a chain reaction.

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