Folktales review – taking on tyranny of social media as teens learn to live like hunter-gatherers

In this documentary, high schoolers camp out in subzero temperatures, making their own fires and driving sledges in the wild The Pasvik Folk high school in remote northern Norway teaches teenagers to grow as young adults and escape the pressures of toxic social media by challenging them to get back in touch with their “stone age brain” and live like hunter-gatherers in the snowy wild. This is the subject of a documentary from Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady. Over winter months of almost continuous darkness, the teens cleanse themselves with tasks such as camping out in subzero weather, making their own fires and driving sledges with huskies. Prior to all this of course is presumably a solemn promise to do without their phones, tablets and laptops, although there are no scenes of the kids actually having to surrender these gadgets (this isn’t rehab, after all). They have to swim in icy water; and they make it look like fun. What doesn’t look like fun is the camping out and there is one t...

Maria review – Angelina Jolie plays the diva in magnificent stroll around the cult of Callas

Venice film festival
Jolie is a painting to be stared at in Pablo Larraín’s opulent drama, tottering around Paris in the 70s and drawing us in to tragedy as thoroughly as Bellini or Pucchini

Hide the overflowing ashtrays and move that infernal grand piano – Maria Callas, La Diva, is granting a valedictory TV interview. She’s pacing the halls of her Paris apartment, feeding her poodles and strung out on pills. The visiting journalist is called Mandrax, named after her favourite medication. He takes a seat and checks the mic. By way of introduction, he says, “I’d like to walk with you through your life.”

Callas’s life whisked her from the slums of Nazi-occupied Athens to the concert halls of Europe and the US, through a torrid relationship with Aristotle Onassis to collaborations with Pasolini and Zeffirelli. But Pablo Larraín’s opulent Maria shrewdly homes in on the soprano’s final days, showcasing a stiffly dignified Angelina Jolie as the lioness in winter, four years retired and a legend in her own lunchtime. “Make me an appointment with a hairdresser who doesn’t speak,” she orders her doting servants. “Book me a table at a restaurant where the waiters know who I am.” She is in the mood, she adds, for adulation.

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