Dead Souls review – Alex Cox rides into sunset with anti-Trump spaghetti western

Rotterdam film festival The Repo Man director relocates Gogol’s surreal novella to the old west in what he says will be his final film English film-maker Alex Cox comes riding into town with this jauntily odd and surreal western which he has indicated will be his swansong, shot on the rugged plains of Almeria in Spain and also Arizona. Cox himself is the star – an elegant, dapper presence – and his co-writer is veteran spaghetti western actor Gianni Garko. The story has obvious relevance to contemporary America, and a flash-forward makes some of this clear. But it is also inspired by the classic novella of the same name by Nikolai Gogol, a mysterious parable of greed and vanity about a man who travels around offering to buy the souls of dead serfs on various estates in pre-revolutionary Russia so landowners can lower their tax bills, but plans to claim that they are still alive and therefore pass himself off as a wealthy man. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://i...

‘We just have to keep fighting’: a shocking new film on the danger of US abortion laws

In the Hilary Clinton and Jennifer Lawrence-produced documentary Zurawski v Texas, women whose lives have been brutally upended have their say

In August 2022, Amanda and Josh Zurawski were 18 weeks into a much-wanted pregnancy with their first child when her water broke early. The complication ended her chances of delivering a healthy baby and imperiled her health – but doctors in Austin, where the couple live, said they could not end her pregnancy under Texas law, because they could still detect fetal cardiac activity.

In the wake of the supreme court’s decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization in June 2022, which reversed half a century of precedent and overturned Roe v Wade, the Texas legislature, like those in 13 other states, passed a near-total abortion ban. Though the ban allowed for medical exceptions, doctors have said that the law – written by politicians, not medical professionals – is so vaguely worded, and the criminal penalties so severe (up to 99 years in prison for violating state abortion law), that it was unworkable in practice, blocking doctors from helping patients.

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