The Mission review – a surgeon saves lives in war-torn Gaza in a visceral portrait of human endurance

Mohammad Tahir and his colleagues operate through bombing and blackouts in barely functional hospitals – but there are moments of relief amid the documentary’s tragedy and gore What this documentary might lack in film-making finesse it makes up for with sheer visceral and emotional impact. British nerve surgeon Mohammad Tahir and his colleagues, who also work the cameras, toil in Gaza’s barely operational hospitals during some of the worst days and nights of the war in the winter of 2024-25. Supported by US-based charity FAJR Global , who provide medical care to the world’s most in need, Tahir operates through bombings and blackouts with a bare minimum of medical supplies, sometimes treating patients lying on the floor in puddles of blood because there are no gurneys. This is often hard to watch, and not just because of all the gore; many of the victims are children, out of whom Tahir and the others dig bullets as well as tiny tungsten cubes, new-fangled shrapnel designed to cause maxi...

Elle Fanning: ‘The last thing I want to be is boring’

Her debut at two catapulted the actress to child stardom, while taking the lead in The Great turned her into a household name. Ahead of the much-anticipated Bob Dylan biopic, she discusses subverting expectations, escaping her princess vibe – and why she could have been a tennis pro

‘Technically, I did my first film when I was two,” says Elle Fanning, which, at 26, makes her a youthful old-timer, already more than two decades into a hugely successful acting career. The cliché of the child star is that they will, inevitably, go off the rails at some point, unable to cope with a demanding adult-oriented entertainment business that places its leading lights on a distant and unreachable pedestal, leaving them with no concept of real life and no solid framework to prop them up. But there are other, less headline-worthy outcomes for performers who have been at it for their whole lives. Some child stars, particularly those who seem to be thriving, may be more like professional athletes, singular in their ambitions, trained and focused, more than content to remain within the industry that has raised them.

I suspect that Fanning leans towards the latter. She was born in Georgia in 1998 and was brought up in California, where her family moved when she was two, to pursue her older sister Dakota’s acting career. “My family is very southern, so it’s southern hospitality and southern manners,” she explains. “My grandmother would go with me on all my film sets, or my mom, to keep us in line. Thank God they were there with us.”

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