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

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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...
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The best films of 2024 … you may not have seen

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From a Hitchcockian thriller to a shocking documentary, Guardian writers pick their lesser-known movies of the year

I can’t really blame anyone for not seeing Drugstore June in theaters, considering that scattered, super-limited run lasted just a few weeks. (I caught it in a near-empty cinema, on a weekday-afternoon whim, the day after belatedly seeing the trailer online.) But now that it’s streaming on Hulu in the US, you can check out one of the least-discussed but funniest mainstream comedies in ages. Built around the standup persona of comedian Esther Povitsky, Drugstore June is very much a throwback to a time when any emerging comic figure might be awarded their own thinly conceived vehicle. It wasn’t a great trend – Drugstore June’s director, Nicholaus Goossen, made Grandma’s Boy, to cite one example among many – yet here, revived absent big-studio attention (or maybe just with extra love for the game), it produces an idiosyncratic townie detective comedy, with sheltered, self-centered, snacks-obsessed June (Povitsky) trying to figure out who trashed the pharmacy where she (barely) works. Unlike its many Sandler-crew predecessors, Drugstore June has a genuine sense of place, a playful sense of generational self-satire, and an original persona at its center. It’s all the more miraculous at a time when studios big and small don’t care much for making comedies. Jesse Hassenger

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