A Gangster’s Life review – funny in parts, but not always deliberately

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Despite some interesting visuals, not even Tony Cook and Jonny Weldon can lift this poorly produced tale of a pair of dodgy lads hiding in Greece from a gangster Here is an odd film about a couple of dodgy lads who get on the wrong side of a bona fide gangster and have to hide out in Greece. It’s not thoughtless per se; rather, it lacks the resources to bring its vision successfully to screen. Its quirks are sometimes appealing and sometimes amateurish and, while a mixture of influences swirl about, from Bond to Kingsman to Guy Ritchie and even Mission: Impossible, the film-makers don’t have the necessary budget, meaning that it feels at times like a TikTok parody of more expensive films. It is a shame, because there are some interesting visual ideas that go beyond route one filming. Example: a goon beating a man tied to a chair on a crispy manicured lawn is filmed in a lovely wide shot, with a guy in the far distance calmly clipping the hedge. But it’s the post-production that is th...
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Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project review – electric film about radical thinker and poet

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Featuring interviews and archive footage of the brilliant civil rights activist, the readings of her poems will have the hairs on the back of your neck standing up

Nikki Giovanni, bestselling American poet and civil rights activist, blazed on to the scene in the 1960s. In this documentary, completed before she died in December, we watch Giovanni in her late 70s, reigning over sold-out public appearances. On stage she recites poems about love, race and gender and in between, with the timing of a standup comedian, she has the auditorium erupting in whoops and laughter. Posing for selfies, a woman tells Giovanni she named her daughter after her; another says she wrote to her on the verge of dropping out of college. “You wrote back. I’m a teacher now!”

In archive footage, Giovanni as a young woman, reads her 1968 poem Nikki-Rosa, which has a line about how white people fail to understand the lives of black people: “they’ll probably talk about my hard childhood / and never understand that / all the while I was quite happy”. Giovanni was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, during segregation and, after witnessing domestic violence at home, she went to live with her grandparents. Speaking in a radio interview she is blunt: “Either I was going to kill him” – she’s talking about her father – “or I was going to move.”

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