The Six Billion Dollar Man review – WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s rise, fall and limbo

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Cannes film festival Focusing on the rogue’s gallery of hypocrites and crooks surrounding him, Assange himself is in the background of a pretty definitive examination Julian Assange sits at the centre of this gripping account of the WikiLeaks founder’s rise, fall and protracted seven-year limbo inside the Ecuadorian embassy. Eugene Jarecki’s documentary takes its title from the price the incoming Ecuadorian government supposedly charged the Trump administration for helping furnish his extradition to the US, thereby reneging on a promise of political asylum. If The Six Billion Dollar Man doesn’t rebuild Assange, exactly, that’s because it’s more interested in comprehensively demolishing his enemies. Compared to the hypocrites, scoundrels and crooks who surround him, the man himself looks almost virtuous. Actually Assange is mostly a background presence here. He’s more talked about than talking up; a karmic victim of his own success. While even his supporters admit to his personal fai...
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The Parenting review – supernatural caper is a so-so comedy and a lousy horror

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A gay couple are trapped in a haunted Airbnb with their parents in an initially amusing but progressively exasperating genre mishmash

Writer-director Craig Johnson broke out with 2014’s spiky comedy drama The Skeleton Twins, a film that hit familiar Sundance indie beats but hit them better than most. He has struggled a little since, from annoying Woody Harrelson-led comedy Wilson to ho-hum gay high school romance Alex Strangelove, and so one can understand why Johnson might feel like a big swing in a different direction might make most sense.

It has led him to a script by Saturday Night Live writer Kent Sublette called The Parenting, a throwback supernatural comedy horror that tries to remind us of a time when these rambunctious concoctions were far more common. Think Beetlejuice in the 80s or The Frighteners in the 90s or the deeply underrated Housebound more recently, a high-energy rush of scares and laughs that should feel effortless but too often doesn’t, the difficulty of such a balance perhaps serving to explain why so few are made these days. It might also explain why backers New Line didn’t quite know what to do with this one, the film gathering dust on the shelf for almost three years and now landing on Max with a suitably concerning trailer released less than two weeks prior.

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