Animol review – gritty young offenders drama challenges conventional machismo

Institutional menace and an idealistic take on redemption sit side-by-side in Top Boy actor Ashley Walters’ empathic and occasionally over-earnest film The lawless brutality of a young offender institution is the setting for this British movie written by Marching Powder ’s Nick Love and directed by Ashley Walters. It’s a place where terrified newbies realise they can survive only by abandoning their innocence and decency, and submitting to the gang authority of a psycho top G, naturally involving a horrible loyalty test. This is a place where drugs arrive by drone, where facially tattooed men meet each other’s gaze with a cool opaque challenge in the canteen, and where the cues and balls on the recreation area’s pool table have only one purpose: to give someone a three-month stay in the hospital wing while underpaid guards in lanyards and ill-fitting v-neck jumpers look the other way. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/CLu4l65 via IFTTT

‘I stopped talking to my parents – and life opened up’: Heather Graham on family, ageing and ‘creepy’ film-makers

The actor has seen the best and worst of Hollywood, from directors like Paul Thomas Anderson to the notorious Harvey Weinstein. She talks about her #MeToo moment, her difficult childhood and her new movie, Chosen Family

For almost all her life, Heather Graham says, she was a “people pleaser”. It was encouraged in childhood, she says, this obligation to put others’ needs above her own, and it endured even after the 1997 film Boogie Nights had made her a star and she had severed all contact with her “judgmental, authoritarian” parents.

Now 55, Graham was in her 40s before she recognised her self-sabotaging tendencies, and tried to correct course. “I realised, no, actually I can just ask myself, ‘What do I want?’ and make myself happy,” she says over Zoom from her home in Los Angeles. “I wish I could have had this when I was 20 or 15. If I wasn’t trying to please other people, what would I have done?” It affected her romantic life and sometimes her work. “There were moments where I feel like I could have stood up for myself more,” she says.

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