Animol review – gritty young offenders drama challenges conventional machismo

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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
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Warfare review – nerve-shredding real-time Iraq war film drags you into visceral frontline combat

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Co-directors Alex Garland and former US Navy Seal Ray Mendoza recreate a 2006 battle with almost unbearable intensity – and a dazzling ensemble cast

It’s up there with the first 23 bruising minutes of Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan or Elem Klimov’s harrowing and relentless Come and See. This is film-making that doesn’t just show you the horrors of war; it forces you to taste the dust and the choking panic, smell the fear and the cordite and the tinny metallic tang of spilled blood. Warfare, by Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza, is the most forceful and unflinching depiction of combat since Edward Berger’s 2023 Oscar-winning All Quiet on the Western Front. It’s also one of the boldest and most formally daring.

There are certain conventions at play in most war movies. Among them is the unwritten rule that however blisteringly hellish the depiction of combat, there’s a mitigating audience sop in the form of a flag-waving message about the nobility of the cause. Or, at the very least, some attempt at sentimental string-pulling to knit an emotional attachment to the characters. But Warfare, a forensic, close to real-time re-enactment of a 2006 battle fought during the Iraq war, rejects all that. Co-written and co-directed by Garland and former US Navy Seal Mendoza, the film’s radically stripped-back approach gives us next to no background on the characters, a platoon of Seals, or the operation, a surveillance mission in the Iraqi city of Ramadi. Nor does it take a stance on any moral questions about the Iraq war. Instead, it focuses on evoking, with almost unbearably visceral intensity, the experiences of a group of highly trained professionals who have been hired to do a job. And they are having a really bad day at work.

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