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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Ride the Snake review – low-budget home-invasion horror offers transgressive free-for-all

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After a car accident kills her husband, Harper and her daughter kidnap the driver responsible to serve their own kind of justice – but he may not be everything he first seems

Quoting the classics can be a dangerous game for a film – one liable to highlight your shortcomings. When two Gypsies-cum-demons chant Leaning on the Everlasting Arms, Robert Mitchum’s ditty from Night of the Hunter, not to mention bearing love-hate tattoos on their knuckles, it indicates that this low-budget British home-invasion horror is missing the same fairytale concision. Which is a shame, as this messy but entrancing, faintly surrealist feature by Shani Grewal has entirely different qualities of its own.

Blinded in a car accident that killed her husband, Harper (Suzanna Hamilton) has lived alone for several years; until recently that is, as stepson Taran (Viraj Juneja) returns home to find that his mother and sister Megan (Francesca Baker) have kidnapped the drunk driver responsible and shackled him in an upstairs bedroom. This is Sebastian (Michael Maloney), who in their eyes dodged jail with a fake insanity plea; they intend to stage a retrial on their own terms. But, spouting in multiple tongues including one belonging to a sinister entity, Sebastian may genuinely have a few cables unplugged.

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