Literally the two worst things I can imagine is being trapped underground and drowning. So for me, the trailer for this looked like a horror film. The Descent or something. The Rescue is a documentary about the attempt to rescue 12 Thai schoolboys and their football coach from a flooded underground cave. The story made…
Mm. I really loved Jim Cummings’s first two films, but this is just . . . fine. The trailer had me a bit skeptical but trailers are frequently deceptive. Clearly inspired by the Ashley Madison leak and the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal, The Beta Test focuses on a guy at the centre of an attempt to…
Blacks Britannica is a 1970s documentary interviewing working class Black Brits, exploring their analysis of race, class, colonialism and capitalism. It was initially banned on its release for the reasons you’d expect. It’s kinda depressing how much of it remains relevant half-a-century on. And it flags up gentrification, back before it even existed in the…
Getting Away With Murder(s) asks the question why were the people who carried out the holocaust not brought to justice? Less than 1% of the people who participated in this mass murder were ever brought to trial. Of those, fewer were convicted, and even fewer adequately sentenced. It takes thousands of people to commit a…
I never saw Belle when it first came out coz I thought it looked gash. But since seeing it analysed in The Psychosis of Whiteness, I’ve been a little interested in what the complete piece looked like. And tonight it was being shown as part of Black History Month with a panel from CRER to…
The Man Who Sold His Skin is based on Delvoye’s Tim, an artist who tattooed his work on a guy’s back, a man who now sits in exhibit halls displaying it. In this film, the canvass is Sam Ali, a Syrian refugee who sells his back to a famous artist to gain safe passage to…
Sabaya means girl, but under ISIS sabaya refers to the women and girls raped and used as slaves. They are trafficked and sold and brutalised. When ISIS invaded the Yazidi homeland in northern Iraq, in the Sinjar province near the border with Syria, they slaughtered boys and men, abducted and raped girls and women, and…
In Thatcher’s Britain, at the height of video nasty fever, Enid, a buttoned-down film censor who sincerely believes that her work protects society, comes across a film which challenges her sense of reality. Having lost her sister many years before, the lack of resolution to her disappearance causes Enid to believe one of the actresses…
Fucking beautiful! Night of the Kings focuses on a night and a day in a maximum security prison in Ivory Coast. While a token force of guards remain, the prison is really run by its king, Blackbeard. In this brutal, modern setting, the most traditional of stories plays out – an ailing king is falling,…
Went to Bhaji on the Beach as part of the Film4 classics season. I never saw this as a kid, coz I would have been 7 when it came out. But it’s great! A bunch of Brummies go on a trip to Blackpool through the local South Asian Women’s centre. There’s wee auld grannies clucking…