terrorism
Graham Fuller
Last year’s Brad Pitt vehicle Bullet Train was an affable action comedy except in those parts – including the dreadful coda – when it was an insufferably smirky one. Freighted with more thrills, intelligence, gravitas, and social commentary, 1975’s The Bullet Train, released in a 2K restoration on a Eureka Classics Blu-ray, is the better movie.Director and co-writer Jun'ya Satô’s main character is HIkari 109, a button-nosed 0-series (first-generation) Shinkansen express travelling the 1100 km between Tokyo and Hakata, a trip that then took seven hours. Seeking a $5 million pay-off, criminals Read more ...
Gary Naylor
“Darkly comic thrillers” (as they like to say) set in Ireland tracking how families, or quasi-families, fall apart under pressure are very much in vogue just now. Whether The Banshees of Inisherin will garner the Oscars haul it hardly deserves remains to be seen, but set 60 years later in a different Civil War, I suspect Under The Black Rock will not be troubling theatre’s award ceremonies next year. During the euphemistically named The Troubles, a Belfast mother loses her son, having seen him follow in his father’s footsteps into the Provisional IRA. Her daughter, wanting to prove Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Bald, barrel-shaped and pugnacious, Doron Kavillio (Lior Raz) could have been conceived as the anti-Bond or the un-Ethan Hunt. But as action heroes go, Doron can mix it with the finest as he tracks down terrorists with his comrades in Israel’s Mista’arvim Special Forces team.Raz is the star – or one of them – of Fauda, as well as its co-creator (along with Avi Issacharoff). As a real-life veteran of an Israeli counter-terrorism unit operating in the Palestinian territories, he’s been able to bring a raw edge of verisimilitude to the show, even if the action has obviously been shaped for a Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
A sun-baked island resort; Keeley Hawes taking a leisurely dip in an infinity pool as we hear her in voiceover musing on how events happen unchosen, with you in them; then we are up in her room, where she is texting somebody. The sounds of gunshots and mass panic jolt her into action. She rushes for her trainers – not flipflops, she admonishes herself, you are going to need to run.Then flashback to her among a busload of excited tourists, arriving at the hotel, unaware of their fate, naturally. More musing on life, choices, fate etc. You sense that writer Louise Doughty (Apple Tree Yard) is Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
A black box with a red blinking light is being stashed in a cabinet under the seating of the Olympic stadium in Munich. Then a hoodie-ed man is seen in silhouette, the stadium in the background. We are about to be plunged into the darker corners of the prosperous Bavarian city where, 50 years earlier, as the footage in the opening credits recalls, the infamous massacre of 11 members of the Israeli Olympic team by PLO gunmen took place.Different games are in the offing now, notably a special anniversary one between the local football team and one from Tel Aviv. This, various characters Read more ...
theartsdesk
"My pen is the wing of a bird; it will tell you those thoughts we are not allowed to think, those dreams we are not allowed to dream." Batool Haidari’s words give this bold collection of stories its title and epigraph. She is one of 18 writers from the Write Afghanistan project, run by the organisation UNTOLD which works to promote the work of writers in communities marginalised by conflict. This book is the culmination of that two-year project: the first anthology of short stories by Afghan women, written in the languages Dari and Pashton, and translated by Afghan translators.The following Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
A lot’s changed since Kiln Theatre boss Indhu Rubasingham directed The Invisible Hand’s first UK outing in 2016, not least the theatre’s name (it was known as the Tricycle back then). But in Rubasingham’s capable hands, American Ayad Akhtar’s taut exploration of greed and blame still hits like a punch to the chest, ratcheting up the tension over two hours to an almost unbearable level.The premise is relatively simple. American banker Nick Bright (Daniel Lapaine, pictured below) has been kidnapped by accident – the unnamed organisation keeping him prisoner in rural Pakistan wanted his boss Read more ...
Owen Richards
Belgian filmmaking duo the Dardenne Brothers have long been darlings of Cannes Film Festival, winning awards for hardhitting dramas like La Promesse, Le Silence de Lorna and The Kid with the Bike. Their latest offering Young Ahmed is no different, a domestic terrorist tale which won them Best Director at 2019’s festival. Surely by beating Bong Joon-Ho, Celine Sciamma and Ken Loach, the film would stand up to scrutiny?The titular Ahmed (Idir Ben Addi, pictured above right) is an introspective teenager, thoroughly devoted to his imam’s strict interpretation of the Qu’ran. Both his Muslim Read more ...
Jill Chuah Masters
It’s hard to take The Old Guard seriously — it’s an action film about thousand-year-old immortal warriors. Pulpy flashbacks and fake blood abounds. But The Old Guard doesn’t need to be serious or even memorable: it’s a fun, feel-good film, a rare commodity these days.Andy (Charlize Theron) leads a band of renegades who use their immortality to thwart crime. Their secret power makes them outcasts, so their existence is increasingly threatened by surveillance and modern technology. A new immortal, Nile (KiKi Layne), joins their ranks at the exact moment that their freedom is most threatened. Read more ...
Owen Richards
Thank goodness no-one’s going anywhere this year, because 7500 does for planes what Jaws did for bright yellow lilos. Set entirely within the cockpit of a passenger jet, this thriller trims all the fat, leaving a taut nightmare that pulls no punches.Joseph Gordon-Levitt stars as Tobias Ellis, a mild-mannered pilot on a routine flight from Berlin to Paris. His biggest worry is his child not getting into a preferred kindergarten, something that far more bothers his partner (who also happens to be part of the flight crew). Both character and actor aren’t your typical action protagonist, but Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
After a season that sought to redefine what Westworld could become, the finale exposed the confused arc, before limping towards an emotionally weak ending. This season began by recoding itself into something schlockier, more high-octane, and arguably more mainstream than before – somewhere between a Jason Bourne film and The Matrix. Whether a glossy, high budget HBO show (on Sky Atlantic) could ever be classed as anything other than mainstream is a fair question, and the feature-length finale was no different. If Game of Thrones taught us anything, it was Read more ...
Sarah Collins
When Amer Deghayes departed for Syria in a truck leaving from Birmingham, a worker from a youth arts organisation in Brighton had been trying to get in touch with him. She wanted to inform Amer, an intelligent and creative 18-year-old who had once harboured journalistic ambitions, that his pitch to develop a project about identity in his hometown had been successful. The Heritage Lottery fund had decided to award him £50,000.The news of his success came too late. On route to another life as a jihadi fighting for Jabhat al-Nusra, an Al Qaeda affiliated rebel group in Syria, Amer Deghayes had Read more ...