violence
matilda.battersby
Saturnine means to be hard, impermeable, gloomy and dull. Thudding, even. The word quite literally means to be like lead. It is an odd choice of album title for a record which is none of those things. Jackie Oates’s fourth studio album is, in fact, a collection of songs forged in traditional foundries (if we’re going in for metallic analogies) - lyrics pinched from anthologies of ancient peasant ditties; tunes passed on orally or reclaimed by Oates and her confederate folkies with skills passed down through the generations. Lead might be more malleable than other metals, but the material this Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Watching Incendies leaves you winded. Although it can be read as a thriller, Incendies is a drama that offers no hints of where it’s going. When it gets there, it hits hard. It’s about more than Middle East conflict, more than a search for identity. As director Denis Villeneuve puts it in one of this DVD’s extras, Incendies is a “Greek tragedy with a thriller inside it”.Based on a Wajdi Mouawad play which premiered in Montréal, the scope and the use of sudden explanatory, digressive flashbacks are cinematic rather than theatrical. Although there are very few characters in the film, and the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
You must have come across those “happiness quotient” surveys, which judge the relative achievements on the contentment front across a series of countries. The last one I recall gave Denmark the Number One spot, with a remarkable 96 per cent classing themselves as lykkelig, as the feel-good factor is known locally. If you were left wondering about the other four per cent, Michael Noer and Tobias Lindholm’s R: Hit First, Hit Harder offers some clues.In fact, there’s little that looks specifically Danish here (though the film swept the board at this year's Danish Oscars), except a certain Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The Conan yarns are familiar from novels, comics and TV series, but most of all from the early-Eighties Arnold Schwarzenegger movies, Conan the Barbarian and Conan the Destroyer. In this new remake, the title role is stretched around the pneumatic bulk of Jason Momoa, the half-Hawaiian and half-Irish veteran of the celebrated cheesecake opera Baywatch.Plot-wise, it's a point-and-go revenge saga with an added long arc of ancestral evilMomoa doesn't look as if he likes to waste time studying the Method or boning up on the Nouvelle Vague, but he fills a Conan-sized 3D hole on the screen. Yet Read more ...
ash.smyth
It is easy to see why Danish director Susanne Bier’s latest movie would have scooped up all the Foreign Language gongs, made the festival selection lists and generally five-starred it all over the shop. Riffing on the theme of violent conflict as it arises both in an African refugee camp and a generic Danish town (here, picnics in wheat fields, fresh lakes for swimming, unlocked front doors, faces like golden apples; there, Darfur-style dirt-scratching), In a Better World centres on the friendship of two schoolboys, Elias (Markus Rygaard) and Christian (William Jøhnk Nielsen), one perennially Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
With theartsdesk readers still reeling from the demise of Italianate sleuthing series Zen, now comes news of the axing of glossy MI5 drama Spooks. The BBC has announced that the show's 10th series, starting next month, will be its last, though it seems the decision to pull the plug was taken by production company Kudos rather than by the Corporation."We didn't want to get to the point where the BBC said we really don't want another one," said executive producer Jane Featherstone. "We wanted to kill it off in its prime."
Spooks was originally launched in the wake of the 9/11 attacks in New Read more ...
alex.kotlowitz
Twenty-four years ago, I found myself hanging out virtually every day in the Henry Horner Homes, a Chicago housing project on the city's hardscrabble West Side. I had begun to immerse myself in the lives of two young brothers, Lafeyette and Pharoah Rivers, in an effort to understand what it means to be growing up poor in the world's wealthiest nation. Mother Teresa had visited this neighbourhood just a few years earlier, and what so struck her was not the poverty of the pocketbook - she had certainly seen worse in India - but rather what she called “the poverty of the spirit”. Indeed, it was Read more ...
joe.muggs
I'm not claiming some major prescience or insight here. I am as guilty as anyone of dipping into the music of the sink estates for a small dose of frisson then returning to art and music that confirm my own worldview. But maybe, just maybe, if we had all paid more attention to what was being said by young British men and women from those estates over the last decade, the events of the past few days might not have come as such a horrific surprise. After all, French rappers had been explicitly predicting the riots that took place there in 2005 for a decade beforehand, as I noted (with, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
History rears its harrowing head in Sarah's Key, a sometimes galumphing film that lingers in the mind not least because of the terrible tale it has to tell. Reminding us that the atrocities of the Holocaust weren't any one country's exclusive preserve, the film chronicles both the eponymous Sarah, a young girl who survives the French internment camps, and Julia, a Paris-based American journalist in the modern day whose life is taken over by Sarah's story. Are the film's two parts of equal value? Let's just say that fiction yet again is trumped by fact.That the contemporary sequences achieve Read more ...
josh.spero
If I'm being honest, I never saw the charm of Alan Bennett's Talking Heads. Too many quiet disappointments, too much capital-A Acting. They lacked naturalism in presentation and content, whereas Double Lesson, from Channel 4's First Cut series of quirky documentaries and quasi-documentaries, had naturalism to spare last night.It probably helped that the show, a monologue given by Phil Davis to and across the camera, was based on real experiences of teachers who had attacked their pupils. Davis, playing David de Gale, explained from his potting shed, where he over-symbolically tended young Read more ...
emma.simmonds
A mean, muscular and unflinching display of concentrated brutality and shaved-down storytelling, the Spanish thriller Cell 211 is armed with the furious intensity of its caged environment and a chain of events which cascades like dominos over and beyond its prison walls. It’s an unlikely candidate for award-season acclaim, but Daniel Monzόn's film cheeringly arrives laden with Goyas - as if Spain’s strongest man had triumphed at a beauty pageant.Relative newcomer Alberto Ammann (pictured below right and left) is Juan Oliver, an eager-beaver trainee prison guard being shown the ropes ahead of Read more ...
emma.simmonds
David Michôd’s stark, screw-tight debut is, in his own words, a “grand Melbourne crime drama”. Though it presents us with a menagerie of criminality it eschews many of the paradigms of the genre and feels courageous in its elegant, near suffocating intensity.Joshua “J” Cody (James Frecheville) is our emotionally impotent, blank-slate narrator, blunted by a life that relentlessly deals him a losing hand. After his mother overdoses he is taken in by his Grandma “Smurf” (a stunning, Oscar-nominated Jacki Weaver), a “Mommie Dearest” mafioso who has raised a gang of armed robbers. A lumbering Read more ...