war on terror
Adam Sweeting
The destruction of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie on 21 December 1988 was one of the ghastliest events in what would become known as the War on Terror, and 36 years later it’s still shrouded in mystery and ambiguity.Lockerbie: A Search for Truth has been adapted from the book The Lockerbie Bombing: A Father’s Search for Justice, by Jim Swire and Peter Biddulph, and leads the viewer through Swire’s tortuous quest to winkle out the real facts behind the bombing which killed his daughter Flora, along with 258 other passengers and crew as well as 11 people on the ground.The depiction of the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
You might assume that the “Has Fallen” in the title of this Anglo-French thriller connotes the presence of Scottish lunk Gerard Butler (as in Angel Has Fallen, London Has Fallen and Olympus Has Fallen), but there’s no Gerard in sight. Instead, in this TV spin-off from the movie series, we have Tewfik Jallab (pictured below) as protection officer Vincent Taleb, who’s acting as minder to France’s defence minister Philippe Bardin (Nathan Willcocks).When terrorist mayhem breaks out at a plush reception at the British Embassy in Paris, Vincent finds himself teaming up with feisty, fearless MI6 Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The Catalan capital has given its name to a famous number in the Stephen Sondheim musical, Company. And here it is lending geographical specificity to the second two-hander, following the far-superior Camp Siegfried, from American writer Bess Wohl to reach London in recent years.The star presence of TV name Lily Collins in a demanding stage debut will pique curiosity, for sure, but the play feels as if it wants to be weightier than it is and can't decide whether to surrender to cliche, or subvert it.Collins plays Irene, a glammed-up American abroad whom we first see in a lustful embrace with Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Thanks to numerous arguments and disagreements over script, casting etc, nine years have elapsed since Expendables 3 hit the multiplexes, and Sylvester Stallone and his mercenary crew were perilously close to being over the hill even then. In Expend4bles, age has duly withered them even further, a fact wryly acknowledged by director Scott Waugh and his screenwriting squad. Dolph Lundgren, now vaguely resembling an ancient relic dug up from a peat bog in Jutland, has become a comic figure whose sniper’s skills are severely hampered because he hasn’t made that latest trip to SpecSavers.Jason Read more ...
aleks.sierz
What is the best way of talking about the Middle East? Should plays take a documentary or verbatim approach, all the better to educate and inform, or is there another path, with includes entertainment, and that magic ingredient called theatricality?At the Royal Court the imaginative way has recently been explored in plays such as Sabrina Mahfouz’s dreamy A History of Water in the Middle East. Now, Jasmine Naziha Jones’s debut play, Baghdaddy, in which she also stars, also gets the magic realist treatment. But how successful is it?Beginning in 1991, this coming of age story is seen through the Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Whether he’s making documentaries or dramas, director Kevin Macdonald has an eye for the bleak moments in our history, and a dynamic way of recreating them, from the Oscar-winning doc Four Days in September, about the Munich massacre, to the fictionalised account of the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, The Last King of Scotland, which at times played like a horror film.Compared to those, The Mauritanian feels pretty conventional, a tale of righteous lawyers and their ill-treated client, amid the well-trod US malfeasance in its War on Terror. Yet there’s no denying the almost Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It may seem incongruous that a factually-based film about Iraqis battling against murderous Islamic State invaders should have been produced by the Russo brothers, famous for Marvel’s Avengers and Captain America blockbusters. However, Hollywood giganticism is happily absent, and Mosul (Netflix) is a claustrophobically intense battlefield movie which also throws some penetrating light on the terrible costs borne by the long-suffering Iraqis. Writer/director Matthew Michael Carnahan has crafted a spare and purposeful narrative in which character and incident are allowed to tell their own story 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 ...
Marianka Swain
With counter-terrorism an urgent concern – and specifically how best to find, track and use the data of suspected threats, without sacrificing our privacy and civil liberties – it’s excellent timing for a meaty drama about the surveillance state. And the second half of this debut full-length stage work from Al Blyth, helmed by Hampstead AD Roxanna Silbert, comes excitingly close to being that play for today.However, you do have to wade through an overlong first half which, unfortunately, trips into every genre cliché going. The GCHQ computer whizzes who supply the security services with Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Five episodes ago, BBC One's The Capture set off at a cracking pace with the apparent abduction and murder of barrister Hannah Roberts by army lance-corporal Shaun Emery. With Roberts’s help, Emery had been acquitted of killing a Taliban fighter in Afghanistan in cold blood, the defence’s case hingeing on a timing glitch in the video taken at the scene by Emery’s body-camera.It didn’t make sense that he’d want to bump off the woman who’d dug him out of a huge legal hole, especially as he’d also become more than slightly enamoured of her. The feeling between them appeared to be mutual. The Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Last year’s first season of Deep State featured cloak and dagger exploitations of chaos in the Middle East by the capitalist West and its intelligence services. Judging by its opening episode, this second iteration is about to do something similar, except moving the target area left and down a bit to Niger and Mali.An explosive start was mandatory, and was duly delivered with a bullet-spattered set-piece in a bar in Bamako, where a bunch of off-duty American undercover agents had their pool game interrupted by a squad of turbaned jihadists spraying them with AK-47s. This all kicked off when a Read more ...
Owen Richards
In September 2014, after three months of captivity, Nadia Murad escaped ISIS control in Mosul, Iraq. Since then, she has dedicated her life to travelling the world and telling everyone who will listen about the plight suffered by her Yazidi people, then and now still. On Her Shoulders shows this exhausting commitment, simultaneously in the public eye yet seemingly ignored when action is required.As we’re introduced to Nadia, we quickly understand the strain this touring causes, constantly made to relive her horrifying experience for interviews. Her work is valuable for the public to Read more ...