SECOND SCREEN
The lumbering life story of Edward Snowden is told in Snowden (15A) HH – and depending on your point of view, he is either the world’s greatest whistleblower or the man who leaked so much top-secret intelligence from America’s National Security Agency in 2013 that he might as well have handed the world’s terrorists a handbook called How Not To Get Caught.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt, in the title role, and Shailene Woodley, as his long-time girlfriend Lindsay Mills, are decent enough, but there’s a smug, self-righteous air to proceedings that makes it hard to warm to.
Just as D W Griffith’s controversial 1915 silent film The Birth Of A Nation used the course of the American Civil War to trace the origins of the Ku Klux Klan, so Nate Parker’s film of deliberately the same name (15A)
HHHH takes the real-life story of an earlier slave revolt which, he’d argue, sparked a battle for racial equality that rages to this day.
Parker writes, directs and stars in a film – also featuring Colman Domingo and Gabrielle Union, pictured below – that initially seems mired in the familiar cliches of the Deep South, but gains real power as its violent, unpalatable story builds to its Braveheart-style climax.
In The Pass (16) Russell Tovey and Arinze Kene play two soccer players whose lives are defined by what happened in a hotel room one night and what didn’t happen on the pitch the next day. But the film makes little effort to conceal its theatrical origins – the heightened-reality style works on stage but fails to convince here.