SHORT TAKES
THE WALL directed by Doug Liman
There’s something admirable in the sheer sparseness of Doug Liman’s war thriller.
It is set not on the Mexican border but on some dusty plain in Iraq, circa 2007. Two US soldiers (Aaron Taylor-Johnson and John Cena) are pinned down by an unseen ghost-like sniper with a fondness for mind games and quoting Edgar Allan Poe. It’s a battle of fortitude, not arms, as dust, heat and festering wounds put ever-increasing pressure on the pair. Short, sharp and well made, The Wall manages to achieve maximum tension without ever leaving the foxhole. James Robins IN CINEMAS NOW
IN BETWEEN directed by Maysaloun Hamoud
A girl-power chick flick for grown-ups, this engaging if occasionally disorganised Israeli-French co-production defies genre clichés as it dips into the lives of three Arab-Israeli women in Tel Aviv. Along the way, it provides an engrossing portrait of daily life and the changing social landscape (though, interestingly, it is devoid of any reference to ethnic and religious tensions). Layla, a chic lawyer, and her bestie flatmate, Salma, a hospo worker and DJ, are party girls whose strictly secular lives look to be upended when a hijab-wearing conscientious country cousin comes to stay. But the film’s dramatic tensions derive from the menfolk whose pretensions to piety or liberalism are paper-thin. Peter Calder IN CINEMAS NOW