THIS GRITTY GUANTANAMO DRAMA DESERVED AN OSCARS NOD

KEVIN MACDONALD, the Scottish director of The Mauritanian, can consider himself and his film well and truly snubbed in the recent Academy Award nominations. It’s a surprise, because his picture not only has irreproachable credentials in the liberal breast-beating department, it also has Academy favourites Benedict Cumberbatch and Jodie Foster. To be more precise, 30 years after The Silence Of The Lambs, it has Jodie Foster going back into a high-security prison to interview an inmate. It really ought to be a nailed-on Oscar contender.

Still, Macdonald, whose impressively eclectic credits include the brilliant 2003 documentary Touching The Void and the awards-festooned 2006 drama The Last King Of Scotland, and who is himself descended from movie royalty (his maternal grandfather was the great Hungarianborn filmmaker Emeric Pressburger), has the consolation of a raft of Bafta nominations, as well as a Golden Globe for Foster.

Better still, he has made an indubitably powerful (though not perfect) film.

It is based on the 2015 memoir Guantanamo Diary by Mohamedou Ould Slahi, compel

lingly played by the French actor Tahar Rahim (pictured). Slahi was a 30-year-old electrical engineer who, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, was transported from his native Mauritania to the Guantanamo Bay detention centre in Cuba, folksily known in military circles as ‘Gitmo’.

Slahi was suspected of having been Al Qaeda’s key recruitment officer. Unhelpfully for him, his cousin was Osama bin Laden’s spiritual adviser.

As his CIA captors try to get him to confess, the film chronicles Slahi’s enduring torment, which includes some truly outlandish forms of torture. Along with more conventionally barbaric tactics, he is sexually assaulted by a female soldier wearing a nightmarish cat mask. He also suffers ‘removal of bodily function privileges’, one of those bizarrely coy American euphemisms that reached peak absurdity in another Gitmo ‘procedural’, the 2019 film The Report, in which a prisoner was forced to ‘go to the bathroom on himself’. But never mind linguistic niceties. Subjected to these indignities, and many more, Slahi confesses.

However, where there is Foster, there is hope. Sporting a scary blow-dry and an even scarier slash of scarlet lipstick, she plays his lawyer, Nancy Hollander, with Shailene Woodley as her junior. Their adversary is military prosecutor Stuart Couch, played by Cumberbatch with good ol’ boy Southern vowels.

In his briefing, Couch is told that ‘this guy is the Al Qaeda Forrest Gump . . . everywhere you look, he’s there’. That’s all he needs to know. Moreover, he was friendly with one of the pilots murdered on 9/11.

He is determined to enforce the death penalty, which he has no problem reconciling with his strong Christian faith, until he starts finding evidence to suggest that maybe Slahi is a lot more sinned against than sinner. In fact, maybe he never sinned at all.

With the help of flashbacks, Macdonald keeps all this rattling along with pace and verve, but as a story it needs more nuance, making it more of a thriller and less of a moral statement. Nevertheless, it is superbly acted and I still think Rahim and Foster should be in the Oscars running.

MINARI is the absolute opposite, up for more baubles than it really warrants. It arrives on streaming platforms preceded by a mighty reputation — no fewer than six Academy Award nominations, and lots of extravagant praise — but in my view it is undeserving of the momentum it continues to generate.

It’s a slow-moving, nicely observed, largely autobiographical film by writer-director Lee Isaac Chung, about an immigrant South Korean family settling uncertainly in rural Arkansas in the Eighties.

There is tenderness, poignancy and slightly forced comedy in the story of Jacob Yi (a nice performance by Steven Yeun), an engaging paterfamilias who works hard to establish a small farm while holding down a job in a chicken-sexing factory with his wife, Monica, and trying to keep her, their two children and newly arrived mother-in-law all happy in challenging circumstances.

To buy wholly into the story, as many clearly have done, you need to find Monica sympathetic rather than tiresomely miserable (I didn’t), and the grandma whimsically hilarious rather than persistently irritating (I didn’t).

That said, the lovely cinematography makes the most of the wide-open landscapes, and it’s a relief to find the locals broadly welcoming, not overwhelmingly hostile. A pleasant enough film, but by no means a great one.

The Mauritanian is available now on amazon Prime Video. Minari is on digital platforms from today, and in cinemas from May 17.