The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Getting a lift from Pixar
ONWARD
Pixar’s latest is a real pleasure: a fantasy quest story set in a magic kingdom where the magic has died. If you imagine Dungeons and Dragons trapped in contemporary suburbia, you’re most of the way in, with Tom Holland and
Chris Pratt voicing a pair of elvish brothers.
U cert, 107 min
BACURAU
In this blood-soaked Brazilian sci-fi western, a tiny mountain village is besieged by armed forces.
Fusing genre and non-genre elements to re-enact Brazil’s history of indigenous survival, it will leave your preconceptions hacked up and rolling all over the place. 18 cert, 131 min
THE PHOTOGRAPH
Issa Rae and Lakeith
Stanfield play a couple who meet when a journalistic assignment draws them to investigate Rae’s late mother, in this love story for grown-ups. It gets by on Louisiana settings and star power more than grabby storytelling.
12A cert, 106 min
2017 for his role in the compelling HBO TV series The Night Of. Having risen up in such independent British movies as Four Lions and Ill Manors, Ahmed has featured in the Jason Bourne and Star Wars film franchises, and was cast as a villain in superhero blockbuster Venom (surely the ultimate accolade for any British thespian in Hollywood).
At 37, he is an outstanding British leading man, dark and handsome. I wonder why we never see him touted as the next James Bond? I suspect Ahmed has his own theories. “You want to keep me in my lane,” Ahmed raps against the sleek R’n’B groove of Any Day. “You still can’t pronounce my name.”
Under the guise of Riz
MC, Ahmed has maintained a relatively low-profile music career as a member of Swet Shop Boys. There has always been a political edge to their work but, with his first solo release under his own name, Ahmed has gone for broke.
The Long Goodbye is an angry, funny, clever and, at times, swaggeringly brutal examination of a national identity crisis, on which Ahmed demonstrates the skills of a master rapper, aided by the emotional edge of his thespian delivery.
Sharply produced by Swet Shop Boys collaborator Redinho (Tom Calvert), the tough, percussive beats sample elements of Sufi music, Bhangra and Seventies Pakistani psychedelia, along with other South Asian and Middle Eastern sounds, interpolating them through the hard-hitting electro of UK rave and grime.
Tracks are interspersed with witty voicemail messages from famous actors and comedians of colour, including Oscarwinner Mahershala Ali, Hasan Minhaj and Asim Chaudhry’s comedy alter-ego, Chabuddy G, who promises to take Ahmed to Southall for some lassis to “get over that chick, yeah!”
It helps alleviate the anger burning through an electrifying album in which the multitalented leading man pulls no punches on one of most complex, controversial issues of our age: “Now everybody everywhere want their country back/ If you want me back to where I’m from, bruv, I need a map!”
Ahmed frames his relationship with this country as an abusive love affair
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