ALSO SHOWING
Monos (15)
★★★★
Colombian filmmaker Alejandro Landes’s film about child soldiers offers a far stranger, richer, more abstract take on the subject than one might expect. A full-tilt thriller with some of the deranged energy and surreal feel of Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket ,it’ssetinan unnamed Latin American country and revolves around a group of teenage guerrilla fighters tasked with guarding a kidnapped white American engineer (Julianne Nicholson). With no concept of the wider political fight of which they’re a part, they treat her captivity as a game – a game that inevitably descends into a more primal fight for survival. The film makes stunning use of its locations, their alien quality amplified by another wild, atonal score from Under the Skin’s maverick composer Mica Levi. But it’s the way Landes keeps us off balance, repeatedly shifting point of view so we latch on to the humanity of the characters, that really makes this so enervating and relevant for a world in which the machinations of conflict are never clear-cut.
Black and Blue (15)
★★
The on-the-nose title of this racially charged cop movie – about a rookie cop (Naomie Harris) forced to fight for her life after witnessing the police execution of a young black drug dealer in her old neighbourhood – is probably the most subtle thing about this atrociously scripted, ludicrously plotted thriller. Capturing the crime on her regulation body-cam, Harris’s character, Alicia, knows her only chance of survival is to get back to her precinct and turn the footage over to Internal Affairs. But at a time when police brutality and systemic racism is headline news, her uniform automatically makes her a target of both her fellow cops (led by Frank Grillo’s corrupt narc) and the people she grew up with. That’s actually a promising set-up for a slick thriller to explore the complexities of racial identity and law enforcement in the age of Black Lives Matter. Unfortunately, it sabotages what intelligence Harris brings to proceedings by forcing her character to act irrationally at every turn.
The Beach Bum (18)
★★
Harmony Korine’s latest sees him tipping from playful experimentation into freeform tedium. Playing out as a midlife crisis-themed companion piece to his outré crime opus
Spring Breakers, it stars Matthew Mcconaughey as a whack-a-doodle poet who lives a blissed-out existence among the vagrants and burnouts of Key West, Florida, safe in the knowledge that his ultra-wealthy wife (Isla Fisher) supports his every lifestyle choice because he’s an artistic genius “from another dimension”. When fate conspires to remove this safety net, he’s suddenly forced to attempt to finish the great American novel he’s been promising to write. To Korine’s credit, he’s not interested in delivering a moralistic redemption story about a middle-aged screw-up learning to take responsibility. But despite Mcconaughey’s portrayal of Moondog as a kind of cosmic Charles Bukowski, the film’s goofball energy doesn’t translate into a fun film for the rest of us.
By the Grace of God (15)
★★★
The mercurial François Ozon returns with a deadly serious fact-based drama about a group of men in Lyon reckoning with the sexual abuse they suffered as children at the hands of their local priest. Like the similarly themed Spotlight, it’s a no-frills film about the ease with which the Catholic church uses its hold over a community to quietly sweep under the carpet crimes no one is even trying to deny.
It’s a tough subject, but one Ozon handles with sensitivity and controlled outrage. ■