Occupied City ★★★★☆
Directed by Steve McQueen. Narrated by Melanie Hyams. Limited release, 266 min
Singular documentary, derived from Bianca Stigter’s book Atlas of an Occupied City (Amsterdam 1940-1945), on the occupation of the Dutch capital during the second World War. No archival footage. No talking heads. No maps. Occupied City comprises 130 shots, taken with a largely static 35mm camera, of various sites in contemporary Amsterdam: a school, a park, a private home and so on. While we watch, Melanie Hyams’s impassive voiceover tells us about what happened in or near this place during the war. Clocking in at over four hours, McQueen’s film profits from rigour and reserve. Full review DC
The Settlers/Los Colonos ★★★★☆
Directed by Felipe Gálvez Haberle. Starring Camilo Arancibia, Mark Stanley, Benjamin Westfall, Alfredo Castro, Marcelo Alonso. 16 cert, gen release, 100 min
Felipe Gálvez Haberle’s hugely ambitious and masterfully staged debut feature starts as it means to go on: with the brutal killing of an injured labourer by his foreman. Based on gruelling events from turn-of-the-century Chile, The Settlers concerns a genocidal odyssey to Tierra del Fuego, a spartan archipelago at the continent’s southern tip. The filmmakers evoke spaghetti westerns with wide-angle vistas of forbidding horizons. Odd moments of Tarantino playfulness add to the unease. The perverse, atonal effect is as discombobulating as Harry Allouche’s plucked, appositely bleak score. A most deserving FIPRESCI prize-winner from Cannes. TB
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The Iron Claw ★★★☆☆
Directed by Sean Durkin. Starring Zac Efron, Jeremy Allen White, Lily James, Holt McCallany, Maura Tierney. 15A cert, gen release, 132 min
Study of the doomed Von Erich wrestling dynasty from the director of Martha Marcy May Marlene and The Nest. Durkin can’t impose a shape on the wild true story of troubled brothers and their imposing dad. With its 1980s neon fonts, strangely sanitised storytelling, exposition-heavy dialogue, wrongly aged cast and terrible wigs, The Iron Claw looks and feels like a pre-streaming TV movie — and not just any old TV movie, but a strangely entertaining, darkly tragic, completely gripping TV movie. Efron’s Kevin makes for a passive, unwitting protagonist; an oddly compelling study of Hamletian inaction with none of the rumination. TB
Double Blind ★★★☆☆
Directed by Ian Hunt-Duffy. Starring Millie Brady, Akshay Kumar, Diarmaid Noyes, Pollyanna McIntosh. 16 cert, gen release, 90 min
If you fall asleep you die! That’s the premise for this nifty, economic Irish horror. We begin with a party of youngish people arriving for a drug trial arranged by a not-in-any-way-sinister company called Blackwood Pharmaceuticals. McIntosh, always charismatic, appears as the not-in-any-way-sinister doctor supervising the trial. Brady is excellent as the likely “final girl”. It is not just recent memories of The Traitors that sparks unintended (I’m guessing) suggestions of reality TV. No shade is intended. Those structures work for a reason and the tension is well maintained throughout. DC
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