film

Troubled Teen Finds New Direction In Clear-Eyed ‘Bull’

By Scott Tobias

“Can’t you just take me to juvie?”

There’s a disturbing resignation to the way Kris, a 14-year-old white girl from a run-down Houston suburb, poses the question to a cop who’s picked her up for trashing a neighbor’s house. Her mother is already in jail and her grandmother, dirt poor and overtaxed in the best of times, lacks the health and the resource to look after her and her little sister. Kris’ academic prospects are so dire that her English teacher doesn’t even bother to call her out in class for watching a video on her phone. “I saw you, Kris,” the teacher says. “I’m just to the point where I don’t care anymore.”

Getting the audience to care is a challenge, too, though the two first-timers responsible for Bull, director Annie Silverstein and her lead actress, Amber Havard, are up to the task. Despite the sentimental outlines of the story, which ultimately centers on the redemptive relationship between Kris and an aging African-American bull rider, don’t actively court sympathy for her. They want to make her persuasive first, so they emphasize the deflating apathy of a girl who doesn’t believe her future will be any different than her mother’s. Kris doesn’t want to take even the minimal steps to keep herself out of trouble. She just wants to get it over with.

There are several recent points of comparison for Bull, like the Heartland drift of a traveling magazine sellers in Andrea Arnold’s American Honey, the lost children in the shadows of Disney World in Sean Baker’s The Florida Project, or the teenage girl fighting her way through meth country in Winter’s BoneBull could use more of the expressive spark of those great films — it’s humble and low-key to a fault — but it share with them a keen sense of what it’s like to grow up poor in America, and how even young children become aware of their narrowed options. What’s different about Kris is that she doesn’t have the will to fight for anything better, at least not at first.

South African ‘Queen Sono’ Is A Savvy Secret Agent — And A First For Netflix

by Michel Martin

Queen Sono is both a classic spy thriller and a ground-breaking entertainment endeavor. The drama is Netflix’s first commissioned script-to-screen series from Africa, and the first such show to get major distribution in the U.S.

Filmed across the continent with a diverse cast featuring multiple languages, the show stars Pearl Thusi as a South African secret agent with a complicated past.

Creator and executive producer Kagiso Lediga has a background in stand up comedy and says his jump to a crime drama is “just a graduation of storytelling.”

“Stand up was the cheapest way to tell a story because you don’t require crews and lights and cameras,” he says. “It’s just you, and the mic, and a spotlight.”

There are a lot more moving parts now, and he acknowledges that being the first comes with some pressure.

“If you do stand up, you get into a room, you perform and you’re … representing yourself … ” he says. “People laugh? Great. People, don’t laugh? You just avoid eye contact and keep it moving.”

But when you’re making the first Netflix original fully produced in Africa?

“Everybody’s coming with this expectation,” he says. “It’s like what is the first African original? … What are we going to see?”


Interview Highlights

On why he wanted to tell a spy story

I’ve always loved the spy genre. You know, I love everything from John le Carré-type of spy stuff all the way to James Bond. And you know, what I like most about it is that you can infuse it with history. … You get to tell the story of a culture very easily.

So I thought, you know, that the world doesn’t necessarily have like a context of Africa. You know, Africa is always this place over there with kids that are covered in flies. And I thought: Africa’s way sexier, and what better way to show it off than through a spy story where you have like this great female agent who traverses the continent?

On featuring a female protagonist

For African women and for little girls to see a woman do that — you know, punching people in the face — because [those are] the kind of roles that men generally play on this continent. I wanted to flip that. I wanted to have women see themselves or see another female that’s empowered and maybe that could make a difference. You know, for like a 15 year old, 16 year old seeing Queen Sono, you know, that’s a great image. That’s, I think, something empowering for them going forward. That was sort of a driving force for me.

It is the elephant in the room. The legacy of apartheid is everywhere.

On Queen Sono being haunted by the murder of her mother, an anti-apartheid activist

Our recent history is apartheid. And it kind of is like the ghost — it is the elephant in the room. The legacy of apartheid is everywhere. It’s pervasive in general society. And for me, it’s very important that that narrative doesn’t get lost.

You know, like for young people who … might have been born 10 years ago, for them, it might just be regular that black people are always working on the side of the roads while, you know, the yards and the spaces are owned by white people. If you don’t sort of explain why that is, people are just gonna think that’s how God intended it. … The universe just likes it that way, you know?

And so I felt in this piece of entertainment, it’s important to tell that history. … I thought it would be like a cool thing to imbue the story with the history and see how that goes.

On creating the first Netflix original series where the whole production is centered in Africa

So you come with a spy thing and people recognize all the tropes, then they’ll go: ‘It’s not original.’ … And then you get people who get it and they’re like: ‘Oh, my God, this is unbelievable to see ourselves, to hear our languages.’ …

So then at some point you just have to kind of grow a thick skin and go with it, because we knew that it was going to be a tightrope walk, because you can’t please everybody, but you’re going to try to make something very original and fun — and I think we succeeded in that.

On how he’s doing in Johannesburg, during the coronavirus pandemic

We’re good. In my town, it’s illegal to go jogging or to walk your dog. So luckily, my dog is really, really old. So walking it would probably kill it. But it plays a little bit in the garden. It’s winter — winter’s starting. So that could also be bad news because it’s when people get flus and all of that type of stuff. But I think as a nation people are staying at home. We’re doing our best.

Portrait Of The Outlaw As A Young Man: ‘True History Of The Kelly Gang’

By Ella Taylor

If you’ve read Peter Carey’s marvelous 2001 True History of the Kelly Gang, you’ll be aware going into a faithful new film adaptation of the novel that the word “true” is a signal to literary mischief and sly tampering with received history. Director Justin Kurzel and writer Shaun Grant mirror Carey’s grimly playful take on the myths that have grown around Ned Kelly, leader of the notorious Australian Kelly Gang.

In his second feature after the chilling 2012 horror movie Snowtown, Kurzel adds a ravishingly brutal visual grammar that pictures the country’s state of Victoria as a late 19th century Wild West with no clear boundaries between those who break the law and the British colonizers meant to enforce it. Not that there’s much law to start with. A former theatrical designer, Kurzel wrings a ravaged beauty from a rural landscape so blighted, its trees stick straight up in the air, leafless and barren. The soundtrack, by turns eerie and jangling, draws on the frantically nihilist punk canon of the 1970s, exactly a century after the Kelly Gang’s rise and fall. In a recurring, misleadingly romantic long shot we see Ned riding a white horse through the countryside.

Depending on your tolerance for savage mayhem, Ned Kelly — famous down under and overseas for the crude metal bucket he wore to butt heads with the Brits — was either a folk hero with Robin Hood tendencies or a murderous thug who spent his short, sharp life stealing horses, robbing banks, and whacking the constabulary who got in his way as reigning overlord of the Sons of Sieve, a ragtag band of Irish-born or bred resistance fighters whose odd signature was the frilly dresses they wore to battle the oppressor.

Hero or villain, that duality has pretty much come to be a staple of any knowing 21st-century revision of the Western hero, and certainly in anyone as drawn to subversive subtext as Carey. Faithful to the writer’s sly vision, Kurzel pries loose the man from both myths and digs deeper to give Kelly an origin story in three parts, told by Ned himself in a letter he writes from prison to the baby daughter he will never see grow up. Woven into Ned’s earnest missive, an alternate tale unfolds as a black tragicomedy studded with the pathos of a frightened and confused boy forced into manhood far too early, with myth and reality all jumbled up in his addled head.

Carey’s Ned, expanded by Kurzel, is something of a screw-up as both saint and sinner. There’s something biddable about Ned that makes him both easy to love and fatally vulnerable to baleful influence. Which may be why Kurzel cast George MacKay as his lead and not the more dashing Nicholas Hoult, who plays a cruel and callow local policeman who preys on Ned’s mother. MacKay showed himself a versatile performer in Pride and 1917, but there’s an irreducibly sweet goofiness that serves him beautifully as Ned, an innocent warped into avenging angel by early trauma, destitution, and the brutal injuries of the colonial rule he was born into.

Played as a child by a seraphic Orlando Schwerdt, Ned is shaped early on by the loss of his father and the twisted devotion of his mother, played by the terrific Australian actress Essie Davis, recently seen as a harried single mother in The Babadook and as the sexy lay detective in television’s Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries. Davis’s Ellen Kelly may be the most bracing portrait of maternal devotion gone bananas on the screen today. A proud, wild-haired warrior, Ellen Kelly will do anything, including selling her body and her favorite son, to protect the little that’s hers. Even the religiosity that sustains her has gotten tangled in her head, and, inevitably, her credulous son’s.

A hyper-responsible little man of the house, Ned adores his mother back, and their mad kinship will remain the movie’s fulcrum, molding the eager-to-please lad into an adult who’s equal parts creative writer and bitter avenger. In the latter he’s helped along by bush ranger Harry Power (Russell Crowe, vast in size and billowing rhetoric), whose sexual impotence feeds straight into a horrifying sadism that lands his young charge in prison. Years later Ned emerges a man of sorts but divided against himself, his most creative impulses twisted by circumstance into violence and a tendency to bend with every wind. Ned has been shown enough affection to enable him to fall in love and father a child with a sweet young prostitute (Thomasin Mackenzie). But his encounters with a viciously exploitive British constable, played wittily against type by Charlie Hunnam, will be the making of Ned, and also his undoing.

And so Ned’s story comes to an end, his account always refracted for us by the film’s visceral interpretation. True History of the Kelly Gang ends with a set piece that both tops and undercuts every bravura climactic gunfight you may have seen. The spectacle, at once brutal and absurd (here comes that metal bucket), affirms and demolishes Ned’s messenger-of-God fantasies and those of the Western too. Behind his dangling body we hear echoes of an earlier comment by a buddy with a clearer head. “None of this is the work of God,” he whispers to Ned. “You’re just a man.”

CorrectionApril 24, 2019

An earlier version of this review incorrectly stated that George MacKay had appeared in Game of Thrones.

SXSW Film Festival Heads To Amazon

by Andrew Limbong

Amazon Prime Video will be hosting some of the movies that never got screen time at this year’s canceled SXSW Film Festival. Amazon and SXSW announced today that the online film festival will be free to all audiences for 10 days — but you will need an Amazon account. 

According to the statement, the slate of films offered will depend on which filmmakers choose to opt in to the festival. “Filmmakers who choose to participate will receive a screening fee for streaming their film over the 10-day period … SXSW has shared details on the opportunity with 2020 filmmakers, who can opt in starting today.” 

SXSW joins a number of canceled and delayed film festivals going the online route: the Tribeca Film Festival has been posting a short film every day, the Greenwich International Film Festival will be bringing its May festival online, and the Washington, D.C., Environmental Film Festival has posted a number of this year’s movies, along with an archive going back to 1990. And the film distributor Kino Lorber has begun working with independent and art house theaters across the country to “screen” current independent releases, starting with the acclaimed Brazilian movie Bacurau.

It Ain’t Cabot Cove: Murder In Maine Haunts The Twisty ‘Blow The Man Down’

by Scott Tobias

Note: Blow The Man Down will be available for streaming Friday, March 20, on Amazon Prime.

Tourists know coastal Maine as an idyllic summer spot of rocky beaches, lobster piers, cute little towns where independent bookstores and coffeeshops still thrive, and the bed-and-breakfast places are among the quaintest in the country. Blow the Man Downtakes place in the fictional seaside town of Easter Cove, Maine, and while no approximate location is given, it looks like a straight latitudinal line to Brainerd, Minn., the primary setting of Joel and Ethan Coen’s Fargo. There’s surely a time of year when the snow and wind doesn’t bite at your skin, but the film makes it impossible to imagine. 

The Fargo connections run deeper still in Bridget Savage Cole and Danielle Krudy’s tight, evocative drama. Beyond the frosty milieu, the two share a fascination with macabre crimes committed by ordinary people and the inevitability of amateurish mistakes and crises of conscience. Though the twists and turns are unsurprising for anyone schooled in the Coens — or in this type of genre film in general — Cole and Krudy make the backdrop the star: a fishing village where the past informs a sinister present and women struggle to find their place in a brutal patriarchy, often taking it out on one another.

Opening with burly fisherman singing the sea shanty of the title — a wonderful touch the film repeats to great effect — Blow the Man Down starts with two sisters, Mary Beth and Priscilla Connolly, who are finally burying their mother after a long illness. Mary Beth (Morgan Saylor) and Pris (Sophie Lowe) have inherited problems that are keeping them penned down in Easter Cove for the time being, including a house that’s on the brink of foreclosure and a lightly trafficked fish market. But those worries are minor compared to the grisly events that follow, when Mary Beth goes out drinking the night of the funeral and comes back begging her sister to help cover up a crime. 

In truth, Mary Beth was in the right. She has a reputation around town for “liking the creeps” and she found herself a doozy that night, but given her own inebriation and recklessness, she and Pris assume the police won’t understand why she harpooned a man in self-defense. As the Connollys set about sloppily hiding the body and other evidence, some other ugly subplots in Easter Cove begin to surface, including another dead body connected to the Oceanview, a local brothel catering to the port. The Oceanview’s proprietor, Enid (Margo Martindale), holds many of the cards in this whole scenario, but how she chooses to play them is anybody’s guess. 

In an inspired bit of writing and casting, Cole and Krudy have hired three veteran actresses — June Squibb, Annette O’Toole and Marceline Hugot — as the village busybodies and standard-bearers, always sticking their nose in other people’s business. The history of Easter Cove, and of the brothel especially, accounts for a fascinating split between the morally upstanding trio and Enid, who sees herself as continuing a service that’s foundational to the community. Martindale has excelled at playing against her gentle image as a Russian agent on The Americans and a criminal mastermind on Justified, but Enid is a slipperier character, ruthless yet not entirely irredeemable. 

It’s normally not a great sign when the lead characters are less compelling than anything around them, but the Connollys’ predicament opens up the weird bits of village mythology and feminine conspiracy that secretly drives the film forward. Blow the Man Down functions just fine as a skillful replication of Fargo or Blood Simple, but Cole and Krudy’s attention keeps drifting to the darker edges of Easter Cove, where such crimes of passion seem folded into a rough-hewn way of life. Isolated from the rest of civilization — Maine yet as discreet as a snow globe — it plays by its own unwritten rules and the film teases them out beguilingly.

‘Onward’: Timid Teen On A Mythic Quest For Elf-Assurance

by Glen Weldon

In the opening minutes of Disney/Pixar’s Onward, we are met with various manifestations of loss.

There’s the film’s setting, a world where magic once flourished, and with it, pixies, unicorns, pegasi, elves, ogres, centaurs, mermaids — your standard-issue high-fantasy mythofaunic biome. But even here, in a gimmick the film leans into juuuuust enough, the Industrial Revolution arrived. As automation increased, magic faded. Elves still live in giant toadstools, but said toadstools are now rigidly apportioned into vast, Spielberg-suburban subdivisions and cul-de-sacs. Once-splendid unicorns have gone feral, raiding raid trash cans and hissing at passers-by like peculiarly horsey raccoons. If Middle-Earth had more strip-malls, it’d look something like this.

There’s also the loss experienced by the elf-family at the film’s center: mom Laurel (voiced by Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and her two sons — the younger, anxious Ian (voiced by Tom Holland) and his older, buff, RPG-obsessed brother Barley (Chris Pratt, squarely back in Andy Dwyer mode). It’s Ian’s 16th birthday, and he’s given a gift left to him by his late father, who passed away when Ian was too young to remember him: A wizard’s staff.

Finally, in these opening minutes, there’s still another feeling of loss that manifests in the viewer — that of lost opportunity. 

The jokes are glib and smarmy, the family dynamics achingly familiar, and as we follow Ian to high school, his every encounter and interaction feels less Disney/Pixar and more Disney Channel — which is to say, too sweet, too cornball, too affected, too faux-contemporary. The average very young child in the audience won’t notice; the average parent will start checking the theater’s exits.

But!

On or about the 20-minute mark — not coincidentally, upon the arrival of a manticore called Corey, voiced by Octavia Spencer — the film seems to discover what it is: A testament to the remarkable degree of emotional expressiveness that Pixar’s character-animators can imbue into a story. 

That’s not to say that the voice cast isn’t solid — they are. But so much of what enlivens Onward has to do with the characters’ body language, their facial expressions and their pure, albeit pixelated, physicality. In my screening, the scenes that produced the longest, loudest, deepest bursts of audience laughter — like Corey’s interactions with her Chuck E. Cheese-esque doppelganger, or Ian’s crossing of a yawning chasm — landed as hard as they did because they were so fully imagined, enfleshed and executed, with such confident, entirely visual, comic timing. I’m pretty sure they would have worked with the sound off.

As for the story, it is, fittingly enough, a mythic quest/road movie: Ian, guided by a supportive Barley, must follow clues on a map that will outfit him with the tools he needs to bring their dead father back for a single-day visit. (Ian managed to bring the lower half of his father back in the film’s opening minutes — and it’s remarkable how much personality a pair of brown trousers and a couple of Florsheims can convey.) It’s here that the film’s suburban/fantasy hybrid nature coheres most strongly, as when one of the greatest challenges Ian must face is not slaying a beast, rescuing a damsel or finding a treasure, but instead … merging onto a highway.

Pixar’s been doing this whole story-structure thing for a while now, so it’s no surprise that the various lessons (read: spells) that Ian learns over the course of the film will slot neatly into the film’s climax. What is a surprise — and a good one — is how satisfying that climax turns out to be, especially since so many animated films remain content to collapse into noisy spectacle in their closing minutes. (Note: Onward‘s climax does count as spectacle, and it is noisy — but it has also been carefully crafted to directly reflect the emotional stakes that the filmmakers have been systematically raising over the course of its running time.)

The film remains true to its Pixar provenance in its willingness — nay, it’s doughty insistence — on playing on viewers’ emotions. Which is to say: The film’s final moments do not simply attempt to pluck at the heartstrings, they saw away at the heartstrings savagely, with Gwar-like abandon. Prep your kids for this eventuality. And, discreetly, yourself.

‘First Cow’: A Profound, Ruminative Western

by Chris Klimek

First Cow, writer-director Kelly Reichardt’s seventh feature and her fifth collaboration with novelist/screenwriter John Raymond, is as rich and melancholy an expression of the themes that have defined her career as one could ask. It’s another unhurried, keenly drawn excerpt of subsistence living in the Pacific Northwest, with the savage mandate of survival butting up against the “civilized” — the quotation marks are Reichardt’s — forces of capitalism. Any expectations based on prior Reichardt joints, particularly her rustic relationship drama Old Joy or her harrowing western Meek’s Cutoff, prove correct: You’ll need to slow your breathing to sync up, or more likely, down with the movie’s tempo, but Reichardt rewards your patience with a profound experience that lingers in memory.

After a contemporary prologue involving a discovery on the banks of the Columbia River, Reichardt moves the clock back two centuries, to a time when a growing intercontinental market for gold, beaver pelts and other prizes made the Oregon Territory a land of violent opportunism. Cookie (soulful John Magaro) is a soft-spoken itinerant cook and forager who has taken the unenviable job of keeping a menacing group of fur-trappers fed. He befriends King Lu (Orion Lee), a handsome Chinese ex-pat whose English is better than his own and who does not share Cookie’s innate aversion to risk.

The arrival of a bovine to the territory — she’s owned by blowhard Englishman Chief Factor (Toby Jones, who calibrates the character’s innate superiority perfectly) — allows these two hungry men to launch a small enterprise. Their “oily cakes,” confections of fried dough made using milk stolen under cover of night, become a sensation. Everyone who tries them is reminded of home — a detail that feels vaguely supernatural, given the diversity of King Lu and Cookie’s customer base. Reichardt makes the point that American industry was built by people from everywhere, all of them hostile to, or dismissive of, the natives, sans underlining. That’s not her way.

Chief Factor is so tickled to taste South Kensington in his snack that he hires Cookie and King Lu to prepare a special dessert — a clafoutis — to impress an influential visitor to his home. He wants desperately to demonstrate to the Captain (Scott Shepherd) that frontier life is not without the indulgences these prosperous white men think of as their birthright. Cookie is baffled that it never occurs to his rich employer to wonder where the milk is coming from: “Some people can’t imagine being stolen from,” he reflects.

Like Reichardt’s earlier westerns — though she’s voiced ambivalence about that label — First Cow is shot (by Christopher Blauvelt) in Academy ratio; close to the 4:3 frame that was more common in the early decades of cinema, and in TV for half a century after that, than it is today. She’s not one for establishing shots or for ogling the beauty of the forest, nor does she shoot the food Cookie prepares with any palpable gluttony. Her new film is more likely to make viewers feel cold than hungry. She wants nothing to distract from her close observation of the severe nature of these brief, tough lives, and of the tenderness of the friendship that tempers that severity just a little. Although the screenplay Reichardt and Raymond cowrote is adapted from Raymond’s 2004 novel The Half-Life, they’ve discarded, well, more than half of it.

That rigidity of focus is impressive, but it will make First Cow a forbidding sit for some. The 121-minute picture is almost deliberately dull in stretches, vividly conjuring an environment wherein the labor of keeping oneself alive for a single day was occupation enough. (Imagine The Revenant without any of the action-movie stuff, or Deadwood minus Al Swearengen’s flights of filthy poetry or, well, women.) Once the gearworks of plot finally turn just far enough to nudge this scenario to a sort of resolution, even audiences conversant in Reichardt’s trademark minimalism may feel undernourished. This is the sort of picture that requires the viewer to meet it more than halfway without soothing the mileage of that journey. You might appreciate that sensation or you mightn’t, but it was clearly induced by design.

‘The Night Clerk’: Hitchcockian Premise, Half-Cocked Execution

by Mark Jenkins

Everyday life is a big mystery to Bart, a 23-year-old hotel worker who describes himself as having Asperger syndrome. Yet The Night Clerk is such a tiny mystery that it barely intrigues at all. The film may intend to be a Rear Window for the mini-cam era, but it lacks Hitchockian perplexity and perversity. 

Bart (co-producer Tye Sheridan) lives at home with his over-solicitous mother (Helen Hunt, one of several overqualified bit players). She puts Bart’s meals on the stairs to his basement domain, so he can eat alone and avoid the agony of conversation. Yet Bart tries hard to chat with the people he encounters on his 8-p.m.-to-4-a.m. shift at a mid-priced suburban hotel. 

Bart’s enthusiasm for improving his small-talk skills sets up the first of writer-director Michael Cristofer’s improbable contrivances. The awkward young man is a tech savant who has outfitted the hotel’s rooms with cameras he monitors from an elaborate computer network. His motivation is not peeping but self-improvement. He eavesdrops on how guests speak to each other so he can mimic natural dialogue.

To do this, of course, he could just listen and not watch. But an audio-only system wouldn’t give him something that’s crucial to the plot: a view of the murder of a female guest by a man who enters her room otherwise unseen. 

The police detective assigned to the case (an unusually bland John Leguizamo) quickly determines that Bart is hiding some information, and begins to treat him as a suspect. Bart can be disastrously candid, but he’s sufficiently guarded not to reveal that he has video of the killing. The recording would exonerate him of homicide, but convict him of invasion of privacy.

Since Bart’s detached reaction to the murder strikes his boss and co-workers as weird, he’s transferred to another hotel. That’s where another plot device walks through the door. Her name is Andrea and she’s played by Ana de Armas, seen most recently in Knives Out. Andrea is sympathetic to Bart’s condition — “my brother had it,” she says — and Bart mistakes her kindness for love. But is she staying at the hotel by happenstance, or does she have a sinister motive? 

Bart and Andrea’s relationship is the heart of the movie, and Sheridan and de Armas are the only two performers allowed the space to construct nuanced performances. Too bad the script doesn’t send them anyplace interesting. 

Cristofer, a TV and movie veteran who’s probably best-known as a playwright, has said that Bart was inspired by someone he actually knows. Yet The Night Clerk is no character study. As in the much showier Motherless Brooklyn, the protagonist’s condition moderates whenever the story requires it. Bart’s unconventionality doesn’t hinder a conventional outcome, or even provide any surprising detours or asides. 

Like many films that play on the affinity between cinema and voyeurism, this one intercuts naturalistic viewpoints with surveillance-camera footage and often captures the characters’s images reflected in mirrors. Looking is as complicated as talking, Cristofer seems to want to say. But just about everything in The Night Clerk is all too simple.

In The Run-Up To War, A British Whistleblower Exposes ‘Official Secrets’

By Andrew Lapin

We are still figuring out how to make compelling films about 21st-century geopolitics. The stakes in this arena have never been higher, but they’ve also never been less visually exciting. Most unscrupulous maneuvers these days occur not in secret parking-structure meetings or hotel rooms, but behind computer screens, where the good people can frown while squinting at emails and .wav files.

The latest attempt to make such screens come alive is Official Secrets, a new biopic of Iraq War whistleblower Katharine Gun. In 2003, the British intelligence worker leaked a memo from the (American) National Security Agency asking her office to help arm-twist holdout countries in the United Nations run-up vote to authorize the war. By calling up intelligence forces to dig up dirt on allies, Gun believed the US was conspiring to launch an illegal and dangerous war by disreputable means. But when she leaked the memo, all hell broke loose, and she was put on trial for violating the U.K.’s tellingly named Official Secrets Act. This is good news for the drama based on Gun’s life, because it eventually gets her out of her cubicle and into the courtroom, where she stands inside a glass box that’s a lot more exciting to look at.

Gun is played by Keira Knightley, standing in principle while drowning in sweater sleeves. She comes onboard the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the British equivalent of the NSA, as a low-level language analyst, seemingly kept in the dark as to the organization’s true nature. And Knightley plays Gun as relatable and down-to-earth, not a Snowden-type figure who was going in looking to stir up trouble.

In the run-up to the offending email, we see her at home in Cheltenham grinding her teeth as Tony Blair and George W. Bush make their televised case for going to war. “Yelling at the TV isn’t going to make any difference,” Gun’s husband Yasar (Adam Bakri) tells her, and so she takes that to heart, utilizing a network of anti-war activists to get the NSA’s memo into the hands of Observer reporter Martin Bright (Matt Smith, trying out the cynical-journalist routine on his boyish The Crownface).

Director Gavin Hood is no stranger to this kind of material, having already tackled extrajudicial intelligence schemes in his 2007 drama Rendition and modern-day warfare in the 2015 drone thriller Eye in the Sky. And Official Secrets doesn’t shy away from placing the Iraq War under the harsh light of history, emphasizing the underhanded machinations both U.S. and U.K. intelligence used to secure public approval for their actions. In its Observerscenes, the film also gets to critique the media’s failures in covering Iraq in a way that feels specific to the narrative — the left-of-center paper had formally endorsed the war before landing Gun’s scoop, so editors have shouting matches in the newsroom over whether they’re just carrying water for Blair and Bush.

But what Hood, and his co-writers Gregory and Sara Bernstein are actually building to is something far more ambitious and damning: putting the war itself on trial. They can do this with Gun’s story because her legal team, headed by Ralph Fiennes, decides that their best strategy is to demonstrate she was acting out of necessity, to stop an illegal war — thereby trumping the British law forbidding the sharing of government secrets. If you know Gun’s story, it won’t surprise you that it ends in something of an anticlimax. But it’s also where the film truly takes flight, as Hood is able to import the language of world affairs into the mechanics of a good courtroom drama (or about half of one, anyway).

And on the side is an attempt at a straightforward espionage thriller, though the material here is a bit thin and sometimes feels like we’re just biding time while the film can run its two-hour length. There’s a great fuss made over the identity of a mysterious NSA figure with the very Keyser Söze-esque name of “Frank Koza” (that part is real), and the familiar scenes where Gun, out in public, begins to believe she is being watched. But there’s not enough effort made to spice up the inherent drabness of a story that takes place mostly in offices. When minor characters leave the country, it’s a rare moment for some fresh air—though one reporter’s trip to Washington, D.C. mostly just results in a few tense phone calls.

As the Iraq War recedes into our rear-view mirror and our current news cycle spins blindly from one world crisis to another, films like Official Secrets, bland as they may seem, will serve as crucial efforts to keep our past mistakes in our minds. And although 2003 may not seem like that long ago, this movie feels like a period setting in at least one respect: Someone like Gun still cares about trying to separate legal acts from illegal ones, and truth from lies.

In ‘Tigers Are Not Afraid,’ A Dark Fantasy Amid Mexico’s Drug War

By Leila Fadel

Estrella, age 11, is granted three magical wishes after a tragic event at her school — only to find out that her fate is about to take an even worse turn. It sounds like the beginning of a dark fairy tale, but the movie, Tigers Are Not Afraid, is far more than that.

It takes place during Mexico’s violent, bloody drug war. Estrella’s mother is taken by the cartels, and in trying to find her mom, she meets a boy named Shine, who wears a tiger mask. He lives on the street and leads a gang of fellow orphans, helping each other survive the constant violence around them while chasing the ghosts of their parents.

Tigers Are Not Afraid (titled Vuelven in Spanish) is now beginning a limited theatrical release in North America in advance of its arrival on the horror-specific streaming service Shudder. It’s written and directed by Issa López, who says that “reality” inspired her to make the film.

“There’s a universal fascination with the figure of the drug lord, and with the cartels, and a certain type of romance even, which is terrible, that has emerged from it,” she says. “But nobody is talking about the children left to their own devices because their parents have been taken, their parents were displaced or sometimes killed. Nobody is addressing this as the proper war it is. And I felt that we needed that story; someone needed to do it.”

Of course, the film also has plenty of fantastical elements.

“I love fairy tales, I love fantasy and I love horror,” López says. “And I thought this was a great opportunity to go into all of that.”


Interview Highlights

On losing her own mother at a young age

My mom died of natural causes, but it was very unexpected and sudden. And many, many times you don’t realize that you’re dragging a ghost behind you. And I was just about to go into production when one of my friends pointed out that it was my personal story, and it floored me. I hadn’t seen it.

On developing the line of blood that follows Estrella around the movie

As I was writing the first scenes, I created this image of a girl that has to leave school because there was a shootout right outside. And she sees a dead body, which happens frequently in the war culture. And she watches it for a second and then turns around and walks away. And that’s not something you can do with violence — you can’t turn your back and walk away. It will come after you until you look at it and you understand what’s going on. And as I’m writing that scene, and she turns around from the pool of blood, a line of blood starts following her. And it became sort of the leitmotif of the movie: How death will come with you, will walk with you, until you accept and embrace the situation you are in. …

I think that it’s the perfect view to understand a broken universe. But also: I’m Mexican. I’m deeply Latin American. And the entire thing about Latin America is magical thinking, and witchcraft, and ghosts, and leading with our death. So it was just a matter of sitting down to write at the very beginning, and not trying to pull the story in that direction, but simply getting out of the way for the story to tell itself.

On tackling social and political issues with magical realism

Yes. I think that if you’re attempting to bring these things to the conversation of the social classes that make the decisions in Mexico — which is [the] middle class and upper class — they don’t want to watch movies about children suffering because of political corruption. So what you do is: You make a movie of a genre that makes it easier. And the interesting phenomenon was that it worked around the world. And I think it’s important to understand what are the true horrors that these children are facing, especially when two years after the movie opened at a festival for the first time, we find ourselves in a version of the United States where children that cross the border to survive this [drug] war are being put in cages. So it’s particularly urgent. And if horror is going to be the way to deliver this message, fantastic. Let’s go with it.

On how a movie specific to Mexico has landed internationally

Issa López: What is striking is: I set out to make a movie about a very peculiar, particular situation, which is what Mexico is going through right now. But I found that many of the themes that the movie touches upon, you can find them across the world. So for example, there is a gender violence happening in the movie, which is the origin of the story. In Canada, Native women are disappearing in big numbers; I think that I’m ashamed to say I didn’t know. And then you play the movie in a city like Belfast, where they still have walls to divide one side from the other, and they understand bullets flying around town. It is not a good thing that the movie is understood deeply in so many places. It’s actually worrisome.

Leila Fadel: There was one scene in the movie where the kids were playing make-believe on a stage. And I remember a very specific [experience] going to a place with Syrian refugees where they were acting out, in a very funny way, the war that was going on around them. And it just felt so familiar.

López: That’s — you know, I didn’t know that. But that’s so moving because, again, through telling stories and fables, and playing and performing for each other, they try to make sense of the world. And yeah, it was a natural thing to happen. … It’s just inside children to stand up and create a character and portray it. And it doesn’t matter if it’s in [Arabic] or it’s in Russian or in Korean, or — it doesn’t matter what language.

On being a woman in a male-dominated horror-film industry

Something funny happened just as the movie was opening: The whole #MeToo movement exploded. And I’ve been front row, watching the changes that it’s created. And I’m not saying that it has fixed anything, but I am saying that at least now we’re observant of a phenomenon where the numbers simply don’t make sense. The percentages don’t make sense.

I’ve been in so many conversations about genre and gender. And it’s really interesting because in Spanish, the word for both things is the same — is género. And here’s the deal: I don’t believe neither in genre nor in gender. I believe in the stories that need to be told. … And I’m telling you, we need to start telling stories from a different point of view, if, for nothing else, for the sake of not getting bored, you know? We need to hear a new voice, a new take. And the fact that women and LGBT community … are standing up and just taking the stage is allowing the world to hear different stories and different voices. And that is priceless.

Sophia Alvarez Boyd and Ed McNulty produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Patrick Jarenwattananon adapted it for the Web.