WILL STONE fact-checks the colourful life of Ozzy Osbourne
Film round-up: March 30, 2023
MARIA DUARTE reviews of Riotsville USA, God’s Creatures, Law of Tehran and Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
MESMERISING: Payman Maadi in Law of Tehran
[Courtesy of Boshra Film] 
JAMES CROSSLEY applauds a lucid biography of the German radical preacher who reemerged as a hero in the GDR
Prizes all round: the Bard hands plaudits to the Miners Gala, OT&JC, Joe Solo, Black Sabbath’s frontman and the Lionesses
Star cartoonist JAMIE BRITTON is in awe of a graphic novel of epic proportions that explores class, religion and globalisation via the strange cultivation of Ginseng in the US Midwest
GUILLERMO THOMAS is intrigued by a history of the Middle East that demonstrates how promising post colonial beginnings were snuffed out by Western imperialist interests
MARIA DUARTE recommends the intricate study of a high-performance and highly dysfuntional German family
Riotsville, USA (12A)
Directed by Sierra Pettengill
★★★★
SIX years in the making, Sierra Pettengill’s painstakingly researched documentary lifts the lid on the shocking fake towns — or “riotsvilles” — the US military built to militarise the police and train them to snuff out the uprisings and civil rights protest movements of the late 1960s.
Set in 1967-68 and created entirely from archival footage shot by the US military or broadcast on television, the film shows a national psyche hell-bent on maintaining law and order no matter the cost.
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MARIA DUARTE recommends the intricate study of a high-performance and highly dysfuntional German family
MARIA DUARTE recommends the ambitious portrait of an agricultural community confronted by the trauma of enclosure
MARIA DUARTE recommends a chilling examination of the influence of Evangelical Christianity over the far right in Brazil
MARIA DUARTE recommends the creepy thrills of David Cronenburg’s provocative and macabre exploration of grief
