GEOFF BOTTOMS relishes a profoundly human portrait of a family as it evolves across 55 years in Sheffield
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]
PAUL DONOVAN applauds an excellently crafted new musical that explores the life and death of Ruth Ellis
PAUL DONOVAN is tickled by the excruciating take-downs of one of the funniest, wittiest, political writers around.
RON JACOBS points out, via a transcription of Kissinger’s secret recordings, that Trump could never have existed without Nixon and Kissinger
ELLIS RAE is persuaded that the advantages of the ‘talking cure’ are superior to the treatment of mental illness with drugs
JOHN GREEN, MICHAL BONCZA and BELLA KATZ review The Good Boy, Broken English, and Don't Be Prey
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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