MATTHEW HAWKINS applauds a psychotherapist’s disection of William Blake
Film round-up: August 15, 2024
Inside Afghanistan, Chinese crime thriller, entertaining pants and Alien deja vu: the Star's critic MARIA DUARTE reviews Hollywoodgate, Only The River Flows, Jackpot! and Alien Romulus
AUDACIOUS: The Taliban enter an abandoned US military base in Ibrahim Nash’at's Hollywoodgate
[IMDb] 
New releases from Christina Alden and Alex Patterson, Odette Michell, Clementine Lovell
JOHN GREEN is fascinated by a very readable account of Britain’s involvement in South America
Strip cartoons used to be the bread and butter of newspapers and they have been around for centuries. MICHAL BONCZA asks our own Paul Tanner about which bees are in his bonnet
GORDON PARSONS acknowledges the authority with which Sarah Kane’s theatrical justification for suicide has resonance today
RON JACOBS welcomes a timely homage to one of the IWW and CPUSA’s most effective orators
Hollywoodgate (12A)
Directed by Ibrahim Nash’at
★★★★
“WHY is he filming? asks a member of the Taliban. “He is making a documentary… Documenting our everyday lives both civilian and military for a year. If his intentions are bad he will die soon.” Chilling words from a Taliban commander about Egyptian film-maker Ibrahim Nash’at.
The Taliban agreed to let him film Mawlawi Mansour, the new head of Afghanistan’s air force whose father was killed by US forces, and MJ Mukhtar, a former Taliban fighter now with dreams of an illustrious military career, from the moment US troops left Kabul and Taliban forces took the city on August 31 2021.
He captures Mansour and his team entering Hollywood Gate, a secret CIA base, and checking what the US left behind.
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