Iraq
Adam Sweeting
Incredible but true, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein really did hire a largely-British film crew to come to his country and make a movie called Clash of Loyalties, about how Iraq freed itself from British influence in the 1920s and blossomed into an independent state. It never made it as far as a cinema release, but the footage was recently rediscovered in a garage in Surrey by its producer, Latief Jorephani (pictured below).This entertaining but slightly ragged documentary by Stephen Finnigan (★★★) told the story of the film and rounded up several of the surviving cast and crew, though the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“Say your last words before you leave this life.” Somewhere in the so-called Islamic State, a woman was accused of adultery. Her father joined her accusers, then, as her shrouded body was lowered into a pit, picked up a rock and hurled it at her. We didn’t have to watch her die, but Moona, an Iraqi activist using the internet to spread the truth about IS, did. It’s remarkable that Moona is still alive. IS gunmen turned up at her flat to confiscate her laptop and threaten her family. She now lives in exile in Turkey.Escape from Isis was profoundly harrowing, geopolitically urgent and, Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
This was one of the most disturbing, terrifying and informative programmes imaginable, made more so by Dan Cruickshank’s calm demeanour as he interrogated everyone from scholars to fanatics about the actions and rationale of the Islamic State (IS) during the past two years in Iraq and Syria. These conversations were set against his own visits to the Middle East and terrifying videos of IS hammering to smithereens the contents of museums and bulldozing world-famous archaeological sites.When Cruickshank visited Iraq's ancient sites in 2002, he feared the destruction Western bombs might bring; Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
You haven’t had to actually watch the brutal executions staged by Islamic State (IS, or ISIS or ISIL, as it’s also known) to register them: just a single image registered has been more than enough to horrify. Managing to penetrate the world’s consciousness to such an extent has surely been one of the terror group’s most singular achievements. As one contributor to This World’s latest bulletin from the frontlines of Islamism, World’s Richest Terror Army, put it, the organization combines an ideology drawing on seventh-century principles with a 21st-century grasp of social media technology. In Read more ...
Nick Hasted
First there’s an “Allahu Akbar”, then an American tank’s rumble and clank. It’s an ominous and wearying start, the sound of Islam and invasion intermingled in the Iraq War, a violent conflict that today simply expands. When director Clint Eastwood lets us see, too, we’re by the treads of the tank, then within seconds we’re on a rooftop with Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper), who spots a woman in a hijab with her child. They have a grenade, and he lines them in his crosshairs. Cut.American Sniper is a leanly muscular film, reviving Eastwood’s best qualities as a director after several worthy duds. Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Early in The Fog of War, Errol Morris’s first, Oscar-winning documentary about a former US Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara admits that, if the USA had lost World War Two, he would have been convicted as a war criminal for his part in the fire-bombing of Japan. “Some things work out, and some things don’t,” Donald Rumsfeld observes with contrasting breeziness in Morris’s new film. This is as near to a critical perspective as the Iraq catastrophe’s principal architect cares to get.The cunning and humane Morris, who spent 33 hours interviewing Rumsfeld, only presses his subject once, on Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The story you think you know slides beneath your feet in this rigorous investigation of Julian Assange and Bradley Manning. “I’m a combative person," WikiLeaks’ founder says, setting out his motives. "I like crushing bastards.” Director Alex Gibney’s intentions are more nuanced. An Oscar-winner for Taxi to the Dark Side’s exposé of US abuses in Baghdad, he has similarly probed the poisonous roots of banking (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room) and the paedophile-protecting Catholic church (Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God). Gibney’s restless filmography also includes the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Did they get the president? That’s the benchmark question viewers will ask of any new film from documentary house par excellence Brook Lapping and producer Norma Percy ever since they secured an interview with Slobodan Milosevic for their landmark The Death of Yugoslavia. Their strike rate has rather dropped off lately. Even though – or because? – he was the subject of the outfit’s recent Putin, Russia and the West, that wasn't enough to convince the current master of the Kremlin to participate.Brook Lapping's new three-parter, The Iraq War, has a similar dearth of the number-one men: George Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The St James Theatre has risen, phoenix-like, almost literally from the ashes of the Westminster Theatre, which was first a chapel, then a cinema and latterly a drama theatre that played host to productions of Oscar Wilde and Harley Granville Barker plays, among many others, and where Tyrone Guthrie once directed. In the 1950s and 1960s it was home to a production company run by producer Tony Furness and actor Alan Badel.The theatre, just around the corner from Buckingham Palace, burned down in 2002 and now, as part of a new commercial development on the site, a company led by Robert Read more ...
Dylan Moore
Looking at CCTV footage of a school hall in Cardiff through Adobe Flash Player in the corner of a webpage and listening to the attendant interference, bells, buzzes and bleeps might not sound like the cutting edge of theatre. But by the time National Theatre Wales’ tech wizard Tom Beardshaw closes the live stream of Tim Price’s electric new play The Radicalisation of Bradley Manning with the school pupils and soldiers we have been watching taking their bow, this is exactly what the "audience" are convinced we have witnessed.NTW Director John E McGrath, having overseen one of the most radical Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
While Homeland is hardly unique in being a TV series born in the shadow of 9/11, it may prove to be one of the most resonant and troubling responses to that ghastly event and its aftermath. Sergeant Nick Brody, who went missing with a fellow Marine sniper in Iraq in 2003, is found alive by a Special Forces team raiding a safe house used by notorious terrorist Abu Nazir. He is brought back to the USA as a shining symbol of War on Terror heroism, stoically addresses his fellow Marines at Edwards Air Force Base, and is ferried home through jostling reporters to try to pick up the traces of his Read more ...
joe.muggs
I've seen some genre intersections in my time, but gangsta ambient takes the biscuit. Baghdad born South Londoner VersA Beatz began as a grime producer, but like many has moved from that genre's hyped-up energy into the slower, more menacing electronic “trap beats” of hip hop. This in turn has overlapped with a current American style of melancholic leftfield hip hop sounds pioneered by Clams Casino (best known as producer to Lil B and current sensation A$AP Rocky) to produce, in this free album of instrumentals, a narcotic sound that feels as if gravity has been loosened and the imagination Read more ...