A small-time heroin dealer harbours idealistic dreams of building a hospital “to help da limmless in Peshawar and Kabul”. This is the premise of The Book of Naseeb, the debut novel from Khaled Nurul Hakim.
“They always try to break you down when you’re 17,” says queen bee Selah (Lovie Simone) in Tayarisha Poe’s impressive directorial debut. As leader of the Spades, one of the five Mafia-style ruling factions in the exclusive Haldwell boarding-school in Pennsylvania, Selah, with her waist-long braids and inscrutably cool managerial style, seems unbreakable. But not so fast. Here comes new girl Paloma (Celeste O’Connor), her sweet-faced nemesis.
There are quite a few good things to be said for Julien Leclerc’s Earth and Blood. It’s a terse and uncluttered thriller which makes full use of its main location, a battered old sawmill in the midst of a dank expanse of forest, and Leclerc has rustled up a thoroughly unpleasant bunch of gangsters led by the intimidating Adama (Ériq Ebouaney).
Creating the opening episode of a new comedy series is like flipping pancakes with one hand while playing the Moonlight Sonata with the other. You have to introduce your characters and invent the world they live in, while squeezing in enough plot to keep the action moving.
Guy Ritchie enjoyed his greatest commercial success with 2019’s live-action fantasy Aladdin, the most atypical project of his career, but The Gentlemen finds him back on his best-known turf as a purveyor of mouthy, ultra-violent geezerism. It’s 21 years since his debut hit with Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, but its shaggy-dog story-telling and spirit of high-wire anarchy resurface intact.
Thanks to a powerful cast and crisp direction from Brian Kirk (Game of Thrones, Luther), 21 Bridges drives home its story of good cops, bad cops and a Big Apple rotten to the core with bulldozing force. Centre stage is Chadwick Boseman as Andre Davis, a detective renowned for showing bad guys no mercy.
Monday night’s first episode of this three-part series was a bit ordinary, as it introduced its cast of British recreational cocaine users and explained why their habit may be ill-advised.
This was the first of a two-part investigation into... well, I don't know what. The voiceover of High Society: Cannabis Café said it was an experiment “to test the alleged benefits of weed” and the people featured all had “a personal motivation for getting stoned” as they visited an Amsterdam coffee shop, where dope is sold legally.
The high, crackhead days of James Frey (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) are over in five adrenalized minutes, as he dances naked to the Smashing Pumpkins, then tumbles insensibly backwards from a ledge.