****1/2

Stalinist Russia, 1937. A young, idealistic prosecutor takes up the case of an unjustly imprisoned, political prisoner – out in UK cinemas on Friday, March 27th

A prison yard. Impassive guards. Inmates on scaffolding work at plastering the exterior wall. A man from a new prisoner detail is given a sack of letters and locked in a cell with a stove. He must burn the letters.

Given two matches, he reads some of the letters before incineration. One is written in blood from an inmate named Stepniak requesting a visit from a prosecutor. 

The young, fresh faced prosecutor Kornev (Alexander Kuznetsov) arrives at the prison to see the governor. He is seen instead to the duty assistant (Andria Keiss). 

The prosecutor is received, but the interviewing duty assistant lives in a different world. The prison staff live in a world where the apple cart is never to be upset and an easy life is paramount. They laugh uproariously at the current joke doing the rounds about a political celebrity being imprisoned both before and after the Revolution. 

They do their jobs efficiently, but woe beside interfering busybodies.… Read the rest

*****

When paradise is suddenly taken away from him, a young innocent must come to terms with stark and brutal forces of corruption and death – searing drama is out in UK cinemas on Friday, June 20th

** SPOILER ALERT**

Two boys are herding a flock of sheep cross-country. The older one (Wided Dabebi), who tells the younger not to be scared, but to watch out for mines, knows his way around. The younger one Achraf (Ali Helali) hasn’t told his mother he’s doing this, because he knows she would have forbidden him from coming.

They are navigating the slopes of Tunisia’s Mighila Mountain, which is fabulously beautiful. They find a perfect place to give the sheep a rest, and the older one shows the younger a good spot – they climb to the top of a ridge, with a stunning, panoramic view of the local landscape, and bask on the rock in the sunshine. Life is good. In fact, it is paradise. After some time, they head back down to the watering hole they left earlier, plunge their heads in the cool water.… Read the rest

***1/2

A man attempts to live for 30 days without the use of his smartphone, tablet or computer – out on digital from Monday, April 1st

This documentary opens with an advisory to keep your phone handy during the screening, as you may be required to use it at some point. In the UK, it’s only available on digital platforms… but even so, that advisory marks it out as different from most films.

Lykos, who narrates his documentary, is old enough to have grown up without a smartphone or other digital devices, but kids today handle smartphones from a younger and younger age. What would happen, wonders Alex, if I disconnected myself for an entire month? His and his wife’s home contains their two smartphones, two tablets, and a TV. Learning that Alex wakes and checks his smartphone three or four times a night, Alex’s doctor wires him for a sleep test.

Like many of us, Alex finds himself spending an hour on social media and wondering, what just happened? He and others admit to feelings of envy when others post about good things in their lives. A near-tearful divorcee talks about it being hard seeing people having a good time with partner or family.… Read the rest

****

Imprisoned for a murder he did not commit, Korean American Chol Soo Lee became a figurehead for a protest movement, something he felt unable to live up to – out in UK cinemas on Friday, August 19th

In San Francisco’s Chinatown in 1973, Korean loner Chol Soo Lee was arrested and subsequently convicted for a gang murder. While it’s true he had foolishly borrowed a gun off a work colleague a few days previously and accidentally discharged it into his apartment wall giving himself a police record, he was not the murderer. He was identified on the flimsiest of premises by unreliable witnesses, possibly not helped by white cops who wanted to convict a felon for the crime and consign the case to history.

On what was to be his last journey through the outside world before many years in prison, he heard the Tower of Power song “You’re still a young man” on a car radio crossing the Golden Gate Bridge. It resonated. As the years passed in prison, his mother abandoned him. He had fallen for a Japanese American girl he’d met Jean Ranko who subsequently told him in a letter that she had no romantic interest in him.… Read the rest