We should be so luckyy to have Curtis
CAN’T GET YOU OUT OF MY HEAD
Available on BBC iPlayer tomorrow ★★★★✩
How did we get into the state we are in today? If you want to navigate a path through modern times defined by societal divisions, rampant conspiracy theories and an immense sense of bafflement, then ace documentary maker Adam Curtis is your man.
If Curtis was a TV detective he’d be a maverick savant with scant respect for the rules, cracking cases with a nifty choice of image and a left-field soundtrack. Because there’s nothing linear about a Curtis documentary: they wriggle hither and thither, lacing together ideas and images in what can seem random fashion. Yet, subversive and thrilling, there’s a deep intelligence at work.
His latest, Can’t Get You Out Of My Head, is a six-part plunge into the zeitgeist that will have your head spinning around as it bounces from
Beijing’s Summer Palace to the Playboy Mansion, tying apparently disparate ideas, movements and thinkers together with a graceful logic that’s seductively persuasive.
The point – that we as individuals are as much to blame for the state of things as the power cabals we’re eager to blame – might be hard to stomach. However, the idea that conspiracy theories are a conspiracy in themselves – we are oppressed by the power of suspicion – is one to wrestle with in the moral maze that is lockdown.
Threaded through it all is the 1960s counterculture practical joke that was Operation Mindf***, which pointed the finger at 18th-century Bavarian radicals The Illuminati and lives on to this day. Operation Mindf***? Totally.
PVT CHAT 18
In New York, a lonely online gambler (Peter Vack) becomes obsessed with a sexy dominatrix (Julia Fox, Uncut Gems) he meets on a camgirl site and starts to stalk her. But who is playing whom?
Out Friday on all major platforms,
including Curzon Home Cinema
THE RECCE NO CERT
This South African-made actiondrama is set in 1981. Wrongly declared killed in action in an Angolan war zone, an elite Afrikaner soldier (Greg Kriek) fights to return home to his pregnant wife.
Out now on Amazon, Apple TV, Google, Microsoft and Playstation
SLALOM 18
A chilling study of sex abuse set within the sports world. A 15-year-old girl (Noée Abita) is accepted to an ultra-competitive ski academy in the French Alps where she is mercilessly groomed by her predatory instructor (Jérémie Renier).
Out Friday on Curzon Home Cinema