Film picks: Boy From Heaven, Blood & Gold, Milk
Sign up now: Get ST's newsletters delivered to your inbox
Boy From Heaven stars Fares Fares (left) and Tawfeek Barhom.
PHOTO: THE PROJECTOR
Follow topic:
Boy From Heaven (PG)
126 minutes, now showing at The Projector, 4 stars
The death of a Grand Imam opens up a succession struggle at Al-Azhar University in Cairo, the epicentre of Sunni Islam, where a young scholar becomes a pawn between Egypt’s corrupt powers in this 2022 Cannes Film Festival best screenplay winner.
Wily intelligence agent Colonel Ibrahim (an excellent Fares Fares) is ordered to spy on the students and clerics, and manipulate the election to favour an imam of the regime’s choice. He gets his hands on an innocent student, Adam (Tawfeek Barhom), a fisherman’s son newly arrived on a scholarship.
In Swedish-Egyptian film-maker Tarik Saleh’s espionage thriller, treachery plays out in the vast complex of prayer halls, chambers and corridors. The story benefits hugely from its strong sense of place. There is danger everywhere.
Blood & Gold (R21) 100 minutes, streaming on Netflix, 4 stars
Blood & Gold is a thriller with fantastically evil villains and creative showdowns starring Marie Hacker and Florian Schmidtke.
PHOTO: NETFLIX
Just added to Netflix is the latest from German film-maker Peter Thorwarth, a writer-director who specialises in violent action-dramas made on a small budget but packing big thrills.
In the excellent Blood Red Sky (2021, also on Netflix), a band of hijackers has taken over a commercial jet, but one of the passengers is a mother cursed with vampirism. In the fights that follow, the curse becomes a blessing.
Director Thorwarth’s equally fun follow-up is Blood & Gold (2023).
In the waning days of World War II, a group of German soldiers rides into a German town, searching for buried treasure and using every brutal means in their power to find it.
Payback comes to the robbers in the form of a deserter, Heinrich (Robert Maaser), a man with a grudge. As with Sky, the villains are fantastically evil, the showdowns are creative and justice is served in gloriously bloody ways.
Milk (R21) 128 minutes, one screening at The Projector
Milk stars Sean Penn in the biopic about the crusading political leader of the film’s title.
PHOTO: THE PROJECTOR
This Oscar-winning 2008 biopic has been brought back to the big screen in aid of transgender social service group The T Project.
The character of the crusading politician Harvey Milk is played by Sean Penn, who won an Oscar for Best Actor.
Milk, the first openly gay politician to hold public office in the United States, is initially shown to be a struggling San Francisco businessman. He becomes convinced that it is not enough that gay people are recognised as full citizens of the city, but they must also hold political power.
With that belief, he launches his campaign – one that will attract the attention of social conservatives, among them fellow politician Dan White (Josh Brolin).
Screenwriter Dustin Lance Black won a Best Original Screenplay Oscar while director Gus Van Sant received a Best Director nomination.
Where: Projector X: Picturehouse, 05-01 The Cathay, 2 Handy Road theprojector.sg/films-and-events/milk
MRT: Dhoby Ghaut/Bras Basah
When: Friday, 8pm
Admission: $20 a ticket
Info:
