Skip to main content

The Rescue review – riveting Thai cave rescue documentary

The rescuers are the focus as Free Solo directors Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin expertly weave news footage with restaged scenes

A junior football team trapped deep inside a flooded cave in Thailand are making headlines all over the world. Not even the Thai Navy Seals have been able to save them and their chances of survival are bleak. That is, until a pair of middle-aged Britons arrive on the scene. Rick and John don’t exactly look like action heroes; one is bald, the other bespectacled, and both could be described as bumbling. But they are two of the world’s best cave divers, and in 2018 they led one of the most dramatic rescue missions of recent times.

This hugely involving documentary from Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, the directing duo and married couple behind the Oscar-winning climbing documentary Free Solo, centres on the rescuers rather than the rescued (the rights to the boys’ story were speedily bought for another project, by Netflix). Twenty-four-hour news coverage of the event is integrated seamlessly with footage filmed by locals and reconstructions starring the divers themselves. Vasarhelyi and Chin recreate the sense of the clock running down as oxygen levels in the cave decrease, while the monsoon outside rages.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3jTmMtg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Knives Out review – Daniel Craig goes Columbo in Cluedo whodunnit

Craig grills an all-star lineup of suspects when a wealthy novelist is found dead in Rian Johnson’s sharp, country-house murder mystery R ian Johnson unsheathes an entertainingly nasty, if insubstantial detective mystery with his new film, Knives Out. Back in 2005, his debut movie Brick (a high-school thriller) paid tribute to the hardboiled noir genre. Now he does the same thing for cosy crime, although there is nothing that cosy about it. Knives Out has a country house full of frowning suspects, deadpan servants and smirking ne’er-do-wells and an amusing performance from Daniel Craig as Benoît Blanc, the brilliant amateur sleuth from Louisiana who annoys the hell out of one and all by smiling enigmatically, occasionally plinking a jarring high note on the piano during the drawing-room interrogation and pronouncing in his southern burr: “Ah suh-spect far-wuhl play!” Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2L0NKO4
Post a Comment
Read more

Thirty Years of Adonis film review: sexually explicit gay drama mixes porn and pomposity

1/5 stars The line between soft-core porn and pompous art-house cinema grows ever finer in the seventh feature by writer, director and producer Danny Cheng Wan-cheung, also known as Scud. Intended as a philosophical statement about the meaninglessness of life, Thirty Years of Adonis instead comes across as a badly misjudged piece of sensationalist filmmaking. God’s Own Country review: gay love story set in the Yorkshire countryside The film revolves around aspiring gay actor Adonis Yang... from South China Morning Post - Culture feed https://ift.tt/2qgQkop
Post a Comment
Read more

Tracey Emin decorates Regent's Park and a celebration of Islamic creativity – the week in art

Emin and others survey the state of sculpture, Glenn Brown takes his decadent imagination to Newcastle and artists offer northern exposure – all in your weekly dispatch Frieze Sculpture Park Tracey Emin, Barry Flanagan and John Baldessari are among the artists decorating Regent’s Park with a free survey of the state of sculpture. • Regent’s Park, London , 4 July until 7 October. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2IDCpPV
Post a Comment
Read more