In My Country

John Boorman continues his exploration of remote political situations by moving from an invented situation in Panama to a fictional account around the real stories told during the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission after the end of Apartheid under the presidency of Nelson Mandela. He also continues his propensity for pushing too much into…

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The General (1998)

John Boorman had been getting more explicitly political for about a decade, but he moves his focus from far-away jungles to close to home, namely his adoptive home of Dublin. Based on a book by Paul Williams, Boorman wrote his script about the brazen and notorious criminal Martin Cahill with a particular emphasis on a…

Beyond Rangoon

There's something off about this film. It's like there are puzzle pieces that don't fit and aren't even from the same puzzle being shoved together without any effort to actually find some semblance of cohesion. It makes me wonder about the writing process of the film. The credited writers are Alex Lasker and Bill Rubenstein,…

Hope and Glory

It's kind of funny how you can read the description of a film, think it sounds completely out of step for a filmmaker's work, and then actually watch it to discover that it ends up fitting perfectly. A slice of life tale of a small boy in the London suburbs during World War II felt…

The Emerald Forest

John Boorman goes full Luddite. Taking the harrowing real story of a man searching for his son for years after the boy was taken by a rainforest tribe in South America and applying his ever-increasing pessimism about humanity and its relationship to technology, Boorman takes his ideas towards their supposedly inevitable conclusion and embraces the…