Yes, God, Yes

Alice masturbates

Yes, God, Yes – a funny title pithily catching the twin obsessions of this slight but sharp movie. Sex and god. It stars Natalia Dyer, who somehow has managed to fit this in alongside the nine other movies and 30-odd episodes of the Netflix show Stranger Things she’s appeared in over the last six years or so. She was about 24 when she made this, but the big eyes and slender frame mean she can just about get away with playing Alice, a teenager from a sheltered background grappling with the first stirrings of sexuality at the Catholic school that seems almost unnaturally fixated on the carnal. Coming of agers with storylines that … Read more

Tuscaloosa

Billy and Virginia

Tuscaloosa kicks off with an urgent, arresting image laying out what’s at stake, archive footage of George Wallace making his infamous “segregation today, segregation tomorrow and segregation for ever!” pitch on the campaign stump in 1963, before even more footage shows Wallace in the full glare of the TV cameras blocking the entrance to the University of Alabama to two black students. A flash even further back in time, to 1953, and a car containing a white woman and a black woman, caught in freeze frame, the two having run away together. They ended up, we learn, so badly disfigured in the burnt-out hull of the car that their bodies were unrecognisable. And … Read more