Working from a script by Enda Walsh, the director of 'Ali & Ava’ and ‘The Arbor’ doesn’t give her characters much room to breathe in this overly plotted-out kitchen-sink melodrama about the struggles of a tight-knit group of 30-somethings.
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Courtesy of Charades The group of lads at the center of Clio Barnard’s “I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning” dance their way through addiction, housing precarity, class tensions and good old romantic betrayal. In theory, the British director’s fifth feature — premiered in Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes — is a film of big, bubbling emotions and anti-capitalist rage. In execution, it’s a choppy outline of five working-class lives in the U.K. cobbled together by gloopy sentimentality. The ingredients for a pounding kitchen-sink melodrama are here, but nothing really matches the scalding imagery evoked by the title — and scattered throughout via archival footage of the dozens of high-rise housing towers demolished in Birmingham, where the film is set, since the turn of the century.
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