At Cinemas: If in doubt, ask Snoop Dogg

Anymore nonsense Hollywood, and we’ll put Motley on your case!

You’re probably aware of the #OscarsSoWhite furore, criticising the Academy’s uneven representation with regards to race – there’s been Michael Caine, amongst others, saying that black people need to pipe down and wait their turn and Charlotte Rampling decrying the boycott as racist to whites. From some rather more sober quarters there’s talk about the lack of diversity in the industry as a whole and the subsequent need for a complete overhaul from top to bottom – not just what comes out at the red carpet end. However, I think Snoop Dogg said it best with: “F*ck that old slavery bullsh*t-ass award show”.

All that said, the fifth Oscar-nominated film to open at Danish cinemas is The Big Short. It features some obscenely rich, powerful and morally redundant white men but – unlike the Oscars ceremony – it’s an indictment of them and not a celebration. Read this week’s review.

Also out this week is Motley’s Law, a documentary about 38-year-old Kimberley Motley who left her husband and her three kids in the USA to go and work as a defence lawyer in Kabul, Afghanistan. She’s the only foreign lawyer with a licence to work in an Afghan court – not to mention the only female. Prestigious human rights cases have motivated her for five years, but the threats against her life and dangerous conditions in the country make it increasingly difficult for Motley to continue her work. Showing at Grand Teatret.

Until Sunday evening at Cinemateket, you can enjoy the VOID International Animation Festival, which includes a retrospective of the renowned independent animation director Bill Plympton. Probably best known for his Oscar-nominated short Your Face, American-born Plympton famously sent in a stack of drawings to Disney when he was just 14. They refused him work, but decades later they were to offer him a ton of cash to animate Aladdin – this time it was he who declined. He’s since contributed to many commercials, music videos and The Simpsons – but this retrospective will focus on his feature-length works. The first of these is Cheatin’ which plays on Thursday (28th) at 19:30 and includes a Q&A with the man himself (dfi.dk/filmhuset).