MONOS

 Boy soldiers are nothing new in international cinema with killers as young as ten gracing our screens in movies like "Beasts of No Nation". In the Colombian film "Monos" the soldiers are a mix of young men and women guarding an American hostage, (Julianne Nicholson), firstly on a remote mountainside and then in some unforgiving tropical jungle. Who these teenage warriors are fighting or why is never explained in a scenario that is part Kafka, part William Golding and part Werner Herzog.

There's only a slim semblance of a plot; instead director Alejandro Landes simply films his young cast, (who go by names like 'Bigfoot', 'Wolf' and 'Dog'), as they mostly fight among themselves, have sex or simply try to survive and what begins as just the kind of art-house movie designed to give art-house movies a bad name becomes, in its second half, the kind of savage 'adventure' movie Coppola might have made back in the seventies, indeed did make back in the seventies; there are sequences here as breathtaking as any in recent cinema. I simply couldn't take my eyes off it but whether it finds its audience is another matter entirely.