‘Tommy Guns’ Review: A Sinuous, Surprising Military Drama Wrestles With Portugal’s Colonial Legacy

variety.com:

Guy Lodge Film CriticPortugal’s colonial past in Africa continues to haunt some of the country’s most vital and subversive filmmakers.

With his remarkable second feature “Tommy Guns,” Angolan-Portuguese director Carlos Conceição’s steps into the same precarious territory sometimes occupied by Pedro Costa and Miguel Gomes — borrowing, perhaps, a measure of the former’s visceral austerity and the latter’s shape-shifting playfulness, but mostly proving his own sly, supple talent.

Formally and structurally audacious in ways that build in power and meaning as the film unfolds, this study of a Portuguese military squad gradually unraveling in a remote, bloodied wilderness begins with a clear sense of time, place and space, before collapsing those certainties in a horror-tinged nightmare that nods to the sprawling impact of colonialism across eras.

That brush of genre influence — comparable, in its subtle, dimension-twisting fluidity, to Mati Diop’s recent “Atlantics” — ought to heighten interest around “Tommy Guns” as it makes its way through the festival circuit, following a premiere in Locarno’s main competition.