Who is popular today?

Nine years after his incendiary Four Lions, Morris returns with a movie about a tiny urban community and crooked FBI agents
Whatever happened to the “war on terror”? Chris Morris’s intriguing if slight satirical movie, co-written with Jesse Armstrong, imagines the troubled world occupied by those battalions of American bureaucrats, intelligence officers and law-enforcement ninjas, all revved up during the Bush/Obama years to defend the nation against the terrorists of the Middle East and then ideologically orphaned overnight by the wacky new dispensation of Trump – and its preoccupation with Mexico or China or Turkey, or wherever the tweeting finger points next.
The film imagines this entire class of people as like the generals perennially fighting the war before the one they’re supposed to be fighting, or like the mythical Japanese soldier in the jungle who doesn’t know the conflict is over. The Day Shall Come sees this group of embittered and disoriented professionals, still doggedly focusing on the threat from Islamic State and Al-Qaida, and surreally trying everything to create enemies from this province to give a justification to their own dwindling existence. Continue reading...