The BFI London Film Festival
MOVIE REVIEW
Ultraviolence (2020)
There is not much more contemptible in documentary filmmakers than using the pain of others for their own aggrandizement. Ken Fero’s “Ultraviolence,” which is being marketed as an expose of deaths in British police custody from 1995 to 2006, does exactly and only this. Presumably it has been pushed to market these days in the wake of the global Black Lives Matter movement and the recent high-profile murders carried out by police in the United States. Do not be fooled – it is nothing of the sort. It’s merely a testament to the ego of the director, who felt entitled to cobble this travesty together because he went to the same school as one of the men whose memory he cannibalizes.