Month: January 2015

12 January 2015-01-12

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Tomer Sisley and Lizzie Brocheré in Sleepless Night

Home entertainment releases in the UK this week Sleepless Night (Icon, cert 15) A great French chase thriller set almost entirely inside a nightclub. All the cops are bent, there are a lot of bad guys, and they’re the boiled-in-piss sort (pockmarked Birol Ünel is one of them, if that means anything to you – it should). Tomer Sisley is lead cop – crooked as you like, though there’s far worse than him – and the action kicks off after he heists a big bag of cocaine off the bad guys and hides it in the false ceiling above the gents toilets. When he goes back to get it, a bad guy having … Read more

Sixty Six

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Gregg Sulkin and Helena Bonham Carter in Sixty Six

Bernie, a London Jewish boy who sees his barmitzvah as the very peak of his young life, suddenly realises it’s taking place on the same day as the 1966 football (soccer) World Cup final. Will anyone come, especially once the home team start morphing from total no-hopers to potential giant-killers? Helena Bonham Carter, Peter Serafinowicz, Eddie Marsan and Catherine Tate are among the familiar British faces helping young Gregg Sulkin towards his big day in a likeable but small-scale comedy which pins its hopes on the footballing names Bobby Moore, Nobby Stiles et al to give it back-of-the-net appeal. This of course makes for very parochial comedy indeed, but director Paul Weiland, apparently basing … Read more

Down in the Valley

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Evan Rachel Wood enjoys the beach while Ed Norton enjoys her

Ed Norton continues on his quest to become the new Sean Penn with this very unusual and initially brilliant examination of the cowboy myth and its survival into the modern world. This represents itself in a Bonnie and Clyde love story between Harlan, an itinerant cowpuncher cum gas station attendant (Norton) who immediately quits his job when young and foxy Tobe (Evan Rachel Wood) drives in for gas, and heads off to the beach with her. What a free spirit. What we don’t at first know, but soon becomes apparent, is that our Stetson-wearing South Dakotan is a nutjob. But until that is revealed we are treated to the sort of drama that Robert Redford … Read more