DVD/Blu-ray/Digital Reviews

9 November 2012-11-09

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Matthew McConaughey and Juno Temple in Killer Joe

Out in the UK This Week Killer Joe (Entertainment One, cert 18, Blu-ray/DVD) French Connection/Exorcist director William Friedkin returns to form and hands a decent role to Matthew McConaughey, who plays a dead-eyed contract killer menacing a family who thought they’d hired him to kill the materfamilias for insurance gain. As with The Exorcist, Friedkin gives us an awful lot of set-up before he gets the nasty stuff out, by which time we’re emotionally invested and feeling every jab. Juno Temple stands out as the braless jailbait who catches McC’s eye, but it’s very hard to get really involved in this family as they’re so scarily dim. Unless the whole thing is meant … Read more

12 November 2012-11-12

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Jeremy Irons in Margin Call

Out in the UK This Week Margin Call (Paramount, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) JC Chandor’s debut, and what a film, is about a Lehman Brothers’ (ish) bank hitting the skids. It’s the definitive Hollywood entertainment about the financial crash, a cool, glossy, edge-of-seat procedural about a night in the company of two low-level bank employees (Zachary Quinto, Penn Badgley) who are on duty at the point when a gigantic accounting error comes to light. Whereupon the problem is batted further and further up the heirarchy, until it reaches the top (a particularly dry and corrupt Jeremy Irons). The performances are in the ionosphere – Kevin Spacey, Jeremy Irons, Simon Baker, Demi Moore, Stanley Tucci … Read more

29 October 2012-10-29

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Willem Dafoe in The Hunter

Out in the UK This Week   The Hunter (Artificial Eye, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) There’s a totally immersive sense of place in this engrossing thriller starring Willem Dafoe as the titular hunter in kill-or-be-killed Australia. He’s some sort of badass eco-transgressor working for a rapacious global megacorp and he’s after the mythical and possibly mystical Tasmanian Tiger. Or is that a metaphor? Or is he actually not the hunter at all but instead the hunted? No spoilers. I will just say it’s a thriller and it’s structured like Apocalypse Now – one man, a quest, lots of delicious jeopardy. The Hunter – at Amazon Your Sister’s Sister (StudioCanal, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) Grown-up mumblecore, a … Read more

22 October 2012-10-22

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Viktor Gerrat in Silent Souls

Out in the UK This Week Silent Souls (Artificial Eye, cert 15, DVD) Two men from an almost extinct Russian ethnic sub-group, the Merja, take the dead wife of one of them to her final rest in this poetic, poignant drama which works brilliantly as character study and as a meditation on the notion of national identity. After the rampage of Anders Breivik in Norway in July 2011, and in a world of multicultural cross-fertilisation, the positive case for ethnic separateness or uniqueness is rarely made without it sounding like the spit-flecked rantings of ultra-conservatives, die-hards or Nazis. Yet director Aleksei Fedorchenko has done it. That his film is mystical, full of half-remembered … Read more

12 October 2012-10-12

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Dr Dre and Ice T in Something from Nothing: The Art of Rap

Out in the UK This Week Something from Nothing: The Art of Rap (Kaleidoscope, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) Given how often rappers are being deliberately awkward, or cool, and how often an over-attachment to mind-altering substances can make speech too street even for the street, a documentary about rap sets alarm bells ringing in advance. Nothing could be further from the truth with Ice T’s overview, which kicks off with a declaration – “this film isn’t about the money, the cars, the jewellery, the girls… this film is about the craft”. And then it delivers. T’s strength is the access he gets, to everyone from Melle Mel and Big Daddy Kane, to Kanye West, … Read more

6 April 2009-04-06

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Chyeon Jeon-myeong in Hansel and Gretel

Out in the UK This Week Mike Leigh at the BBC (2 entertain, cert 12) Before heading off on his film career, auteur Leigh did some great stuff for TV. Here’s the pick of his 1973-84 output, including Nuts in May and Abigail’s Party, along with Leigh’s own audio commentary, intelligent interviews and a clutch of shorts. Mike Leigh at the BBC – at Amazon Twilight (Contender, cert 12) The movie adaptation of Stephenie Meyer’s Young Adult novels starts here with smart, sylphlike Kristen Stewart falling for Byronically moody vampire Robert Pattinson in a swoony and chaste romance heaving with unrequited girlish longing. Twilight – at Amazon Hansel and Gretel (Terracotta, cert 15) … Read more

30 March 2009-03-30

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Jill Wagner in Splinter

Out in the UK this week Celia (Second Run, cert 15) Oz director Ann Turner’s classic 1989 rites-of-passage debut, about one girl’s amply furnished fantasy childhood. It’s the story of a child, from a child’s point of view, rather than adult looking back, and set in 1950s Australia overrun by rabbits and the Red menace. Celia – at Amazon Of Time and the City (BFI, cert 12) Back with a bang, grumpy, poetic old man Terence Davies’s elegy to his lost, native Liverpool, composed almost entirely of archive footage, brilliantly welded together by a master. Wait till you hear what he has to say about the Beatles. Of Time and the City – … Read more

9 March 2009-03-09

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Walt Disney's Pinocchio

Out in the UK this week Pinocchio 70th Anniversary Platinum Edition (Disney, cert U) From the days when the voice cast went uncredited, Walt Disney’s 1940 follow-up to Snow White gave us the Oscar-winning song When You Wish Upon a Star, a wooden boy with a Freudian nose and one of the studio’s darkest and finest animations. Pinocchio – at Amazon The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (Disney, cert 12) The Holocaust through the eyes of a nice German lad (Asa Butterfield) whose dad just happens to be a death camp commandant. The everyday normality of the death camps and the mix of the sentimental, the melodramatic and the brutally direct often jars … Read more

16 March 2009-03-16

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Andrea Riseborough in The Devil's Whore

Out in the UK this week   The Devil’s Whore (Lionsgate, cert 15) Having played Mrs Thatcher, Angela Riseborough is once more an iron lady in a proto-feminist TV series set during the English Civil War and laced with death and lashings of bodice-ripping and packed with a great cast (John Simm, Dominic West, Maxine Peak, Peter Capaldi). The Devil’s Whore aka The Devil’s Mistress – at Amazon How to Lose Friends and Alienate People (Paramount, cert 15) Another gold star for Shaun Pegg, as a gauche, arrogant, bumbling Brit git in New York journalism in a version of Toby Young’s comic autobiography heavy on the slapstick, easy on the barbs and probably … Read more