DVD/Blu-ray/Digital Reviews

15 June 2015-06-15

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Tang Wei and Chris Hemsworth in Blackhat

Out This Week Cake (Warner, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD/digital) Child actresses signal they’ve grown up by shedding their clothes; older actresses their bid for independence by shedding their makeup. So it proves with Jennifer Aniston, in a feel-my-agony performance as a woman wracked by relentless physical pain after some sort of accident (all is eventually revealed) which has reduced her to zombie-like shuffling and perma-scowling. It’s a good performance by her, and a reminder she’s only as good as her material. But this is good material, and Aniston is surrounded by actors who are up to the salt. In particular Adriana Barraza as the hired hispanic help who seems to have the share of … Read more

8 June 2015-06-08

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Mark Stanley as a soldier in a minefield in Kajaki

Out This Week Kajaki (Spirit, cert 15) To find a really good, really British war film (so, no, not Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down or Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, both of which are over-rated) you have to go back a very very long way. Or watch Kajaki, which is out right now. It’s a simple, brutal and unflinching portrait of the gruesomeness of war, the camaraderie of the fighters and the raw bravery in the face of sheer terror which extreme situations reveal. Told with the straightahead simplicity and bleach-bright looks that bring to mind Ice Cold in Alex, it follows a detail of British soldiers from 3 Para as they venture … Read more

1 June 2015-06-01

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David Oyelowo in Selma

Out This Week Selma (Pathe, cert 12) Martin Luther King’s life done as a triumph, not the usual tragedy, the focus being the series of marches King led from Selma to Montgomery in 1965. These effectively rode a coach and horses through the prevailing practice of disenfranchising Negros by making registering to vote all but impossible. Up in Washington DC are two tricky customers – the conniving though not entirely venal President Johnson (Tom Wilkinson, not over-reaching himself) and his homunculus, FBI boss J Edgar Hoover (another eel-like turn by Dylan Baker), while down in Alabama operates the strategically astute, tactically sharp King. Like last year’s Dallas Buyers Club, the success of the … Read more

27 July 2015-07-27

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Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart in Clouds of Sils Maria

Out in the UK This Week Clouds of Sils Maria (Artificial Eye, cert 15) Olivier Assayas follows Something in the Air, his largely autobiographical personal meditation on the aftermath of the events of May 1968, with a different type of dramatic reflexivity. Clouds of Sils Maria is a meditation on acting, performed by a trio of actors at the top of their game. Juliette Binoche, Kristen Stewart and Chloë Grace Moretz are the three, all channeling vague versions of themselves. Stewart plays the personal assistant to Binoche, an actress now about to play the older role in a remake of the punishing two-hander that made her name years before. But who to play … Read more

20 July 2015-07-20

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Anne Dorval and Antoine-Olivier Pilon in Mommy

Out This Week Mommy (Metrodome, cert 15) In bad drama people say just what they think; in real life they rarely do. Xavier Dolan, usually referred to as a wunderkind, understands this, and in this grungy new drama he pushes that realisation to the max with a story about Steve, a disruptive ADHD kid and his flaky mother. It’s an urgently brilliant film, that never dips into the well of mawkishness reserved for “social issue” films. And that’s even with an extra “issue” added – the next door neighbour, a former teacher whose nerves are shot to shit, who becomes the friend of this dysfunctional duo. The performances are gritty, the dialogue shocking (“I’m … Read more

13 July 2015-07-13

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Ryan Reynolds and Gemma Arterton in The Voices

Out This Week The Voices (Arrow, cert 15) Marjane Satrapi has made a good film about a man with appalling schizophrenia. That she’s chosen to make it into a comedy, and has cast Ryan Reynolds as the disturbed guy who believes his pet cat and dog are talking to him shows she doesn’t lack for ambition. I suspect a lot of people won’t like The Voices at all, because a comedy about a man who likes to dismember people, and who is shown sawing them up and packing them neatly into many stacked Tupperware boxes like so many packed lunches, is, let’s face it, a bit gruesome. And he’s the “hero”. But Reynolds is excellent … Read more

6 July 2015-07-06

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Tizita Hagere in Difret

Out This Week Still Alice (Curzon, cert 12) Most disease of the week films operate on the same principle as Facebook posters who ask you to Like something or sign a petition – they’re daring you to say you don’t like puppies, or don’t want a cure for cancer, to out yourself as horrible. In Still Alice we meet Alice, an intensely capable linguistics professor (Julianne Moore), as she’s struggling for the right word while delivering a lecture, this being the blood-in-the-hankie sign that something serious is amiss. Her condition goes rapidly downhill from there. Moore is predictably good – tough, believable, often head-on to camera – and is surrounded by agile actors, including Kristen Stewart as the … Read more

29 June 2015-06-29

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Maika Monroe in It Follows

Out This Week Appropriate Behaviour (Peccadillo, cert 15) The New York Neurotics Club – founder member Woody Allen, recent arrivals Lena Dunham (Girls) and Greta Gerwig (Frances Ha) – gets a new member in the shape of Desiree Akhavan, who gives us a smart, self-deprecating comedy about a slightly deadbeat woman struggling in a mumblecore world where everyone else seems to be doing OK. Playing, in Larry David style, a version of herself, Akhavan is Shirin, the bisexual daughter of immigrant parents who can’t or won’t come out to mum and dad, and whose private life is a shambolic mess like the rest of her life. The meat of the film is a chronologically … Read more

22 June 2015-06-22

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Christian Grey shares a tender moment with Anastasia Steele in Fifty Shades of Grey

Out This Week Fifty Shades of Grey (Universal, cert 18) This decade’s Da Vinci Code – the book read by people who don’t often read books – is a basic Mills & Boon/Harlequin story (masterful man, virginal girl) with an added belt, if that’s the word, of S&M. In this film adaptation Jamie Dornan glowers but brings no real life to the role of buff CEO Christian Grey whom Dakota Johnson’s Anastasia Steele meets as he’s buying cable ties in the shop she works in. Dakota looks like her dad, Don Johnson, and has the pluck of her mother, Melanie Griffith, which is handy because she is required to take off more clothes … Read more

25 May 2015-05-25

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Michael Parks and Justin Long in Tusk

Out This Week Tusk (Sony, cert 15) After the wobble of Red State, Kevin Smith seems to have got his midlife crisis out of the way and now roars back to form with a brilliant, and brilliantly discomfiting, grotesque comedy that sees shock podcaster Justin Long surgically turned into a human walrus by mad Michael Parks. The fact that Long has it coming is signified by his douchebag cheating on his superhot girlfriend, played by superhot Genesis Rodriguez, but nothing can really prepare us for the sense of pathos that Long conjures when he cries big walrus tears from out of his big brown eyes on realising his old human form has been … Read more