Home Entertainment
23 February 2015-02-23
Out in the UK This Week Serena (StudioCanal, cert 15) After Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle, Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper clearly have decided they can do no wrong, and so overreach themselves with a Depression-era Gone with the Wind-level epic about a wilful woman and a powerful man thrust together against a backdrop of urgent social blah. Susanne Bier directs, and it’s clear that the further this highly talented Dane gets away from the boilerhouse domestic dramas she’s so good at (Brothers and After the Wedding), the bigger her films, the less powerful they become. There is a lot to like here – the mist rolling over the Smoky Mountains locations where … Read more
15 August 2016-08-15
Out This Week Only Yesterday (StudioCanal, cert 15) It’s 25 years since Isao Takahata directed this touching animation for Studio Ghibli. Only now, thanks to a fresh revoicing by a cast including Daisy Ridley, has it arrived on these shores. The Force etc etc. As with Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies it takes a while to get its hooks in and also goes into slightly darker territory than Takahata’s stablemate Miyazaki would. The focus however remains the same – a girl finding her way, this being the story of Taeko, a woman haunted by memories of her younger self. We see, in flashback, her childhood at school where she isn’t very good, and at … Read more
30 May 2016-05-30
Out This Week The Club (Network, cert 18) Chilean film-maker Pablo Larraín’s seething drama is set in a remote safe house where a group of disgraced Catholic priests are living under the steely eye of capable nun Sister Monica (Antonia Zegers). Life is simple and ordered, with the only bit of excitement coming from the racing of the priests’ greyhound at a local track, though the priests themselves are symbolically watching the race from a distance, through binoculars. This cosy life of the exiled pariah changes when new priest Father Mathias (José Soza) arrives and, having been read the rules – no self-flagellating, no self-pleasuring, no contact with anyone outside – he resignedly settles in, complaining … Read more
22 July 2013-07-22
Out in the UK This Week In The House (Momentum, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) François Ozon’s thriller/farce is as clever as you’d expect from a man who gave us the relationship-in-reverse drama 5X2. Here he’s again examining the nature of storytelling with a film about a teacher who becomes infatuated with his star pupil’s stories, each of which ends with a “to be continued”. And in the continuation the story – and the teenager writing them – becomes more and more involved in the older man’s life. There’s post-structuralism in there, if you’re feeling smart. But the whole thing works just as well as a dark farce played to the hilt by a brilliant … Read more
27 June 2016-06-27
Out This Week Hail, Caesar! (Universal, cert 12) To describe the Coen brothers’ Hail, Caesar! as a love letter to Hollywood is to understate the woozy, delirium these two middle aged men must have been in as they planned and put it together. But then their entire career has been marked by a regard, if not obsession, with the golden age. So what’s the plot? Josh Brolin plays a studio fixer trying to find a sword’n’sandal star (George Clooney) abducted by a bunch of blacklisted communists – the Hollywood Ten in all but name. And… er… that’s about it. Clooney is a Victor Mature/Richard Burton composite, a white-teethed naive who’s sculpted a career on his looks, though he’s keen … Read more
23 May 2016-05-23
Out This Week The Revenant (Fox, cert 15) Last year Alejandro González Iñárritu won the Best Picture and Best Director Oscar for Birdman. The gongs have clearly gone slightly to his head and he now thinks he’s Terrence Malick. If there’s one thing this thrilling, frequently brutal and historically fascinating film doesn’t need is slo-mo glides through the awesomeness of its natural beauties – grandiose waterfalls, snowy wastes, virgin forests and the like. But we get them anyway, and if you’re feeling gracious, you might take them as a palate-cleanser between attacks by Indians, bears and the elements as 1820s fur trapper Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio) fights his way from a severe ursine mauling … Read more
10 March 2014-03-10
Out in the UK this week In Fear (StudioCanal, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) In Fear is a great little movie with a cast of two for most of it, Iain De Caestecker and Alice Englert as a couple who barely know each other but are now off to a festival together in Ireland. He’s driving, she’s wondering, antennae flapping, why he’s booked the pair of them a preliminary night in an out-of-the-way hotel. Except that, no matter how often they follow the signs, they just don’t seem to be able to find the hotel. Taking this as its starting point, director Jeremy Lovering lashes together a titanic raft of increasing creepiness from the simplest … Read more
23 June 2014-06-23
Out in the UK This Week Her (EV, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) The film about the guy who falls in love with his computer’s operating system. Yes, that one, with Joaquin Phoenix as the guy, Scarlett Johansson as the voice of the OS. Spike Jonze takes this premise and has quite a lot of fun with it, working through logically how a man might fall in love with a machine: because he’s lonely, because phone sex with a computer is like phone sex with a human, because computers, like, rule our lives. And he also brilliantly details a world where this sort of event might not instantly book you a place at the funny farm. … Read more
25 March 2013-03-25
DVD and Blu-ray out in the UK this week Sightseers (StudioCanal, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) Serial killing never looked so deliberately dowdy as it does in Ben Wheatley’s excellently funny and very British comedy about a couple (Alice Lowe and Steve Oram, who also wrote) whose tour of pencil museums and the like is interspersed with grim, impassive slaughter. Think Natural Born Killers, towing a caravan in the rain. Sightseeers – at Amazon The Hunt (Arrow, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) Thomas Vinterberg’s powerful 1998 drama Festen, the first of the pared-back Dogme films, examined the skeletons that rattle around in bourgeois closets and he’s at it again in this drama about a teaching assistant (Mads … Read more
7 September 2015-09-07
Out This Week John Wick (Warner, cert 15) Like some kind of undead film star, Keanu Reeves manages magnificent returns every few years – Speed, The Matrix and now John Wick, a super-sleek bit of badass comic-book adaptation relying heavily on Reeves’s blank persona (no one does it better) for much of its appeal. He plays a retired hitman so frightening that, we’re shown, even incredibly hard hardmen blench when they hear he’s on the warpath – after some damn fool goes and kills the pet dog that was the only reminder of his dead wife. And that’s all you need to know about the plot. The screenplay is incredibly smart, a collection of … Read more
6 April 2009-04-06
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
16 February 2015-02-16
Out in the UK This Week The Babadook (Icon, cert 15) The Babadook is a horror story about a nervous lone mum with a hyperactive and emotionally fractious six/seven-year-old child who was born the day his father died… in the car which crashed rushing his labouring wife to the hospital. If that isn’t the backstory to something psychologically intense, then what is? The Babadook has a lot going for it – the sombre production design and the creepy drawings in the book about the ghoulish Babadook that the mother ill-advisedly reads to her child as a bedtime story are just for starters. But it succeeds mostly, like all the best horror films, because it … Read more
