Home Entertainment
6 May 2013-05-06
Out in the UK this week The Impossible (Entertainment One, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) The Spanish have an appetite for mutilation. Look at bullfighting, or the bloody effigies of the crucified Jesus Christ in their churches. And though this film is entirely in the English language, it has a Spanish director, writer and production money behind it. It’s very much a Spanish film. So, parking my misgivings about a drama wrought from the 2004 tsunami in the bay marked “Anglo Saxon squeamishness”, let’s turn to the story of the nice family who copped the big wave while on holiday in Thailand. It’s based on a Spanish family’s true experiences and does at least put … Read more
29 April 2013-04-29
Out in the UK this week Life of Pi (Fox, cert PG, Blu-ray/DVD) Reminiscent of those special-effects-driven Alexander Korda productions of the 1940s starring Sabu as an Asian boy in a world of phantasmagoria, Ang Lee’s adaptation of Yann Martel’s “unfilmable” novel about an Indian teenager and a tiger adrift in a lifeboat is like painting on silk or black velvet – slickly beautiful though hardly profound. Mind you, when images are this lush – a phosphorescent sea full of jellyfish, a doomed hulk of a ship going under with all lights blazing, a sea as reflective as mercury, then maybe profundity can take a day off. Life of Pi – at Amazon … Read more
22 April 2013-04-22
Out in the UK this week Jack Reacher (Paramount, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) In this adaptation of the Lee Child novel One Shot, vigilante investigator Jack Reacher is called in to clear the name of a guy even he thinks is guilty of shooting a whole load of innocent folks. Coming across as a little bit Batman and a little bit more Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name, Tom Cruise’s Reacher is in fact mostly Stacy Keach-era Mike Hammer. Because this is an exercise in cornball noir, the sort of film where people still use quaint terms like “patsy”, where relations between men and women are chivalrous – that’s Rosamund Pike in what amounts … Read more
24 February 2014-02-24
Out in the UK This Week Safety Not Guaranteed (Vertigo, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) Since The Puffy Chair I’ve been a sucker for anything connected with the Duplass brothers. Director Colin Trevorrow and writer Derek Connolly’s film stars Mark Duplass as a nerdy shelfstacker guy who puts an advert into a paper asking for a companion to go time-travelling with him, “safety not guaranteed”. But we pick the story up from its other end, as we follow aspiring journalist Aubrey Plaza, lead writer Jeff (Jake Johnson) and supernerd Arnau (Karan Soni) as they head out into the boonies to track down the obvious whackjob for their magazine, humiliation probably guaranteed. Mumblecore goes sci-fi, kind … Read more
3 March 2014-03-02
Out in the UK This Week Gravity (Warner, cert 12, Blu-ray/DVD/Download) By now you will already know whether the Oscar-winning Gravity is the sort of film you want to watch, or watch again. It’s had so much publicity and so many reviews that there’s no point adding anything. So I’ll just tell you that I got stuck getting up out of my chair watching this film. I was going to pause it and grab a drink and as I was halfway up the debris from the space satellite struck space-walking rookie astronaut Sandra Bullock, blasting her off into almost certain annihilation. Something like 20 minutes later I was still in the same position, … Read more
10 June 2013-06-10
Out in the UK this week Zero Dark Thirty (Universal, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) “A lot of my friends have died trying to do this; I believe I was spared so I could finish the job.” The key line of dialogue, as uttered by Jessica Chastain in the drama about the operation to kill Osama Bin Laden. “Spared” – there’s a faintly biblical colour to that word and it’s deliberate. Mark Boal’s script is not only mechanically extremely good – so many characters are introduced so well in such a short time – but it also deals, with varying degrees of depth, with matters arising from the aftermath of 9/11. The use of torture as … Read more
11 August 2014-08-11
Out in the UK This Week The Raid 2 (E One, cert 18, Blu-ray/DVD) Gareth Evans’s sequel picks up exactly where the first film ended – after the relentless and entirely exciting display of pencak silat martial arts that was the alpha and omega of The Raid (aka Raid: Redemption) – as if to suggest we’re about to get more of the same. In fact we’re not. And at times over the next 150 minutes, following Iko Uwais as a cop deep undercover, Evans had me shaking my head in sorrow. Yes, there are some mighty fine displays of brilliantly choreographed fighting by Uwais. And the final 45 minutes is one long orgy of pugilistic brilliance. … Read more
4 May 2015-05-04
Out in the UK This Week Foxcatcher (E One, cert 15) Not unlike Steven Soderbergh’s Behind the Candelabra in many ways, Foxcatcher tells a similar true story of a young impressionable man being taken up by an older man and being groomed, things all falling apart when the young man says “enough”. With Soderbergh the spotlight was on strapping Scott Thorson and his gay relationship with Liberace, whereas Foxcatcher focuses on potential Olympic wrestler Mark Schultz and the strange grip that the super-rich amateur wrestler John du Pont, owner of the Foxcatcher gym, had over him. The hoo-haa surrounding the film is generated mostly by the really rather remarkable performance by Steve Carell as du … Read more
2 March 2015-03-02
Out in the UK This Week Leviathan (Artificial Eye, cert 15) Not to be confused with the clankingly atmospheric 2012 documentary about trawler-fishing, this Leviathan is something like a retelling of the story of Job – a man who has the lot being tested in his faith as he loses it all. As we open, Kolya has a beautiful wife, a lovely beachside property, a teenage son and is respected in his community. Over the next two and half hours we watch most of it being stripped from him – in fact as Andrey Zvyagintsev opens his film there’s already trouble hemming Kolya in on most sides. The question is: which faith is it testing? … Read more
31 March 2014-03-31
Out in the UK this week Klown (Arrow, cert 18, DVD) Spun off from a taboo-baiting Danish TV series of the same name, this comedy sends a couple of mismatched buddies on a road trip, bromance style, with a 12 year old boy in tow. What this dim bulb and his raging egomaniac friend get up to can best be described as shenanigans, with the jokes usually having a sexual focus – I think this has the most audacious and literal sight gag I’ve ever seen. Klown is full of the sort of stuff that you can imagine the writers room on a Vince Vaughn/Ben Stiller movie coming up with and then deciding it … Read more
16 November 2015-11-16
Out This Week Minions (Universal, cert U) By the end of the first Despicable Me film, Gru, the archetypal bad guy, had been exposed as a bit of softie, which left Despicable Me 2 with nowhere to go, in terms of jokes about bad guys wheezing despicably and mwah-ha-ha-ing their way to world domination. But Gru’s Minions were still funny, and in this surprisingly lively, amusing, inventive spin-off, they get to show they can be funny at feature length, in spite of not being able to speak. Well, they do speak, but it’s a kind of Esperanto done with expressive voices and telegraphed emotions – Pingu, the Clangers and Shaun the Sheep territory. … Read more
18 November 2013-11-18
Out in the UK This Week The Wolverine (Fox, cert 12, Blu-ray/DVD) The X-Men series has been lacklustre, with too many characters chasing too little plot (X-Men First Class being the exception). But The Wolverine bucks that trend thanks to its tight focus on Hugh Jackman as the wolfman with the salon-sational nails and its decision to just chuck us straight into the plot, just like the comic books do. Japan is the focus, a grungy dirty Japan, where bearded, trashed Wolverine is just trying to forget all that superhero stuff and get on with a normal life. But, as is the way with these things, his past comes back to get him, … Read more
