Home Entertainment
21 March 2016-03-21
Out This Week Carol (StudioCanal, cert 15) Todd Haynes’s biggest success to date has been 2002’s Far from Heaven, the period-fanatical story of forbidden gay love giddy with the melodrama of Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows and starring Dennis Quaid, Julianne Moore and Dennis Haysbert. It’s tempting to see Carol as an attempt to repeat the trick, since it’s another period-fanatical story of forbidden gay love. But instead of man-on-man love, this time Haynes goes for woman-on-woman, and decks everything out in the colder, lonelier and butcher tones of an Edward Hopper painting – no Tupperware pastels here. It’s also a tale of love across a class divide, Cate Blanchett being the money, … Read more
13 October 2014-10-13
Home Entertainment Out in the UK This Week Kidnapped (cert 18, DVD/digital) From Spaniard Miguel Angel Vivas a home invasion horror which understands that for the film to work we have to be entirely on the side of the invaded. And also, that we have to feel their shock, disorientation and fear. He achieves both brilliantly in this brutal, relatively short film that takes place over one evening and does a lot with long takes, then switches pace with some excellent split-screen, up-close points of view. It’s the standard family – mum, dad, whingey teenage girl and, eventually, her boyfriend. But it’s far from a standard film. Where Vivas came from, I don’t know … Read more
4 August 2014-08-04
Out in the UK This Week Starred Up (Fox, cert 18, DVD/Blu-ray/digital) Starred Up is a British prison drama, a phrase that usually strikes fear into the soul. But this one is an exception. Jack O’Connell isn’t the only reason for it, though he’s convincing as a young lag toughing his way to the top. The script pulls its weight too, with lots of tiny details – like our guy peeling off his top before some argy-bargy and dousing himself in baby oil so the screws can’t get a hold of him – and an awareness that a prison drama only has a certain number of places it can go (the showers, the top dog’s … Read more
11 November 2013-11-11
Out in the UK This Week Pacific Rim (Warner, cert 12, Blu-ray/DVD) Guillermo Del Toro, everybody, which raises expectations – Pan’s Labyrinth and Cronos being not too shabby. And Hellboy being a yawn but at least a formidably realised one. Throw a director of that ability at a story about alien creatures rising up out of the Pacific and waging war on humanity – who wage it right back with huge robotic leviathans controlled by human drivers – and the result should be something fairly awesome, shouldn’t it? And Pacific Rim actually is awesome up to a point. We have Charlie Hunnam showing his formidably sculpted abs. We have Idris Elba as the … Read more
11 April 2016-04-11
Out This Week Star Wars: The Force Awakens (Disney, cert 12) You don’t go to a Rolling Stones gig to hear new tunes. And you don’t turn out for Star Wars – reboot or not – for new stories. And yet. JJ Abrams, having done a remarkable job on the first Star Trek rejig, does bring lots that’s fresh to Star Wars in a film that seemed more remarkable the more I thought about it. At first it appeared to be a case of “same but different”, with every new thing and new character an echo of something from the first three films (numbers IV to VI) – Adam Driver’s Kylo Ren is … Read more
14 January 2013-01-14
Out in the UK This Week Tabu (New Wave, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) From Miguel Gomes, director of the unique, genre-confounding Our Beloved Month of August, another amazingly original work – a story of forbidden love set in colonial Africa that looks and feels like an archive photograph of the “dark continent” come to life. Give it half an hour for its odd magic to start working, and for the strange use of sound (no dialogue, just background atmospherics) to start making sense. Tabu – at Amazon Shadow Dancer (Paramount, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) ITN reporter Tom Bradby adapts his own book for the screen and brings first-hand knowledge to a gripping, dirty, tamped-down drama … Read more
30 June 2014-06-30
Out in the UK This Week Non-Stop (StudioCanal, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD/digital) Though there are pretenders, Liam Neeson is the king of the geri-action stars, a modern Charles Bronson whose attitude to violence is, to paraphrase the mild-mannered Dr Banner, “You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.” This time Neeson starts out angry and hungover, then becomes increasingly vexed at 35,000ft, playing an air marshal no one will listen to, in spite of the fact that there’s a crazy man on board who wants to blow up the plane unless a large amount of money… etc … etc. Other big names include Julianne Moore, Downton Abbey‘s Michelle Dockery, Scoot McNairy and 12 Years a … Read more
28 July 2014-07-28
Out in the UK This Week Noah (Paramount, cert 12, Blu-ray/DVD) Director Darren Aronofsky, having temporarily revived the career of Mickey Rourke with The Wrestler and then an entire genre – the tween ballet thriller – with Black Swan, goes for another challenge, the biblical epic. The story: a big flood. The man: Russell Crowe as a fundamentalist Noah. The tone: old school epic, with the odd arthouse break to remind us that Aronofsky once directed films like the overwrought Pi. Jennifer Connelly plays Mrs Noah in British Heroic voice, in what must be the least demanding role of her career. Surprisingly, bizarrely, very very little is made of the ark, the animals, the flood, … Read more
12 May 2014-05-12
Out in the UK This Week 12 Years a Slave (E One, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) After Hunger and Shame, Steve McQueen advances into Hollywood properly with this very Spielbergian film following free black man Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) into slavery down in the antebellum South, where he is passed from one slave owner to another – this one bad, the next one worse – until a deus ex machina rescues him. This year’s Best Oscar gong went to this film which looks the real deal, disports itself like the real deal, has all the necessary support acting (Pitt, Fassbender, Giamatti) that you’d expect. But there’s a strange emotional lack at its core. This … 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
21 July 2014-07-21
Out in the UK This Week The Lego Movie (Warner, cert U, Blu-ray/DVD) Normally I watch a film and take notes as I go. With The Lego Movie I hardly managed any, because there was so little of the film that wasn’t packed to bursting with stuff – action, jokes, new characters, new twists on old characters, yet more awesome blocky Legotastic animation. The Lego Movie doesn’t make the Wreck-It Ralph mistake. Instead it sticks to a simple plot and pursues it to the end. Which is… The Matrix meets Star Wars – the nobody who becomes the somebody who can save the world. The voice work is fun, with Liam Neeson growling away as … Read more
19 October 2015-10-19
Out This Week Slow West (Lionsgate, cert 15) One of the best westerns for some time, Slow West plays with the tropes of the pulp magazines that first connected the Old West with a reading public – the glamour, the danger, the hardship and the austere beauty are all here in Scotsman John Maclean’s really rather extraordinary feature debut. It’s framed like an odd-couple road movie, with Kodi Smit-McPhee as a naive, priggish kid following Rose, his one true love (Caren Pistorius, a star), from Scotland across the ocean to America, and then across the increasingly wild badlands. Joining him on the journey is Michael Fassbender as a bounty hunter – there’s a … Read more
