Home entertainment
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 … Read more
Out in the UK This Week Dallas Buyers Club (E One, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) He literally rides bulls, the hero of this refreshingly unsentimental Aids drama – comedy? – about a rampantly heterosexual Texas guy who discovers he’s HIV+. That’ll be the meth and hookers parties we see him indulging in. The hero of this film … Read more
Home entertainment releases in the UK this week Sleepless Night (Icon, cert 15) A great French chase thriller set almost entirely inside a nightclub. All the cops are bent, there are a lot of bad guys, and they’re the boiled-in-piss sort (pockmarked Birol Ünel is one of them, if that means anything to you – … Read more
Out in the UK This Week Two Days, One Night (Artificial Eye, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) A French factory hand (magnificent Marion Cotillard) has a weekend to persuade her colleagues to do without their cash bonuses and keep her on instead. As much a portrait of a woman battling depression and low self-esteem as a condemnation … Read more
Out This Week The Goob (Soda, cert 18) Films like to suggest that life is rawer, more elemental away from the cosmopolitan, metrosexual centres of civilisation. And in British films there’s often a suggestion that out in Norfolk, especially, things tend towards the Wild West. It was apparent in 1996’s Dad Savage, a film largely … Read more
Out in the UK This Week Before Midnight (Sony, cert 15, DVD) After Before Sunrise (1995) and Before Sunset (2004), this is round three for cinema’s most romantic couple, as played by Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. They’re now married with two kids and living in France, but we catch up with them holidaying … Read more
Out in the UK This Week Blue Ruin (4DVD, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) Most vigilante thrillers fall into one of two camps – either the seriously pissed off professional killer who decides enough is enough (Point Blank/Kill Bill), or the utterly unlikely avenger whose anger makes him/her as good or better than any professional (Death Wish/Law Abiding Citizen). … Read more
Out in the UK This Week Annie (Sony, cert PG) The “Black Annie” this has been called. With the button-cute Beast of the Southern Wild’s Quvenzhané Wallis in the lead as Annie and Jamie Foxx in the Daddy Warbucks role and with Jada Pinkett and Will Smith producing, you could call it that, if these … Read more
Out in the UK This Week Stoker (Fox, cert 18, Blu-ray/DVD) Park Chan-Wook – of Oldboy fame – makes his English language debut with a visually, sonically, thematically accomplished film that seems to be trying to get as many varieties of gothic horror assembled in one place as possible. Mia Wasikowska delivers another of inscrutably … Read more
Out in the UK This Week Maniac (Metrodome, cert 18, Blu-ray/DVD) Alexandre Aja and Grégory Levasseur, the writers of Switchblade Romance, one of the most heart-pounding horror films of recent years, swing bloodily back to form with a remake of a 1980 slasher which takes lovely gentle Frodo (Elijah Wood), casts him as a Norman … Read more
Out This Week Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (Paramount, cert 12) Tom Cruise’s desire to be James Bond really gets the better of him in M:I5, a flabby action spectacular which has visited Vienna, London, Langley, Paris and Havana within its first 20 minutes or so, right after the pre-credits sequence which sees Jason Bourne, … Read more
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 … Read more
