Home Entertainment
17 February 2014-02-17
Out in the UK This Week Metro Manila (Independent, cert 15, VOD) A friend of mine used to know Sean Ellis, the director of Metro Manila, when he was an assistant to photographer Nick Knight. And there being nothing quite so irksome as the success of those even halfway close to us – I’m kidding, though not much – I was prepared to hate this, Ellis’s film debut, and was ready to file it alongside the many other failed attempts by stills photographers to join the movie guys. I was wrong. This is a great film. Made with a keen eye for detail though not photographically showy at all – the usual curse – it … Read more
6 October 2014-10-06
Out in the UK This Week Joe (Curzon, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) I like Nicolas Cage in bad films, so going into this one, having heard it was good, I was slightly wary. But both him and the film are excellent – he’s the anger-prone decent guy who takes a young lad (up-and-coming Tye Sheridan) under his wing after he and his dad (Gary Poulter) pitch up looking for work on Joe’s (that’s Cage) tree-poisoning detail. Yes, tree poisoning. That’s a telling touch in a film that’s an exercise in the twisted Southern genre – derelicts and whores, low-lifes and attack dogs – director David Gordon Green back, to some extent, in George Washington territory, telling … Read more
1 February 2016-02-01
Out This Week Sicario (Lionsgate, cert 15) With Incendies the disruption had its roots in the politics in the Middle East, with Prisoners in American paranoia and with Enemy it was something more internal still, a disrupted psyche. In Denis Villeneuve’s latest intelligent, genre-extending thriller his unsentimental gaze settles on the US government and how its agents actually go about their business (according to this film, at any rate). Working on the Mexico border, where drug cartels are mostly in charge, laconic badasses Josh Brolin and Benicio Del Toro are joined by seconded cop and audience avatar Emily Blunt, who looks on with jaw at various distances from the floor as the two … 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
1 July 2013-07-01
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 Bates-style homicidal mother’s boy and then sets director Franck Khalfoun to work filming his exploits as if from the killer’s point of view. Result: another brilliant horror film, touches of Silence of the Lambs, House of Wax, with an electropop sound that just makes it all the grimmer. Maniac – at Amazon Cloud Atlas (Warner, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) … Read more
27 July 2015-07-27
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
16 March 2015-03-16
Out in the UK This Week The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 (Lionsgate, cert 12) Jennifer Lawrence works the adenoids in the third dump of Hunger Games literalism, in a series that has consistently mistaken event for drama. Being the first of two parts, Mockingjay was never even aiming to line up all its battalions, send them into battle and bring them safely home again. But even so, this is a very thin outing for Katniss and co – now she is being groomed as the mascot of the rebels and as such is off out with a camera team making propaganda TV infomercials. How very quaint – TV, camera crews, a world … Read more
4 February 2013-02-04
Out in the UK this Week Untouchable (EV, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) A rich white tetraplegic (François Cluzet) gets lessons in life from a lusty black guy from out of the projects (Omar Sy). Untouchable (Intouchables in French, and the plural is there for a reason) is the most successful French film ever but has generated at least as many accusations of racism as it has five star reviews. But, one joke about Barack Obama apart, this vastly entertaining, hugely feelgood, very funny and brilliantly acted film (Omar Sy’s is a “star is born” turn) touches more on socio-economics than race, unless you’re in the business of being professionally affronted. Either way, see it … 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
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
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
8 August 2016-08-08
Out This Week These Final Hours (The Works, cert 18) A “last day of the world” film like we used to get around the turn of the millennium. It’s made on the cheap but with lots of skill and attitude, the attitude being largely borrowed from Mad Max. Actually, it’s about three genres in one and they successfully fold together as we follow James (Nathan Phillips of Wolf Creek) who is on a coming-of-age road trip on the very last day of the world’s existence. The question the film poses, and James asks of himself eventually when he’s got his priorities straight, is: am I going to be an asshole right to the … Read more
