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Out in the UK This Week Only Lovers Left Alive (Soda, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) Jim Jarmusch arrives in genre territory with this achingly hipsterish take on the vampire movie – finally, one for the grown-ups – full of arch jokes about eternal bloodsuckers. I went into it thinking that surely the Lou Reed of cinema, with the … Read more
Out in the UK This Week Inside Llewyn Davis (StudioCanal, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD/digital) The Coen brothers specialise in films about absence or lack – The Man Who Wasn’t There being the most obvious exemplar. Inside Llewyn Davis is about a folk singer on the Greenwich Village circuit just before Bob Dylan turned up and electrified … Read more
Out in the UK this week Bullet to the Head (Entertainment One, cert 18, Blu-ray/DVD) Last week it was Arnie in The Last Stand. This week the DVD shelves are groaning with 400lbs of mechanically recovered Sylvester Stallone, complete with new facelift and hair (though there’s not much you can do about that creaky old … Read more
Out in the UK this week Florence Foster Jenkins (Pathe, cert PG) Tackled recently in the French film Marguerite, the story of Florence Foster Jenkins – the tone-deaf 1930s New York socialite who insisted she could sing – gets another trot around the block courtesy of Stephen Frears. Frears makes it a less pathetic, more … Read more
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. … Read more
Out This Week Green Room (Altitude, cert 18) Jeremy Saulnier’s follow-up to his debut subjects a band of likeable punk nobodies to sustained extreme attack by a gang of neo-Nazi thugs. If it doesn’t quite suck the air out of the lungs as his brilliant Blue Ruin did, that’s because Saulnier to his credit is … Read more
Out in the UK this week Filth (Lionsgate, cert 18, Blu-ray/DVD) An adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s novel about a member of her majesty’s constabulary – aka the Filth – and his glorious, drug-fuelled, wretched, sweary stumble towards the abyss. For anyone who has only seen James McAvoy as a lean-limbed X-Man superhero this badger-rough portrayal of a … Read more
Out The Week Far from the Madding Crowd (Fox, cert 12) A remake of the 1967 film, rather than another version of the novel. Well that’s what it looks like, and considering how closely so many of the scenes mirror – in length, composition, camera angles even – scenes from John Schlesinger’s original film, the … Read more
Out in the UK This Week Beasts of the Southern Wild (StudioCanal, cert 12, Blu-ray/DVD) It’s generated a gazillion column inches, tweets and web-posts, and you are now pretty much obliged to see what is effectively a 21st century Huckleberry Finn story, set in the entirely atmospheric waterworld of the bayou below the levees where … Read more
Out in the UK This Week The Hunter (Artificial Eye, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) There’s a totally immersive sense of place in this engrossing thriller starring Willem Dafoe as the titular hunter in kill-or-be-killed Australia. He’s some sort of badass eco-transgressor working for a rapacious global megacorp and he’s after the mythical and possibly mystical … Read more
Out in the UK This Week The Imitation Game (StudioCanal, cert 12) Benedict Cumberbatch plays code-breaking genius Alan Turing as an Asperger’s Kenneth More in this superior biopic set in the era of stiff upper lips and laws against homosexual deeds. This drama returns to those laws several times, when it’s not busying itself with … Read more
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 … Read more
