Home Entertainment
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
17 November 2014-11-17
Out in the UK This Week 22 Jump Street (Sony, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD/digital) Since the undercover cops went to high school first time out, this time they must go to college. Directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller and boss writer Michael Bacall clearly know the Jump Street premise is exhausted. More obviously, they know they spunked their best jokes on the first film. So a good 50 per cent of 22 Jump Street is referential humour about franchise exhaustion, things never being quite so good the second time around, including the outro credits, which push this concept to beyond funny and then back again. The rest of it is jokes about the almost … Read more
5 October 2015-10-05
Out This Week Tomorrowland (Disney, cert 12) When did we give up on believing in the future? Can we believe again? Writer Damon Lindelof sets out to tackle the turn to postmodernism – the most significant philosophical cultural shift in the West for a century – in a big, multiplex popcorn film. George Clooney plays a character who is postmodernity incarnate. When Frank was an eager, inventive little boy he went to the 1964 New York World’s Fair (the high point of modernity and its showcase event) and met a young girl called Athena, was wowed both by her and by the scientific marvels he saw there. Then was wowed some more when … Read more
18 August 2014-08-18
Out in the UK This Week Tracks (E One, cert 12, Blu-ray/DVD/digital) This adaptation of Robyn Davidson’s book about her 2,000 mile solo trek across the Australian desert almost says more about the camels than it does about the woman who became known as the Camel Lady. Where she came from, what her motivation was (apart from a Garbo-esque wanting to be alone), how she sorted out water, provisions, medicines, almost all the sort of detail you might expect is lacking. It barely matters because director John Curran has settled for a non-aboriginal dreamtime approach – even as I write that phrase I realise it’s cack, since I have no idea what an aborigine … Read more
6 July 2015-07-06
Out This Week Still Alice (Curzon, cert 12) Most disease of the week films operate on the same principle as Facebook posters who ask you to Like something or sign a petition – they’re daring you to say you don’t like puppies, or don’t want a cure for cancer, to out yourself as horrible. In Still Alice we meet Alice, an intensely capable linguistics professor (Julianne Moore), as she’s struggling for the right word while delivering a lecture, this being the blood-in-the-hankie sign that something serious is amiss. Her condition goes rapidly downhill from there. Moore is predictably good – tough, believable, often head-on to camera – and is surrounded by agile actors, including Kristen Stewart as the … Read more
24 August 2015-08-24
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 temptation has to be to compare like with like. It’s a fairly fruitless endeavour – is Carey Mulligan more beautiful than Julie Christie? Is Tom Sturridge more dashing than Terence Stamp in his prime? Can Michael Sheen outshine the first film’s finest performance, Peter Finch as landowning nob Mr Boldwood? The answer is no on every count. However, … Read more
1 December 2014-12-01
Home entertainment releases this week in the UK The Inbetweeners 2 (4DVD, cert 15) Four go mad Down Under in the “ain’t broke, don’t fix it” follow-up to the British box office hit of 2011. The initial idea behind writer/director Damon Beesley and Iain Morris’s TV series was that the four misfits were the kind of nerdy guys who aren’t cool enough to be cool, not dumb enough to be losers – they’re just inbetween. Normal. But Beesley and Morris’s great skill, as well as jokes involving sex and bodily functions, is in locating these lads socially. So when we first meet them this time around, striving Will (Simon Bird) is at Bristol University, … Read more
5 September 2016-09-05
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 screwball story, as if Fred and Ginger had stepped out for a minute, to be replaced by a non-dancing Meryl Streep and Hugh Grant – actually, there is a dance moment, and it’s there, deliberately, to underline what Frears and this film are about. As with Marguerite the joke is on us rather than her, her inability to … Read more
15 August 2016-08-15
Out This Week Only Yesterday (StudioCanal, cert 15) It’s 25 years since Isao Takahata directed this touching animation for Studio Ghibli. Only now, thanks to a fresh revoicing by a cast including Daisy Ridley, has it arrived on these shores. The Force etc etc. As with Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies it takes a while to get its hooks in and also goes into slightly darker territory than Takahata’s stablemate Miyazaki would. The focus however remains the same – a girl finding her way, this being the story of Taeko, a woman haunted by memories of her younger self. We see, in flashback, her childhood at school where she isn’t very good, and at … Read more
9 December 2013-12-09
Out in the UK This Week The Conjuring (Warner, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) A family living out in the boonies is terrorised by a demon spirit in this moody horror film directed by James Wan and written by twin brothers Chad and Carey Hayes. The Hayes brothers are in their 50s but Wan wasn’t even born when The Exorcist was released in 1973. But he’s definitely seen the film; The Conjuring is an exercise in Exorcist atmospherics – all rosaries, Latin and vomit. Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson play the weird earnest, hucksterish exorcists, Farmiga deliberately going for Ellen Burstyn in her performance, Wilson wisely staying away from any suggestion of channelling Max Von Sydow. … Read more
12 October 2012-10-12
Out in the UK This Week Something from Nothing: The Art of Rap (Kaleidoscope, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) Given how often rappers are being deliberately awkward, or cool, and how often an over-attachment to mind-altering substances can make speech too street even for the street, a documentary about rap sets alarm bells ringing in advance. Nothing could be further from the truth with Ice T’s overview, which kicks off with a declaration – “this film isn’t about the money, the cars, the jewellery, the girls… this film is about the craft”. And then it delivers. T’s strength is the access he gets, to everyone from Melle Mel and Big Daddy Kane, to Kanye West, … Read more
25 May 2015-05-25
Out This Week Tusk (Sony, cert 15) After the wobble of Red State, Kevin Smith seems to have got his midlife crisis out of the way and now roars back to form with a brilliant, and brilliantly discomfiting, grotesque comedy that sees shock podcaster Justin Long surgically turned into a human walrus by mad Michael Parks. The fact that Long has it coming is signified by his douchebag cheating on his superhot girlfriend, played by superhot Genesis Rodriguez, but nothing can really prepare us for the sense of pathos that Long conjures when he cries big walrus tears from out of his big brown eyes on realising his old human form has been … Read more
