Home Entertainment
4 July 2016-07-04
Out This Week Son of Saul (Curzon, cert 15) How do you make a film about the horrors of Auschwitz without it becoming exploitative misery porn? This Hungarian winner of the Cannes Grand Prix in 2015 does it by turning the horrors of the death camp into a near-pov experience, the militarily choreographed camera of director László Nemes and DP Mátyás Erdély hanging close by the face or shoulder of star Géza Röhrig as he goes about his duties as the member of a Sonderkommando group – Jewish prisoners recruited by the Nazis to do the dirty work (scrub blood away, pitchfork bodies into pits, empty ovens of ash and dispose of it in … 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
3 October 2016-10-03
Out This Week When Marnie Was There (StudioCanal, cert U) Directed by Hiromasa Yonebayashi, the guy at Studio Ghibli who isn’t Hayao Miyazaki or Isao Takahata, this is Japanese animation studio’s final, so Ghibli say, film. And it’s a typically sweet, anglophile story about a typically bereft child called Anna finding typical solace in the supernatural realm – a ghost, called Marnie, who lives in the big deserted house over the bay from Anna’s aunt and uncle. Adapted from Joan G Robinson’s Norfolk-set classic, it’s slow-moving and less loaded with drama than Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies or Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, but it’s undeniably sweet, and charms with its familiar Ghibli-style animation – 2D, … Read more
11 May 2015-05-11
Out This Week Wild (Fox, cert 15) Apart from The Young Victoria (which was a hack job done for cash, I suspect), the Canadian director Jean-Marc Vallée has had a good run of interesting films since his breakthrough with 2005’s C.R.A.Z.Y, and then more recently with Café de Flore and Dallas Buyers Club. All have showcased his knack for allying music (often 1970s – he loves glam rock) with well crafted images. His lighting, composition and editing are generally exquisite. Vallée is a great storyteller, and uses all his skills brilliantly in Wild, a film that sounds potentially like either a monumental drag – a woman reconnecting with herself on a gigantic trek … Read more
16 November 2015-11-16
Out This Week Minions (Universal, cert U) By the end of the first Despicable Me film, Gru, the archetypal bad guy, had been exposed as a bit of softie, which left Despicable Me 2 with nowhere to go, in terms of jokes about bad guys wheezing despicably and mwah-ha-ha-ing their way to world domination. But Gru’s Minions were still funny, and in this surprisingly lively, amusing, inventive spin-off, they get to show they can be funny at feature length, in spite of not being able to speak. Well, they do speak, but it’s a kind of Esperanto done with expressive voices and telegraphed emotions – Pingu, the Clangers and Shaun the Sheep territory. … Read more
26 October 2015-10-26
Out This Week Theeb (New Wave, cert 12) Jordan’s contender for this year’s Best Foreign language Oscar is, somewhat unexpectedly, an old school adventure story, the sort of thing Rider Haggard would recognise, set in a Lawrence of Arabia desert and starring Jacir Eid as a Bedouin kid. Eid is an untrained actor, as are most if not all of the excellent cast – goodies and baddies – and the plot is a basic dash across the desert, away from bad guys and towards a well which a floppy-haired English interloper wants to visit, for reasons probably nefarious. A sealed box provides a bit of a Maguffin, the cinematography knows that David Lean … Read more
11 July 2016-07-11
Out This Week High-Rise (StudioCanal, cert 15) JG Ballard’s dystopian novels – Super-Cannes, Cocaine Nights and High Rise among them – tend to be long on premise, short on follow-through. That’s the case too in this film adaptation by Ben Wheatley, the British maverick director behind Sightseers. Set in an entirely allegorical high rise block, Wheatley’s film follows Tom Hiddleston – dressed as so often in a slightly over-tailored suit – as he arrives to live in the block where the more social status you have, the higher up you live. Just above Tom is foxy Sienna Miller, who is eager to lend Hiddleston her loins once she’s caught sight of his splendid body … Read more
2 March 2015-03-02
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 has a beautiful wife, a lovely beachside property, a teenage son and is respected in his community. Over the next two and half hours we watch most of it being stripped from him – in fact as Andrey Zvyagintsev opens his film there’s already trouble hemming Kolya in on most sides. The question is: which faith is it testing? … Read more
24 November 2014-11-24
Out in the UK This Week Ida (Artificial Eye, cert 12, Blu-ray/DVD/digital) Pawel Pawlikowski’s thematic follow-up to 2004’s My Summer of Love is a drama about a novice nun in early 1960s Poland, made in the style of a Polish film from the early 1960s – black and white, old-school Academy ratio (or close), bleak but pungent Eastern Bloc locations. The arthouse stylistics are really the only exception you might take to the film – brilliantly done though they are – because they introduce a barrier between the audience and what is essentially Sideways minus the wine and sunshine, a sometimes comic road trip about this young woman, who discovers she is not by … Read more
15 December 2014-12-15
Out in the UK This Week Lucy (Universal, cert 15) Young innocent Lucy gains access to the full potential of her human brain in one of Luc Besson’s now infrequent bouts of directing. A kissing cousin of 1997’s The Fifth Element, it’s a fun and funky affair, helped enormously by the seven barrels of spunk that Scarlett Johansson injects into it. She plays the innocent abroad who is first forced into becoming a mule carrying a seriously mind-expanding drug for a seriously life-threatening gangster, and then an uberbeing when the drug gets into her bloodstream after she’s given a damn good kicking by a henchman for rejecting his sexytime overture. Well, that’s the last time anyone … Read more
2 May 2016-05-02
Out This Week A War (StudioCanal, cert 15) The Danes do Afghanistan in a bloody, tense drama that takes a left turn about halfway through. That’s after we’ve been given a long immersive bath in war at its foggiest, leadership at its most difficult, focusing on Pilou Asbaek’s company commander Claus Pedersen as he takes his men out on patrol after a particularly bloody IED incident has left one of them with no legs below the knee, and his men having shown little enthusiasm for the “rebuilding the country” speech Pedersen has just given. After this, it’s a fairly familiar, though undeniably suspenseful journey through the dust, the evasive looks of the locals and the first-meets-third-world … Read more
