Home Entertainment
2 December 2013-12-02
Out in the UK This Week Only God Forgives (Lionsgate, cert 18, Blu-ray/DVD) After Bronson, Valhalla Rising and Drive (not to mention the Pusher trilogy) director Nicolas Winding Refn’s cool yet feverish look at violence and masculinity continues with a story set out in the badlands of Bangkok, where moody Ryan Gosling plays Julian, the brother expected to avenge the death of his intensely violent older brother Billy (Tom Burke). But the slightly more sensitive Julian balks, which brings into play his mother (Kristin Scott Thomas), a tough old bitch as elemental as any out of Greek tragedy. It also brings into play a retired cop (Vithaya Pansingram), an automaton of remorseless brutality. … Read more
3 November 2014-11-03
Out in the UK This Week Chef (Lionsgate, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD/digital) The US TV show Diners, Drive Ins and Dives seems to be the inspiration for Jon Favreau’s warm-hearted comedy – which is simple, fun and just works. The story of a jaded high-flying chef who rediscovers his mojo working on a food truck, it’s put together with Favreau’s usual under-estimated skill (he writes and directs as well as stars), and he drafts in a few famous names (Scarlett Johansson, Sofia Vergara, Robert Downey Jr, Dustin Hoffman, Oliver Platt) for what look like “I promise you, one day’s work, max” appearances. Though welcome, none of them are essential. Dealing incidentally with our culture’s internet-driven … Read more
8 June 2015-06-08
Out This Week Kajaki (Spirit, cert 15) To find a really good, really British war film (so, no, not Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down or Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, both of which are over-rated) you have to go back a very very long way. Or watch Kajaki, which is out right now. It’s a simple, brutal and unflinching portrait of the gruesomeness of war, the camaraderie of the fighters and the raw bravery in the face of sheer terror which extreme situations reveal. Told with the straightahead simplicity and bleach-bright looks that bring to mind Ice Cold in Alex, it follows a detail of British soldiers from 3 Para as they venture … Read more
13 October 2014-10-13
Home Entertainment Out in the UK This Week Kidnapped (cert 18, DVD/digital) From Spaniard Miguel Angel Vivas a home invasion horror which understands that for the film to work we have to be entirely on the side of the invaded. And also, that we have to feel their shock, disorientation and fear. He achieves both brilliantly in this brutal, relatively short film that takes place over one evening and does a lot with long takes, then switches pace with some excellent split-screen, up-close points of view. It’s the standard family – mum, dad, whingey teenage girl and, eventually, her boyfriend. But it’s far from a standard film. Where Vivas came from, I don’t know … Read more
6 May 2013-05-06
Out in the UK this week The Impossible (Entertainment One, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) The Spanish have an appetite for mutilation. Look at bullfighting, or the bloody effigies of the crucified Jesus Christ in their churches. And though this film is entirely in the English language, it has a Spanish director, writer and production money behind it. It’s very much a Spanish film. So, parking my misgivings about a drama wrought from the 2004 tsunami in the bay marked “Anglo Saxon squeamishness”, let’s turn to the story of the nice family who copped the big wave while on holiday in Thailand. It’s based on a Spanish family’s true experiences and does at least put … Read more
17 June 2013-06-17
Out in the UK This Week Hitchcock (Fox, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) Stuffed to the gunnels with good stuff, Sacha Gervasi’s biopic about Alfred Hitchcock is nevertheless a disappointment. Nothing wrong with the actors – Anthony Hopkins plays the director as a dead-eyed master of deadpan, greedy for everything – women, drink, food – the greed born of despair. Helen Mirren outdoes him as Alma, Hitch’s wife, screen adapter, muse, fixer, assistant director, wise counsel, editor, warrior queen. And around them spin Scarlett Johansson (as Janet Leigh), Jessica Biel (as Vera Miles), Danny Huston (as lush writer Whitfield Cook) and James D’Arcy (a nice turn as mother’s boy Anthony Perkins – Hitchcock knew why he … Read more
8 December 2014-12-08
Out in the UK This Week The Congress (StudioCanal, cert 15) With Waltz with Bashir, director Ari Folman used Tintin-esque animation as the visual clothing to a set of sober taped interviews between himself and the buddies he’d served with in Israel’s war against Lebanon. The Congress does similar unusual things, propelling Robin Wright – playing an actor called Robin Wright who has elected to have herself digitised and therefore immortalised – into an animated world when she attends “the congress”, the occasional gathering of other fictional figures. The real world looks like a workaday real world, as lived by rich Hollywood, leading to the suspicion that Folman is remaking Andrew Niccol’s digitised-actors … Read more
11 February 2013-02-11
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 hardscrabble folk scratch out an existence, preferring near poverty in the Gulf of Mexico to destitution in the big city. Realism and magic realism aren’t natural stylistic partners – scenes of incoming storms ravaging the bayou sit alongside shots of the mythical beast the aurochs – but director Benh Zeitlin gets them to dance using six-year-old Quvenzhané Wallis … Read more
19 September 2016-09-19
Out This Week Everybody Wants Some!! (E One, cert 15) About perfect, Richard Linklater’s ode to university life when he was a lad is a portrait of 1980s guys just hanging out and having fun, getting laid, listening to music, crashing parties and playing sports. Not much work gets done. It’s done in an Altman-esque overlapping style, pumps music of the era onto the soundtrack and is thick with cultural references to make us feel like we’re there – Space Invaders games as recreation, My Sharona on a car radio, the Burt Reynolds moustache still a non-ironic look. There are no big names and you’d be tempted to think Linklater is aiming for … 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
24 June 2013-06-24
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 cool Alice-like performance as a young girl whose lovely daddy has just died mysteriously. And before Daddy’s body is even cold he’s been replaced in the affections of her blowsy mother (Nicole Kidman, looking just a touch Wildensteinian these days) by her uncle (enter, eyes rolling, tongue lolling, Matthew Goode). Park references Night of the Hunter, Shadow of … Read more
30 June 2014-06-30
Out in the UK This Week Non-Stop (StudioCanal, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD/digital) Though there are pretenders, Liam Neeson is the king of the geri-action stars, a modern Charles Bronson whose attitude to violence is, to paraphrase the mild-mannered Dr Banner, “You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.” This time Neeson starts out angry and hungover, then becomes increasingly vexed at 35,000ft, playing an air marshal no one will listen to, in spite of the fact that there’s a crazy man on board who wants to blow up the plane unless a large amount of money… etc … etc. Other big names include Julianne Moore, Downton Abbey‘s Michelle Dockery, Scoot McNairy and 12 Years a … Read more
