Home Entertainment
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
18 March 2013-03-18
Out in the UK this week Amour (Artificial Eye, cert 12, Blu-ray/DVD) Whatever you say about the director of Hidden or Funny Games, no one does “pitiless gaze” quite as well as Michael Haneke. In Amour he takes one of his standing obsessions, the life bourgeois, and yokes to it a subject rarely covered in film – the loss of dignity and disappearance of the self that happens to most of us as death comes close. Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva are the film’s focus, playing a pair of sprightly retired piano teachers whose quietly tasteful, cultured lifestyle is interrupted when one of them has a stroke. What follows is harrowing but almost inevitable, the … 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
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
18 April 2016-04-18
Out This Week In the Heart of the Sea (Warner, cert 12) Why have one sea adventure when you can have them all? Though ostensibly about the incident that inspired the writing of Moby Dick, In the Heart of the Sea also takes shots at Jaws, Mutiny on the Bounty and Robinson Crusoe in a tale of a whaling ship’s adventures, only some of which are whale related. Chris Hemsworth stars – and possibly that’s a strangled Boston accent or a Clark Gable impersonation – as the first mate of a whaler out of Nantucket whose ship is pounced on by a great white whale. The story is all set out in “dark … Read more
14 April 2013-04-14
Out in the UK This Week Nymphomaniac Vol I (Artificial Eye, cert 18, Blu-ray/DVD/Digital) A middle aged man finds a woman beaten up in the street. Taking her back to his house – she doesn’t want the police involved – he coaxes her story out of her with nothing more than a bit of tea and sympathy. And so starts Lars Von Trier’s most “normal” film to date, effectively a Victorian bildungsroman in which one party (Charlotte Gainsbourg) relates the ping-ponging progress of her life, while the other party (Stellan Skarsgård) prompts more revelations with a “do tell me more”. Von Trier barely bothers to hide the structure and sets about acclimatising us … 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
25 April 2016-04-25
Out This Week Joy (Fox, cert 15) Joy tells the story of Joy Mangano, a real-life Mrs Mop who, as a young woman, invented the Miracle Mop and who went on to become the CEO of her own company. When we meet her, Joy is the bright kid whose early promise and dreams of further education and so on haven’t worked out, and is now the Mrs Fixit of a family of dysfunctional no-can-do’s. Director/screenwriter David O Russell breaks the film down into two halves. In part one, done in a screwball comedy style and speed, we meet Joy (Jennifer Lawrence), her flaky ex-husband (Edgar Ramirez), flakier father (Robert De Niro), flakier still … Read more
