Home Entertainment
22 October 2012-10-22
Out in the UK This Week Silent Souls (Artificial Eye, cert 15, DVD) Two men from an almost extinct Russian ethnic sub-group, the Merja, take the dead wife of one of them to her final rest in this poetic, poignant drama which works brilliantly as character study and as a meditation on the notion of national identity. After the rampage of Anders Breivik in Norway in July 2011, and in a world of multicultural cross-fertilisation, the positive case for ethnic separateness or uniqueness is rarely made without it sounding like the spit-flecked rantings of ultra-conservatives, die-hards or Nazis. Yet director Aleksei Fedorchenko has done it. That his film is mystical, full of half-remembered … Read more
3 August 2015-08-03
Out This Week Good Kill (Arrow, cert 15) What happens when you force a Top Gun kinda guy out of his plane and into a bunker, where he is now commanded to kill people in Whereveristan remotely, using drones? Writer/director Andrew Niccol and his Gattaca star Ethan Hawke reteam to answer the question in an anti-war film running through most of the arguments made by the liberal intelligentsia (ie the intelligentsia). Hawke physically channels Tom Cruise, donning Ray Bans and copying the faux big-bollocks walk, while little touches nudge us even further towards the conclusion that drones are a bad thing – the voice coming down the line from Langley with lethal orders … Read more
21 July 2014-07-21
Out in the UK This Week The Lego Movie (Warner, cert U, Blu-ray/DVD) Normally I watch a film and take notes as I go. With The Lego Movie I hardly managed any, because there was so little of the film that wasn’t packed to bursting with stuff – action, jokes, new characters, new twists on old characters, yet more awesome blocky Legotastic animation. The Lego Movie doesn’t make the Wreck-It Ralph mistake. Instead it sticks to a simple plot and pursues it to the end. Which is… The Matrix meets Star Wars – the nobody who becomes the somebody who can save the world. The voice work is fun, with Liam Neeson growling away as … Read more
26 January 2015-01-26
Out in the UK This Week Jimi: All Is by My Side (Curzon, cert 15) Imagine a Jimi Hendrix record without any of his guitar pyrotechnics. That’s the feeling you get from this efficient, workaday biopic about the godlike genius who came and went so quickly, leaving behind enough music for us to know how good he was. The film follows Hendrix’s transformative year in London 1966-67, makes glancing references to his influences and to his ethnicity (as you might expect from a film directed by 12 Years a Slave writer John Ridley). The ethnicity, it claims, Hendrix chose to ignore, which almost brings into focus a man who might have been remarkably … Read more
13 June 2016-06-13
Out This Week Bone Tomahawk (The Works, cert 18) Someone somewhere described this as The Hills Have Eyes done as a western. That’s a good enough as a shorthand, but what that logline doesn’t quite capture is the amount of love and care – set design, locations, clothes, hair and make-up are all exquisite – that have been lavished on what is effectively a horror movie. And it’s off to an immediately strong start as we meet a pair of murdering robbers slitting a victim’s throat before they accidentally wander into an Indian bone cemetery. Bad shit happens in there, but we don’t find out exactly how bad until the film’s end, by which point … Read more
26 September 2013-09-23
Out in the UK This Week The Kings of Summer (StudioCanal, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) An immensely smart coming of age film pitched somewhere between Stand By Me and Superbad (ie dark undertow, with jokes). And it’s entirely on the side of the kids, whose decision to go off and live in the woods, leaving their sarcastic, obnoxious, bullying, superior parents clueless as to where they’ve gone, is never presented as the callow act of peeved teenagers. Out in the woods, our junior heroes build a rudimentary house, set about sourcing food (sometimes from supermarket bins), grow wispy beards. Meanwhile the film sets about building a dreamy, trippy, sunny song of summer and innocence, … Read more
15 June 2015-06-15
Out This Week Cake (Warner, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD/digital) Child actresses signal they’ve grown up by shedding their clothes; older actresses their bid for independence by shedding their makeup. So it proves with Jennifer Aniston, in a feel-my-agony performance as a woman wracked by relentless physical pain after some sort of accident (all is eventually revealed) which has reduced her to zombie-like shuffling and perma-scowling. It’s a good performance by her, and a reminder she’s only as good as her material. But this is good material, and Aniston is surrounded by actors who are up to the salt. In particular Adriana Barraza as the hired hispanic help who seems to have the share of … Read more
9 November 2015-11-09
Out This Week Song of the Sea (StudioCanal, cert PG) The Irish tricolour is firmly nailed to the mast in the follow-up to Tomm Moore’s animation The Secret of Kells – opening and end credits are in Gaelic – a whimsical tale of a young lad unaware that his dumb younger sister is in fact a kelpie, a mythical sea creature. Moore has set out to do the things with animation that Pixar rarely does, using its possibilities in a more expressive, impressionistic way, recalling Studio Ghibli and Sylvain Chomet, though the resolutely 2D approach also contains echoes of Noggin the Nog and other Smallfilms productions. The story is pure Ghibli though – … Read more
