Home Entertainment
26 May 2014-05-26
Out in the UK This Week Inside Llewyn Davis (StudioCanal, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD/digital) The Coen brothers specialise in films about absence or lack – The Man Who Wasn’t There being the most obvious exemplar. Inside Llewyn Davis is about a folk singer on the Greenwich Village circuit just before Bob Dylan turned up and electrified – joke intended – the scene. It stars the hitherto obscure Oscar Isaac as the struggling singer who just lacks that last, magical quarter of an inch of whatever it is that makes an artist break through. It’s heartbreak in slo-mo, in other words, and to some extent it’s unwatchable, if you find beautifully crafted, brilliantly acted films unwatchable. … Read more
3 March 2014-03-02
Out in the UK This Week Gravity (Warner, cert 12, Blu-ray/DVD/Download) By now you will already know whether the Oscar-winning Gravity is the sort of film you want to watch, or watch again. It’s had so much publicity and so many reviews that there’s no point adding anything. So I’ll just tell you that I got stuck getting up out of my chair watching this film. I was going to pause it and grab a drink and as I was halfway up the debris from the space satellite struck space-walking rookie astronaut Sandra Bullock, blasting her off into almost certain annihilation. Something like 20 minutes later I was still in the same position, … Read more
28 April 2014-04-28
Out in the UK This Week All Is Lost (Universal, cert 12, Blu-ray/DVD) JC Chandor’s Margin Call was a brilliant debut, a great piece of storytelling which turned the complexities of the financial crash into a gripping human interest drama. Now he’s made All Is Lost, also a brilliant film, though as different superficially as they come. Instead of the high-tech, glass and steel, manmade world of finance, it takes place out on the high seas. And instead of a dialogue-driven screenplay there’s almost no speech at all. And yet a sense of jeopardy drives All Is Lost, as it did Margin Call, this newer film telling the tale of a lone yachtsman … Read more
23 September 2013-09-23
Out in the UK This Week Byzantium (StudioCanal/cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) Ah, the burden of being a vampire. It’s been done to death in the movies recently but Neil Jordan is at the helm here and knows how to spice things up. Here he adds a touch of the same mix he used on The Company of Wolves nearly 30 years ago. In other words there’s added social critique, class and gender being the targets of both Jordan and writer Moira Buffini. Saoirse Ronan and Gemma Arterton are the two vampires searching for a new home, the former a Let the Right One In waif, the latter a lusty Hammer horror vamp – both of … Read more
2 November 2015-11-02
Out This Week Amy (Universal, cert 15) Amy is a misery-memoir documentary about the singer Amy Winehouse, whose life ended at the age of 27 after she drank herself to death – years of bulimia had rendered her body too weak to cope with booze as well as the crack, smack and partying she’d put it through. Director Asif Kapadia proceeds in much the same way as he did with his film Senna – hide the fact that it’s a talking-head doc by laying archive footage, newspaper headlines, TV appearances, radio interviews with Amy, whatever you’ve got, over the recollections of journalists who interviewed her, musicians who worked with her, friends, parents, and … Read more
24 March 2014-03-24
Out in the UK this week Jeune et Jolie (Lionsgate, cert 18, Blu-ray/DVD) Being hot is like a weapon. That’s what director/writer François Ozon’s drama about a French schoolgirl’s double life as a hooker seems to be saying. Ozon casts beautiful Marine Vacth as Isabelle, his teenage temptress, in a story that sees Isabelle offering her young bedflesh for cash to older gents, some of whom are nice, while others are only too keen to abuse their power. Meanwhile, at home, the girl’s beauty goes unremarked upon, until exactly what she’s been doing with it becomes apparent to mum, stepdad and their various friends, who react as if someone shouted “fire”. Ozon pits … Read more
26 August 2013-08-26
Out in the UK this week Something in the Air (Artificial Eye, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) If you’ve got any interest at all in how the revolutionary moment of 1968 spawned the postmodern (ie conservative) era that followed it, Olivier Assayas’s brilliant, period-distilling drama is for you. Following a wannabe artist from the revolutionary barricades of Paris, when it was required that all personal preferences came with political justification, through the long intellectual wrangles, splits, and factionalising of what was once called the Left, we follow a young man and woman on a journey that takes them from letting it all hang out to getting a decent job and knuckling down (or not). Musically … 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
7 September 2015-09-07
Out This Week John Wick (Warner, cert 15) Like some kind of undead film star, Keanu Reeves manages magnificent returns every few years – Speed, The Matrix and now John Wick, a super-sleek bit of badass comic-book adaptation relying heavily on Reeves’s blank persona (no one does it better) for much of its appeal. He plays a retired hitman so frightening that, we’re shown, even incredibly hard hardmen blench when they hear he’s on the warpath – after some damn fool goes and kills the pet dog that was the only reminder of his dead wife. And that’s all you need to know about the plot. The screenplay is incredibly smart, a collection of … Read more
21 October 2013-10-21
Out in the UK This Week The Conspiracy (Arrow, cert 15, Blu-ray) Mock-doc of the week is about two film-makers (Aaron Poole and James Gilbert), a pair of cocky guys who think it would be kinda cool to turn the camera on a local conspiracy nut who harangues office workers with his loudhailer. The Illuminati, the Bilderberg Group, the CIA, whatever’s going, being his currency. So far, so standard. Quick namecheck of Alan C Peterson, who is very very good as the stumbling, bumbling, frothing ranter. But at about 15 minutes in, this standard piece of “what’s true/what’s not” mockuwhatnot morphs into something altogether different, after the guys’ amateur fulminator disappears and the … Read more
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
20 June 2016-06-20
Out This Week Pride & Prejudice & Zombies (Lionsgate, cert 15) And it is literally that… Pride & Prejudice… and zombies. Once the famous preamble – lightly scrambled – was out of the way, and I had been apprised of the fact that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains, it was straight into the tale of Elizabeth, if not the most beautiful then certainly the smartest of the Bennet daughters, and her growing relationship with dark, thunderous Mr Darcy. Lily James and Sam Riley play it straight as Elizabeth and Darcy, and Sally Phillips and Charles Dance also fit so neatly into the traditional roles of garrulous, mercenary Mrs … Read more
