Home Entertainment
8 August 2016-08-08
Out This Week These Final Hours (The Works, cert 18) A “last day of the world” film like we used to get around the turn of the millennium. It’s made on the cheap but with lots of skill and attitude, the attitude being largely borrowed from Mad Max. Actually, it’s about three genres in one and they successfully fold together as we follow James (Nathan Phillips of Wolf Creek) who is on a coming-of-age road trip on the very last day of the world’s existence. The question the film poses, and James asks of himself eventually when he’s got his priorities straight, is: am I going to be an asshole right to the … Read more
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
16 May 2016-05-16
Out This Week The Big Short (Paramount, cert 15) What is a mortgage backed security, a sub-prime loan or a credit default swap? At an early stage in this hugely entertaining film about the financial crash of 2007, Ryan Gosling’s voiceover admits it’s confusing and exclaims, “so here’s Margot Robbie in a bubble bath to explain…” Cut to Margot Robbie up to her neck in suds, cradling a glass of champagne … “Whenever you hear the word ‘sub-prime’,” she tells us, “think ‘shit’…”. That’s The Big Short in a headline, a film unafraid to put on the brakes, wheel out a celebrity and roll out a colourful analogy – the chef Anthony Bourdain later … Read more
25 November 2013-11-25
Out in the UK this Week The Heat (Fox, cert 18, Blu-ray/DVD) There aren’t many female buddy-cop comedies. This one, directed by Paul Feig (Bridesmaids), recalls the Lethal Weapon antics of Mel Gibson and Danny Glover, and stars Sandra Bullock as the one trying to play it by the book, and Melissa McCarthy as the out and out slob prepared to take any risk because, hell, law and order is a dirty old business. Suit pants versus sweat pants, basically, with a plot that’s immaterial – it has something to do with guns and drugs, as per – but it’s just enough to bus the girls from one amusing set piece to the next, … Read more
6 June 2016-06-06
Out This Week Deadpool (Fox, cert 15) From the guys who wrote Zombieland, a similarly knowing and smart play in the genre pool, though this time it’s superheroes rather than the undead who get a prolonged playful kicking. The style is Honest Trailers – YouTube fanboys with brains ((“Trailers that tell you the TRUTH about your favorite movies and TV shows”) – and follows Ryan Reynolds as the eponymous hero as he searches … actually, there is no need to recount the plot at all, since that’s why you watch the film, though I should say that it is more than just a mere peg for jokes. And they come in all shapes and … 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
29 April 2013-04-29
Out in the UK this week Life of Pi (Fox, cert PG, Blu-ray/DVD) Reminiscent of those special-effects-driven Alexander Korda productions of the 1940s starring Sabu as an Asian boy in a world of phantasmagoria, Ang Lee’s adaptation of Yann Martel’s “unfilmable” novel about an Indian teenager and a tiger adrift in a lifeboat is like painting on silk or black velvet – slickly beautiful though hardly profound. Mind you, when images are this lush – a phosphorescent sea full of jellyfish, a doomed hulk of a ship going under with all lights blazing, a sea as reflective as mercury, then maybe profundity can take a day off. Life of Pi – at Amazon … Read more
1 August 2016-08-01
Out This Week Midnight Special (E One, cert 12) I’m a sucker for a deduction film, and in Midnight Special we are asked to deduce first what’s going on, and then what sort of a movie it is. This being a Jeff Nichols film, Michael Shannon is the star – as he has been in four of five Nichols films to date (Nichols’s latest, Loving, also a Shannon number, has not arrived here yet) – and he brings his brutish compassion to bear on a story that looks, at first, to be an abduction drama. Shannon, we deduce, is the abductor of a child, and on the run from the law and a religious community headed … Read more
25 August 2014-08-25
Out in the UK This Week Locke (Lionsgate, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD/digital) A film set entirely in a car driving along a motorway needs a lot going for it to work. Locke has it. A tight, believable script, Tom Hardy as a methodical yet inwardly erratic concrete specialist (metaphor alert) who has spent his entire life trying not to be like his loser dad, and is now trying to avert the collapse of his entire life by making call after bluetooth call while hurtling towards London. That’s it – a man and a phone and the voices at the other end. Some you might recognise – Olivia Colman as the pregnant one-night stand Locke is trying … Read more
15 August 2016-08-15
Out This Week Only Yesterday (StudioCanal, cert 15) It’s 25 years since Isao Takahata directed this touching animation for Studio Ghibli. Only now, thanks to a fresh revoicing by a cast including Daisy Ridley, has it arrived on these shores. The Force etc etc. As with Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies it takes a while to get its hooks in and also goes into slightly darker territory than Takahata’s stablemate Miyazaki would. The focus however remains the same – a girl finding her way, this being the story of Taeko, a woman haunted by memories of her younger self. We see, in flashback, her childhood at school where she isn’t very good, and at … Read more
26 November 2012-11-26
Out in the UK this week Ted (Universal, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) Descending occasionally into Family Guy droning, Seth MacFarlane’s comedy about a guy (Mark Wahlberg) and his walking, talking, living teddy bear otherwise riffs rude and hilarious on popular culture – hookers and hookahs to Diff’rent Strokes and Ming the Merciless. Ted – at Amazon Magic Mike (Lionsgate, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) Channing Tatum takes his clothes off. Recommendation enough, maybe, but Steven Soderbergh’s Boogie Nights-lite drama about male strippers also faintly deals with the objectification of the male body. And Matthew McConaughey takes his clothes off too. Magic Mike – at Amazon The Amazing Spider-Man (Sony, cert 12, Blu-ray/DVD) The special effects aren’t … Read more
22 April 2013-04-22
Out in the UK this week Jack Reacher (Paramount, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) In this adaptation of the Lee Child novel One Shot, vigilante investigator Jack Reacher is called in to clear the name of a guy even he thinks is guilty of shooting a whole load of innocent folks. Coming across as a little bit Batman and a little bit more Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name, Tom Cruise’s Reacher is in fact mostly Stacy Keach-era Mike Hammer. Because this is an exercise in cornball noir, the sort of film where people still use quaint terms like “patsy”, where relations between men and women are chivalrous – that’s Rosamund Pike in what amounts … Read more
