Home Entertainment
19 October 2015-10-19
Out This Week Slow West (Lionsgate, cert 15) One of the best westerns for some time, Slow West plays with the tropes of the pulp magazines that first connected the Old West with a reading public – the glamour, the danger, the hardship and the austere beauty are all here in Scotsman John Maclean’s really rather extraordinary feature debut. It’s framed like an odd-couple road movie, with Kodi Smit-McPhee as a naive, priggish kid following Rose, his one true love (Caren Pistorius, a star), from Scotland across the ocean to America, and then across the increasingly wild badlands. Joining him on the journey is Michael Fassbender as a bounty hunter – there’s a … Read more
27 April 2015-04-27
Out in the UK This Week Birdman (Fox, cert 15) And coming right out of the sun to bag this year’s Best Picture Oscar, a director whose films had become increasingly up themselves, and a star whose career looked increasingly over, in one of the most purely enjoyable yet also intelligent films in years. It’s a reminder of the sort of film Hollywood used to produce in the 1930s, with screwball comedy clearly the inspiration for this backstage farce about a once-upon-a-time superhero actor (Michael Keaton) and his attempt to re-invent himself by acting in, producing and directing a stage performance of Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. … 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
7 April 2014-04-07
Out in the UK This Week The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (Warner, cert 12, Blu-ray/DVD) One book, three films – there’s something almost Tolkienesque in that phrase, don’t you think? Against expectation I enjoyed the first instalment of The Hobbit, even though every fibre of my being had been rebelling against the idea of Peter Jackson turning a slim book into three long movies. I can’t say the same for part two, which follows Bilbo and the dwarves on their quest to reclaim Erebor, their kingdom beneath the mountain, which is an exercise in time-wasting until Smaug himself arrives. Every shot, every scene is padded, even the most inconsequential locale getting its … Read more
24 February 2014-02-24
Out in the UK This Week Safety Not Guaranteed (Vertigo, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) Since The Puffy Chair I’ve been a sucker for anything connected with the Duplass brothers. Director Colin Trevorrow and writer Derek Connolly’s film stars Mark Duplass as a nerdy shelfstacker guy who puts an advert into a paper asking for a companion to go time-travelling with him, “safety not guaranteed”. But we pick the story up from its other end, as we follow aspiring journalist Aubrey Plaza, lead writer Jeff (Jake Johnson) and supernerd Arnau (Karan Soni) as they head out into the boonies to track down the obvious whackjob for their magazine, humiliation probably guaranteed. Mumblecore goes sci-fi, kind … Read more
19 November 2012-11-19
Out in the UK this week Arthur Christmas (Sony, cert U, Blu-ray/DVD) After some awful homegrown CGI animations – anyone remember Valiant? – the Brits have made a comic adventure about Santa Claus and family that’s witty, gutsy, insightful and entirely entertaining. A new Christmas classic, surely. Arthur Christmas – Watch it/buy it at Amazon Two Years at Sea (Soda, cert E, DVD) Hungarian miserabilist Béla Tarr is clearly a heavy influence on this artfully artless documentary following a hippie/hermit as he serenely goes about his hardscrabble life. For stressed-out, always-on screen-jockeys this could be the ideal therapy. Two Years at Sea – Watch it/buy it at Amazon Big Boys Gone Bananas (Dogwoof, cert E, … Read more
1 February 2016-02-01
Out This Week Sicario (Lionsgate, cert 15) With Incendies the disruption had its roots in the politics in the Middle East, with Prisoners in American paranoia and with Enemy it was something more internal still, a disrupted psyche. In Denis Villeneuve’s latest intelligent, genre-extending thriller his unsentimental gaze settles on the US government and how its agents actually go about their business (according to this film, at any rate). Working on the Mexico border, where drug cartels are mostly in charge, laconic badasses Josh Brolin and Benicio Del Toro are joined by seconded cop and audience avatar Emily Blunt, who looks on with jaw at various distances from the floor as the two … 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
29 September 2014-09-29
Out in the UK This Week Edge of Tomorrow (Warner, cert 12, digital) As hyper-aware of his position in the culture as he is of a camera in relation to his three-quarter profile, Tom Cruise knows that a lot of people want to see him taking a kicking. Edge of Tomorrow (or Live. Die. Repeat: Edge of Tomorrow as it seems to have become) answers that demand, with Cruise playing a cocky jumped-up PR guy pressganged into the army (which answers the “how come a guy over 50 is still in any army?” question) who then relives the same day over and over again, after he gets contaminated with alien blood. What plays out is … Read more
16 June 2014-06-16
Out in the UK This Week The Invisible Woman (Lionsgate, cert 12, Blu-ray/DVD) Ralph Fiennes directs and stars in a film ostensibly about the secret mistress of Charles Dickens. In fact it’s about Dickens himself. The Invisible Biopic, perhaps. Either way, Felicity Jones is Ellen Ternan, the actress who became Dickens’s lover while Ralph Fiennes plays Dickens, as perhaps one of the first true celebs of the media age, mobbed wherever he went, thanks to his appearance in daily newspapers, read avidly by the newly literate working classes. Both actors are as good as you’d hope (Jones, brilliant, Fiennes actually better than I expected), there’s a wealth of period detail, reminding us, for … Read more
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
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
