Home Entertainment
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
22 August 2016-08-22
Out This Week The Jungle Book (Disney, cert PG) A careful and clever live-action retread by Disney of their 1967 animated classic. Perhaps the cleverest thing Disney did this time round was to hire Jon Favreau, a director who seems, unlike the Zack Snyders of the world, to understand that wonder and awe are key components of films, especially those aimed at children and the child in us all – that first Iron Man movie, when Tony Stark is first getting to grips with his new suit, and is exhilarated almost beyond belief at the sheer simple sensation of flying, that’s the sort of thing Favreau does well. As for plot, it’s the … Read more
30 March 2009-03-30
Out in the UK this week Celia (Second Run, cert 15) Oz director Ann Turner’s classic 1989 rites-of-passage debut, about one girl’s amply furnished fantasy childhood. It’s the story of a child, from a child’s point of view, rather than adult looking back, and set in 1950s Australia overrun by rabbits and the Red menace. Celia – at Amazon Of Time and the City (BFI, cert 12) Back with a bang, grumpy, poetic old man Terence Davies’s elegy to his lost, native Liverpool, composed almost entirely of archive footage, brilliantly welded together by a master. Wait till you hear what he has to say about the Beatles. Of Time and the City – … Read more
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
22 June 2015-06-22
Out This Week Fifty Shades of Grey (Universal, cert 18) This decade’s Da Vinci Code – the book read by people who don’t often read books – is a basic Mills & Boon/Harlequin story (masterful man, virginal girl) with an added belt, if that’s the word, of S&M. In this film adaptation Jamie Dornan glowers but brings no real life to the role of buff CEO Christian Grey whom Dakota Johnson’s Anastasia Steele meets as he’s buying cable ties in the shop she works in. Dakota looks like her dad, Don Johnson, and has the pluck of her mother, Melanie Griffith, which is handy because she is required to take off more clothes … Read more
4 January 2013-01-04
Out in the UK This Week Berberian Sound Studio (Artificial Eye, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) “A dangerously aroused goblin prowls the dormitory” – a line that says it all from the never-seen film that soundman Toby Jones is working on in Peter Strickland’s follow-up to the brilliant, Romanian-set Katalin Varga, a brilliantly overheated, Italian-set homage to 1970s “giallo” horror. Really worth watching with headphones on, this one. Berberian Sound Studio – at Amazon The Imposter (Revolver, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) One of the most gripping films of 2012, a semi-documentary about how a 20something French juvie managed to pass himself off as a missing 16-year-old from Texas. And why the family bought it. A remarkable … Read more
9 September 2013-09-09
Out in the UK this week Iron Man 3 (Disney, cert 12, Blu-ray/DVD/VOD) Drawing a veil over the fact that Avengers Assemble was in effect Iron Man 3, the official Iron Man 3 arrives with Jon Favreau bumped from directing duties and Shane Black in the writing/directing chair. Black wrote the Lethal Weapon films and, blow me, if he hasn’t turned Iron Man – one of the best superhero franchises of recent years, thanks to its understanding of the sheer exhilaration of being able to do cool stuff – into a leaden, clanking 1980s action movie. Yes, Black can fashion a quip, and Robert Downey Jr is certainly the man to deliver them, … Read more
19 January 2015-01-19
Out in the UK This Week Boyhood (Universal, cert 15) As I write Richard Linklater’s ambitious drama is picking up Golden Globes like it was made of Velcro and looks like it’s heading for Oscar glory too. So what’s the deal? At first glance it looks like a gimmick, following the same actors for 12 years, Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette from their lush prime into early middle age, Ellar Coltrane as the boy of the title, who is five when Linklater turns the camera on, 18 by the time he’s done. So is Boyhood drama or structured reality? It’s actually another go at the sort of freewheeling relationship drama of Linklater’s Before … Read more
12 October 2015-10-12
Out This Week Mr Holmes (EOne, cert PG) A bit of a something and nothing here, with Ian McKellen playing a crusty 90-something Sherlock Holmes coming to terms with the loss of his faculties, wrapping up an old unsolved case (in flashback) and putting his remaining wits in the service of cracking an even greater enigma – himself. McKellen has been here before, in Gods and Monsters, when he played Frankenstein director James Whale at the ignominious end of his life. And so has director Bill Condon, who also directed the 1998 film, and again proves himself to be a deft stylist of wipe-clean period drama – Holmes’s ancient house, his beautiful garden … Read more
15 September 2014-09-15
Out in the UK This Week Only Lovers Left Alive (Soda, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) Jim Jarmusch arrives in genre territory with this achingly hipsterish take on the vampire movie – finally, one for the grown-ups – full of arch jokes about eternal bloodsuckers. I went into it thinking that surely the Lou Reed of cinema, with the perfectly cast Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston as Adam and Eve, a pair of centuries-old vampires, is going to make the film that 1983’s The Hunger should have been. And he has. Keats, Iggy Pop, Franz Kafka and Buster Keaton are all name-checked approvingly in a dry, drole story about Tangier-domiciled Eve responding to an emergency call from … Read more
18 November 2013-11-18
Out in the UK This Week The Wolverine (Fox, cert 12, Blu-ray/DVD) The X-Men series has been lacklustre, with too many characters chasing too little plot (X-Men First Class being the exception). But The Wolverine bucks that trend thanks to its tight focus on Hugh Jackman as the wolfman with the salon-sational nails and its decision to just chuck us straight into the plot, just like the comic books do. Japan is the focus, a grungy dirty Japan, where bearded, trashed Wolverine is just trying to forget all that superhero stuff and get on with a normal life. But, as is the way with these things, his past comes back to get him, … Read more
