Home Entertainment
1 September 2014-09-01
Out in the UK This Week The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (Sony, cert 12, Blu-ray/DVD/digital) Marc Webb’s reboot of Spider-Man in 2012 was artistically unnecessary but Webb did at least inject a welcome note of young love into it – he directed indie weepie 500 Days of Summer, let’s not forget. This even more unnecessary sequel sees Andrew Garfield’s Catcher in the Rye webslinger taking on an unnecessary plurality of villains – Electro and Green Goblin. Electro is a nice bit of racist stereotyping for Jamie Foxx, who starts off as a mild mannered janitor and winds up as “angry nigger” Electro, all exaggerated features and steroidal rage, capable of bringing a city to its knees … 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
14 October 2013-10-14
Out this week in the UK Behind the Candelabra (E One, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) Most stars won’t touch an unsympathetic role, for fear of how it will play with their fans. Not so Michael Douglas. Again and again he’s waded in where others fear to tread, playing assholes, psychos and now Liberace, the gayest man in the world, if Steven Soderbergh’s film is to be believed. This is the movie that Hollywood wouldn’t fund, we are told, because of its gay subject. On the evidence of the movie it seems clear they wouldn’t fund it because of the way it portrays the flamboyant pianist – Douglas is majestically reptilian as Liberace and has clearly … Read more
9 June 2014-06-09
Out in the UK This Week The Past (Artificial Eye, cert 12, Blu-ray/DVD) After Fireworks Wednesday and A Separation, something more muted from Asghar Farhadi, a drama set in France rather than Iran as the previous two were, about Marie (Bérénice Bejo) a beautiful but flighty woman finally giving the kiss-off to ex-husband Ahmad (Ali Mosaffa) while lining up a new man, Samir (Tahar Rahim, the lead in A Prophet). It sounds like a soap and it’s undeniable that Farhadi’s genius knack for naturalism seems to have slightly abandoned him this time. What makes The Past still unmissable is the devious plotting – the ex seems like such a nice guy, the new man … Read more
11 April 2016-04-11
Out This Week Star Wars: The Force Awakens (Disney, cert 12) You don’t go to a Rolling Stones gig to hear new tunes. And you don’t turn out for Star Wars – reboot or not – for new stories. And yet. JJ Abrams, having done a remarkable job on the first Star Trek rejig, does bring lots that’s fresh to Star Wars in a film that seemed more remarkable the more I thought about it. At first it appeared to be a case of “same but different”, with every new thing and new character an echo of something from the first three films (numbers IV to VI) – Adam Driver’s Kylo Ren is … Read more
6 January 2014-01-06
Out in the UK This Week Upstream Colour (Metrodome, cert 18, Blu-ray/DVD) Shane Carruth’s belated follow-up to his brilliant 2004 film Primer is a weird mix of body-horror and love story, the story of a woman (a rather good Amy Seimetz) infected by some parasitic worm who is hypnotised and then robbed while under the influence. Well, that’s the first bit anyway. After that she seems to be falling for some guy she’s met (played in a bit of Ben Affleck casting by Carruth himself), the whole thing told in the language not of film but of advertising – overlaps, quick cuts, montages, while a Sigur Ros-style soundtrack (a band advertisers love) bleeps … Read more
23 February 2015-02-23
Out in the UK This Week Serena (StudioCanal, cert 15) After Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle, Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper clearly have decided they can do no wrong, and so overreach themselves with a Depression-era Gone with the Wind-level epic about a wilful woman and a powerful man thrust together against a backdrop of urgent social blah. Susanne Bier directs, and it’s clear that the further this highly talented Dane gets away from the boilerhouse domestic dramas she’s so good at (Brothers and After the Wedding), the bigger her films, the less powerful they become. There is a lot to like here – the mist rolling over the Smoky Mountains locations where … 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
22 February 2016-02-22
Out This Week Spectre (Fox, cert 12) Trope is what they should have called this film, rather than Spectre, though god knows the spectre of so many old Bond movies hangs over a film which, in reviewing terms is worth about two out of five stars if seen as a standalone film, but four as a mash-up. The usual recent writing team of John Logan, Neal Purvis and Robert Wade (Bond writers since The World Is Not Enough) is augmented this time by playwright Jez Butterworth, whose knack for snappy dialogue made Edge of Tomorrow into something worth listening to as well as watching. Here, this quartet send Bond off to Mexico for … Read more
7 December 2015-12-07
Out This Week Trainwreck (Universal, cert 15) Amy Schumer takes that slightly fey, dizzy-smart, passive-aggressive female comedy type (Greta Gerwig, Lena Dunham, Jenny Slate, Desiree Akhavan) and sticks a rocket up front and back passages in this very New York and very funny comedy. Schumer is the journalist on a self-important magazine sent off on a sports assignment even though she has no interest in … in fact it barely matters what the plot is, since all it’s there for is to give Schumer enough space to play keepie-uppie with the comedy ball. This she does, riffing hard on modern living as it affects a sexually active woman in the 21st century. When you … Read more
26 September 2016-09-26
Out This Week Love & Friendship (Curzon, cert U) Sly arch social observer Whit Stillman meets a very similar property in Jane Austen, in his adaptation of her novella Lady Susan – about a dangerous sexbomb widow trying to get both herself and her daughter married off to money. As with all Stillman films it is immensely talky, and Kate Beckinsale is in it too, as she was in 1998’s The Last Days of Disco, and is rather excellent as a younger, sexier weaponised version of Austen’s Mrs Bennet, mouth always on the go, eyes all over the room as she jockeys for social position. It’s a fiendishly plotted thing, all stratetic plays by … Read more
3 October 2016-10-03
Out This Week When Marnie Was There (StudioCanal, cert U) Directed by Hiromasa Yonebayashi, the guy at Studio Ghibli who isn’t Hayao Miyazaki or Isao Takahata, this is Japanese animation studio’s final, so Ghibli say, film. And it’s a typically sweet, anglophile story about a typically bereft child called Anna finding typical solace in the supernatural realm – a ghost, called Marnie, who lives in the big deserted house over the bay from Anna’s aunt and uncle. Adapted from Joan G Robinson’s Norfolk-set classic, it’s slow-moving and less loaded with drama than Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies or Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, but it’s undeniably sweet, and charms with its familiar Ghibli-style animation – 2D, … Read more
