Month: October 2014

13 October 2014-10-13

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Viktor Bout awaiting trial in The Notorious Viktor Bout

Home Entertainment Out in the UK This Week Kidnapped (cert 18, DVD/digital) From Spaniard Miguel Angel Vivas a home invasion horror which understands that for the film to work we have to be entirely on the side of the invaded. And also, that we have to feel their shock, disorientation and fear. He achieves both brilliantly in this brutal, relatively short film that takes place over one evening and does a lot with long takes, then switches pace with some excellent split-screen, up-close points of view. It’s the standard family – mum, dad, whingey teenage girl and, eventually, her boyfriend. But it’s far from a standard film. Where Vivas came from, I don’t know … Read more

Ghosts

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Ai Qin Lin in Ghosts

The British film-maker Nick Broomfield is well known for his documentaries made in the teeth of adversity, his working practice often being to get into someone’s face and then stay there while they duck and dive (see The Leader, His Driver and the Driver’s Wife, the 1991 doc on South African white supremacist Eugene Terre’Blanche). Either that, or he “dead chairs” his subject – as news people do when an interviewee doesn’t or won’t turn up – and makes a documentary about the documentary he’s trying to make (see Tracking Down Maggie: The Unofficial Biography of Margaret Thatcher). In fact he’s made something of a specialty out of these two practices, to the point where … Read more

Candy

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Abbie Cornish and Heath Ledger in Candy

Though there’s plenty of people who take drugs for entirely recreational purposes and never go to hell in any sort of handcart, there’s not much drama to be had from making movies about them. So instead drugs movies tend to be about people hitting the buffers. Candy does at least do it with a roster of good Australian actors, who are required to pull out most of the thespian organ stops as they make the familiar journey – from “we’re just fooling around” to “oops, someone’s dead”, calling in between at all the usual stations on the degradation line. And luckily for us, it’s Heath Ledger and Abbie Cornish who brighten up the journey on … Read more

6 October 2014-10-06

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Tye Sheridan and Nicolas Cage in Joe

Out in the UK This Week Joe (Curzon, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD) I like Nicolas Cage in bad films, so going into this one, having heard it was good, I was slightly wary. But both him and the film are excellent – he’s the anger-prone decent guy who takes a young lad (up-and-coming Tye Sheridan) under his wing after he and his dad (Gary Poulter) pitch up looking for work on Joe’s (that’s Cage) tree-poisoning detail. Yes, tree poisoning. That’s a telling touch in a film that’s an exercise in the twisted Southern genre – derelicts and whores, low-lifes and attack dogs – director David Gordon Green back, to some extent, in George Washington territory, telling … Read more

Eragon

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Edward Speelers in Eragon

Here be dragons. Dungeons and Dragons, to be more specific. Because that’s what this British Lord of the Rings knock-off most resembles. The 2000 film also heavily featured Jeremy Irons, who moved heaven and earth to save it but could not ultimately fight the sheer dead weight of the script and its deadly fantasy game holdovers. Something similar is going on here, with Irons once again mustering all his considerable charisma to try and float a sodden barque, a tale of a fine-limbed young farm lad (Edward Speelers) who has somehow sprung noble from the poor lumpen volk, his nice-boy accent setting him off against the ooh-aarghs of fellow proles, a token of … Read more