DVD/Blu-ray/Digital Reviews

7 March 2016-03-07

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Tye Sheridan, Logan Miller and Sarah Dumont in Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse

Out This Week Steve Jobs (Universal, cert 15) Walking in to watch this film on the last day of the London Film Festival, I was struck by the number of people in the cinema, waiting for the lights to go down, who were absorbed in their tablets, phablets, phones and whatever. We all live in Steve Jobs’s world now, and the case could be argued that collectively we have become those people in Apple’s famous Ridley Scott Big Brother advert of 1984, the ones striving to be freed from tyranny by technology. Coming at this film from the other direction, there’s the Google-financed movie The Internship, starring Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson, which failed … Read more

29 February 2016-02-29

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Domhnall Gleeson and Saoirse Ronan slow dance in Brooklyn

Out This Week James White (Soda, cert 15) Josh Mond was a producer on Martha Marcy May Marlene and now makes his feature debut with the sort of grown-up seriously accomplished filigree drama that more or less guaranteed no cinema release in the UK – wot, no guys in costumes? Instead here it is in what used to be the ignominious “straight to DVD” category. There’s a long ramble to be had here about the best films these days being more likely not to get theatrical releases, but let’s not go into that now. Instead let’s take a look at the film, which stars a seriously good “from the inside out” performance by … Read more

22 February 2016-02-22

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Daniel Craig and Léa Seydoux in Spectre

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

15 February 2016-02-15

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Abigail Hardingham, Cian Barry and Fiona O'Shaughnessy in Nina Forever

Out This Week Nina Forever (StudioCanal, cert 18) If you ever saw the funny, dark and intelligent UK TV series Utopia – conspiracy nerds discover there really is a gigantic conspiracy going on – you’ll already know Fiona O’Shaughnessy, who played the mysterious and sexy lynchpin Jessica Hyde. She’s mysterious and sexy again in this comic horror about a dead woman (O’Shaughnessy) materialising zombie-like in the bed where her clearly-not-grieving-enough ex (Cian Barry) is making the two-backed beast with the new girl (Abigail Hardingham) he’s hooked up with. These two are loved up, but their new relationship has to weather repeated re-appearances by the crack-voiced dead girlfriend, who develops the habit of turning up unannounced … Read more

8 February 2016-02-08

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Gemma Arterton and Fabrice Luchini in Gemma Bovery

Out This Week Gemma Bovery (Soda, cert 15) Gemma Arterton plays the English belle getting French baker Fabrice Luchini in a tizz in this adaptation of the Posy Simmonds graphic novel which first appeared in The Guardian as a weekly cartoon strip. And very cartoon-strippy it is too, Arterton all tippy-toes sex appeal as a modern-day version of Flaubert’s hot-gusseted Madame Bovary, Luchini pulling a series of faces that Benny Hill would be proud of as the “no fool like an old fool” looking on haplessly as the new arrival in the French idyll forsakes lovely, broke husband Jason Flemyng and sets her hat at local rotter Niels Schneider. If it all feels … Read more

1 February 2016-02-01

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Emily Blunt in Sicario

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

25 January 2016-01-26

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Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard in Macbeth

Out This Week Macbeth (StudioCanal, cert 15) Director Justin Kurzel must have hired every smoke machine in the UK for this adaptation of “the Scottish play” about a warlike laird driven crazy, either by his own ambition or by supernatural forces. But the relentless visual effects, dark, swirling lighting and fabulous performances by Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard – as the high-born couple hoping to go just that little bit higher – aren’t the best thing about the film. That’s the superb filleting job that Todd Luiso, Jacob Koskoff and Michael Lesslie have done on Shakespeare’s original play, which has had many obscure references removed and has done away with any language that … Read more

18 January 2016-01-18

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Emma Stone and Joaquin Phoenix in Irrational Man

Out This Week 99 Homes (StudioCanal, cert 15) The subprime meltdown done as Faustian pact, with Andrew Garfield as a naive jobless carpenter going to work for the unscrupulous property developer – it’s Michael Shannon vaping like a maniac – who repossessed his home. Before long, Garfield too is behaving like a monster, or heading that way, in writer/director Ramin Bahrani’s latest long cool look at life at the bottom (see Man with Cart or Goodbye Solo). Having been a lacklustre Spider-Man, Garfield has something to prove and does so in spades, aware of the fact that in Shannon he’s in the presence of serious acting muscle. No one can ultimately win against the … Read more

11 January 2016-01-11

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Aomi Muyock and Karl Glusman

Out This Week The Diary of a Teenage Girl (E One, cert 18) The 1970s are the setting for this intriguingly 1990s-flavoured semi-comedy about a teenage girl (Bel Powley) who starts having an affair with the randy boyfriend (Alexander Skarsgård) of her fairly lackadaisical mother (Kristen Wiig). Taking the now familiar line that the 1970s attitude to sexual liberation bordered on the creepy, it would in fact be no sort of film at all if it had been made back then – “nothing to see here” and all that. The 1990s flavours come from the fact that Powley is something of a budding cartoonist, with Robert Crumb and Aline Kominsky her countercultural idols, … Read more

21 December 2015-12-21

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Rupert Friend and Hannah Ware in Hitman: Agent 47

Out This Week North V South (Metrodome, cert 18) For reasons beyond the scope of human wit, the British gangster thriller has become a Christmas fixture, perhaps because it’s endangered, like the brussel sprout. This year’s front-runner takes the gang battle format – there’s a northern mob led by Bernard Hill, and a southern lot led by Steven Berkoff – adds a Romeo and Juliet romance subplot in the shape of a fixer for Hill (Elliott Tittensor) and the daughter of Berkoff (Charlotte Hope), then loads up with wrong’uns (Keith Allen, Geoff Bell, Freema Agyeman) and an exotic (Dom Monot in an Udo Kier role as a raging transvestite psychopath hitman), shakes and … Read more