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 film that I’d just about got my head around, when off it went in another quite a different and shocking direction.

The Imposter – at Amazon

Grabbers (Sony, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD)

If you could cross the TV comedy series Father Ted with a big-budget Hollywood monster movie, this no-budget Irish tale of pissed-up yokels having a close encounter of the absurd kind would be it. This is a superbly cast and directed film and deserves to become a real cult gem.

Grabbers – at Amazon

You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet (StudioCanal, cert PG, DVD)

Anyone with a love of the arch, the meta, the theatrical will love Alain Resnais’s masterly retelling of the Orpheus and Eurydice story as a play within a play within a play, embracing a stack of interesting themes, not least the ageing of the boomer generation, one self-defined by youth. It’s got a cast of big names, headed by Michel Piccoli, and shows that even at the age of 90, Resnais, director of 1959’s Hiroshima Mon Amour, has still got it.

You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet – at Amazon

Take This Waltz (StudioCanal, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD)

The always excellent Michelle Williams plays the dithery wife being tempted by the artist over the road, while Seth Rogen plays it straight as her apron-wearing, recipe-writing stay-at-home house-husband in a drama from director Sarah Polley which, like her more potent Away from Her, examines a relationship under stress.

Take This Waltz – at Amazon

Partners in Crime (StudioCanal, cert 12, DVD)

The French director Pascal Thomas takes an Agatha Christie story, adds 1960s sports cars, glam European locations and loads of Hart to Hart “playboy detective” nonsense then leaves boulevardiers Catherine Frot and André Dussolier to get on with it. Gorgeous to look at, and sleep through.

Partners in Crime – at Amazon

Jackpot (Metrodome, cert 15, DVD)

This is more Joe Orton than Jo Nesbo, who wrote the original book, a jokey oompah-oompah about a bunch of criminals who win the lottery and then start killing each other. It’s Scandinavian, it’s bloody and if you’ve not OD’d on Tarantino and Guy Ritchie, there are worse and far less entertaining ways of watching people die.

Jackpot – at Amazon



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© Steve Morrissey 2013


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