Reviews of all the latest DVD releases
Beowulf (12), new on DVD through Blockbuster.
A second look at Beowulf now that it’s on DVD confirms first impressions from watching it at the cinema.
Namely, just what a great film this could have been if only Ray Winstone hadn’t been used to voice Beowulf.
Robert Zemeckis uses the same CGI techniques he used to great effect in The Polar Express.
And there are some stunning moments, not least Beowulf’s big punch-up with Grendel in the Mead Hall and his great battle with the dragon at the end.
There is an astonishing degree of life and movement to the computerised characters, and the tale romps along vividly and gorily.
But why oh why did Zemeckis allow Winstone to reduce Beowulf to such a yob. OK, Beowulf was bound to be gruff and unpolished, but Winstone’s mistake is that his East-End brand of uncouth also makes him unconsciously comic.
“I’ve come to kill your monstah!” prompts giggles, not stirrings of admiration. The tale is of Beowulf’s battle against his own pride. Winstone reduces it to the great man’s battle to be taken remotely seriously.
Ancient heroes really do need to be heroic.
A shame when there is so much else that is genuinely outstanding about this film and its conception.
Phil Hewitt
/blob/ DVD rental supplied by Blockbuster. For details of other new DVD releases see www.blockbuster.co.uk.
Hallam Foe (18), new on DVD through Blockbuster.
Hallam Foe is billed as a magical story of redemptive love, loss and life on the rooftops of Edinburgh.
In fact, it’s the story of a weirdo loner who flits around the skyline spying on a woman who reminds him of his mother whom he believes was murdered.
Not much magic here.
Jamie Bell manages to keep Hallam just about the right side of likeable, but there’s little otherwise to recommend in this strange hour and a half of twisted minds.
After falling out his with stepmother (whom he believes to be the murderer), Hallam flits off to Edinburgh where he becomes infatuated with Kate (Sophia Myles), particularly when she gives him a job in a hotel.
Hallam, a loser without a single healthy motive in his body, inveigles his way into Kate’s life, and it isn’t long before she’s rather obligingly wearing his dead mum’s dress for him - which is roughly where all viewer interest finally fades.
Phil Hewitt.
/blob/ DVD rental supplied by Blockbuster. For details of other new DVD releases see www.blockbuster.co.uk.
Jump (15), new on DVD through Blockbuster.
It’s not a film that quite conveys the significance it’s claiming for the events it shows.
But in a low-key way, Jump - the story of a first trial of a Jew by rising Nazism - is still an absorbing watch, even if at times the acting is distinctly stilted.
Photographer Philippe Halsman became one of the most sought-after celebrity portrait artists of his generation, creating memorable images of Marilyn Monroe and co jumping in midair for LIFE magazine.
But Jump is the tale of the days before he became famous in the US - the tale of his nightmare experience in Austria when he was jailed for the murder of his father.
Halsman senior, a ghastly, thuggish bully, slips and falls while he and Philippe are hiking in the Alps. Philippe (Ben Silverstone) goes for help. By the time he gets back, his father has had his head neatly split open with a hiking axe.
The head is gruesomely served up on a platter as the main exhibit in the travesty of a trial which then follows. Anti-semitism is pulling all the strings; and Philippe helps no one, least of all himself, when he lets his contempt show.
His lawyer (Patrick Swayze) gambles all by throwing the prejudice back in the court’s face - a moment when at last the film comes alive in the way you’d wish it’d done from the start.
But even if the film doesn’t carry the passion or power you’d want, it’s still an intriguing story moderately well told.
Phil Hewitt.
/blob/ DVD rental supplied by Blockbuster. For details of other new DVD releases see www.blockbuster.co.uk.
Across The Universe (12), new on DVD through Blockbuster.
Meet Jude and Lucy. Also hanging around are Jo-Jo, Sadie, Maxwell, Martha and Prudence – in fact just about anyone who bears the name of a character in a Beatles song.
And yet, contrived though it undoubtedly is, director Julie Taymor’s film works wonderfully well, never less than entertaining and often hugely impressive.
At its heart is the tale of docker Jude (Jim Sturgess) who leaves 1960s Liverpool (and girlfriend) behind in search of his estranged father in the United States – an unsatisfying encounter off which he bounces into peace-protest New York and the arms of Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood).
Against a background of civil unrest, mind-altering drugs and general disquiet rising to anger at what’s happening in Vietnam, the two play out their love story to the soundtrack of the Beatles.
Every now and again, they – or someone near them – slips into song, musical interludes which are consistently beautifully choreographed.
As Jude leaves Liverpool, he promises his soon-to-be-ex All My Loving. Once in the States breaks into I’ve Just Seen A Face. He’s seen Lucy and life won’t be the same again.
There are curious cameos from Bono and Eddie Izzard, but it’s the leads – plus the imaginative staging of the rollcall of classics – which give the film its charm.
It seems the movie pretty much bypassed the cinemas. Let’s hope it gets the success it deserves on DVD. It’s a cracker, memorable and beautiful, a tribute and yet original.
Phil Hewitt
/blob/ DVD rental supplied by Blockbuster. For details of other new DVD releases see www.blockbuster.co.uk.
Once (15), new on DVD through Blockbuster. Guy meets girl on the streets of Dublin and together they bring out the best in each other - a simple tale superbly told in John Carney’s beautiful film.
The film rightly won the best song Oscar with Falling Slowly, all part of a package which charms from first to last, subtle, understated, haunting and richly enjoyable.
The unnamed man is a busker lacking the confidence to sing (let alone, record) his own songs; the unnamed girl is a Czech immigrant with a young child.
Together they start to make music, the film’s highlight coming when they amble into a music shop and piece together their Oscar winner.
Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova are the stars, musicians rather than actors which probably accounts for the unstuffy naturalness of their performance - that and the fact that they are long-standing mates in real life.
The man needs to get his life back together, so does the girl... but this is a film which refuses the obvious at every turn and is all the better for it.
Emboldened by each other, they assemble a band to record an album... but will they take the next step?
Watch and see - and discover a film with cult classic written all over it.
Phil Hewitt
/blob/ DVD rental supplied by Blockbuster. For details of other new DVD releases see
www.blockbuster.co.uk.
No Reservations, (PG), (104 mins), new on DVD through Blockbuster. No Reservations loses little of its appeal on transfer to the small screen - a romcom with a bit of an edge, but not enough to make too many demands or to make it any less than wholly predictable.
Which isn’t to say that it isn’t enjoyable. It is. It really is, with
Catherine Zeta-Jones on top form as New York chef Kate Armstrong.
A control freak who recites recipes at her shrink, she’s a perfectionist who wants absolutely everything her own way - and gets it... until now.
Two things happen which change everything, leaving her suddenly suspecting that there’s much more to life than what happens in her kitchen.
Kate’s sister is killed in a road-crash, leaving Kate as sole guardian of her little niece Zoe (Abigail Breslin) and so plunging Kate into a world she doesn’t know.
Just at the same time, sous-chef Nick (Aaron Eckhart) joins Kate’s staff, an opera-loving, pleasure-seeking kind of guy who offers Kate challenges of a different kind.
Between them - despite all the resistance - Zoe and Nick start to work their charms on Kate.
Breslin is super sweet without being sickly so as Zoe; and Eckhart is enjoyable as the free spirit knocking at Kate’s previously-locked door.
But it’s Zeta-Jones who’s the real star, nicely showing us the slow melting of the ice maiden. Undemanding and probably not remotely memorable, No Reservations is still a tasty little dish, quality ingredients simmering nicely together.
Phil Hewitt
/blob/ DVD rental supplied by Blockbuster. For details of other new DVD releases see
www.blockbuster.co.uk.
Evening, (12), new on DVD through Blockbuster.
Apart from a brief interlude chasing imaginary butterflies, Ann (Vanessa Redgrave) spends the entire film in bed rather beautifully dying.
While her daughters (Natasha Richardson and Toni Collette) are downstairs bickering, Ann is travelling back half a century to revisit her one weekend with the true love of her life.
Films don’t come more leisurely than this, and the first half is painfully slow.
But to a large extent, all the scene-setting pays off in a superbly-crafted last hour, with Claire Danes excellent as the young Ann.
Intermittently involving at first, the film becomes genuinely absorbing as the long-distant weekend turns to tragedy.
In the closing moments Meryl Streep crops up in the present in a
lovely little cameo linking then and now - and then Ann quietly and finally slips away, her story told in her head to no one except herself.
Lost longing and lost love loom large in a tale which the daughters sense without seeing - and the whole thing wins you over with its elegaic charm.
Just a shame it takes so long to get going.
Phil Hewitt
/blob/ DVD rental supplied by Blockbuster. For details of other new DVD releases see www.blockbuster.co.uk.
Death Sentence (18), new on DVD through Blockbuster.
Mild-mannered decent-dad executive Nick Hume makes the transition to shaven-headed gun-wielding vigilante rather too easily in James Wan’s gory thriller.
It’s one of a number of implausibilities which puncture the film - not least among which is the way characters continue to wander around despite being riddled with bullets.
But none of that takes away from the fact that this is still an absorbing movie with an intriguing premise.
Hume’s cherished son is brutally murdered at a petrol station - the innocent victim of a gangland initiation killing.
The family is shattered - but even more so when it emerges that the correct legal channels offer almost no hope of justice.
And that’s when Hume (Kevin Bacon) opts out and decides to take the law into his own hands... a big, big mistake.
In exacting revenge, he unwittingly declares war on the whole gang, at which point not even the police can help him.
But just when the tension is at its height, director Wan misses a trick. There’s an obvious moment when the film should have ended - and it would have been a great ending.
Instead, Wan carries on for 20 minutes of bloodbath - a decision which soon dissipates most of the interest. Not even a touch of ambiguity in the final moments can save it.
But whatever the frustrations, Death Sentence is still one of those films that stays with you for a long time after the credits roll.
Phil Hewitt
/blob/ DVD rental supplied by Blockbuster. For details of other new DVD releases see www.blockbuster.co.uk.
3:10 To Yuma (15), new on DVD through Blockbuster. Released through Lionsgate Films.
There’s just something about Russell Crowe that makes him a natural star.
The camera loves him and he loves it as he turns in yet another mesmerising performance, this time as the bandit Ben Wade in James Mangold’s superb western.
As ever, Crowe has huge on-screen presence, but as ever, this is no one-dimensional performance.
Crowe’s Wade is a brutal, vicious bandit who ruthlessly kills to stay ahead, but Crowe’s skill is to hint a strange kind of redemption.
The key is in the intense, fascinating relationship Wade shares with his captor, small-time rancher Dan Evans (Christian Bale).
Evans, heavily in debt, volunteers to help escort Wade to the prison train, the 3:10 to Yuma of the title - a perilous journey with Wade’s gang hot on their heels and eager to spring him.
Evans, though, is a man on a mission, driven not just by debt, but also his own shady past and the example he’s setting to the son who’s grabbed a berth on their dangerous trek.
Bale rises to Crowe-esque heights - two men from opposite sides of the law who slowly form a powerful bond which shapes both their destinites.
As 3:10 approaches and as Wade’s gang nears, this is movie-making of the highest order - tense, thrilling stuff built on the back of two outstanding performances.Phil Hewitt
/blob/ DVD rental supplied by Blockbuster. For details of other new DVD releases see www.blockbuster.co.uk.
Like Minds (15), new on DVD through Blockbuster.
Everyone’s trying to outwit everyone else in this murky thriller in which like minds play mind games.
Forensic psychologist Sally (Toni Collette) is brought in to question teenager Alex (Eddie Redmayne) who is accused of murdering his oddbod roommate Nigel (Tom Sturridge) at their exclusive school.
As she questions him, the warped nature of their relationship unfurls - a relationship founded in morbid fascinations and medieval notions of brotherhood and dominance.
But always in the background lingers the question: Is Sally getting remotely near the truth?
Repeatedly the logic seems to stumble; suddenly there is not just one death, but three - a fact which really ought to have emerged far sooner to the story to make sense.
But there’s something oddly compelling about this dark tale - even if Collette Brit accent wobbles repeatedly.
It’s strange that psychologist Sally turns detective, but for all its failings this is a film which still drags you in - and then stitches up with the cleverest of endings.
Or will you spot it coming?
Phil Hewitt.
/blob/ DVD rental supplied by Blockbuster. For details of other new DVD releases see www.blockbuster.co.uk.
Knocked Up, (15), (129 mins), new on DVD through Blockbuster.
Knocked Up, new on DVD, loses none of its appeal on the small screen - a romcom which dares to be different.
Sex and pregnancy come first. Next comes the search for romance and a reason to be together.
TV floorgirl/presenter Allison (Katherine Heigl) ends up in bed with professional laybout Ben (Seth Rogen) when she goes out on the town to celebrate her promotion.
Next morning, she’s horrified at the big fat hairy lazy lump in her bed; two months later, she’s appalled to discover she’s pregnant - which is when she decides the unhappy couple need to get to know each other.
Heigl is superb as she shows initial disgust turning to tenderness; Rogen is no less impressive as the slob with a heart of gold.
The pattern is just a touch predictable - attraction followed by repulsion followed by attraction followed by fall-out followed by reconcilation.
But the consistent laughs along the way make this a film to enjoy, completely un-PC and all the better for that.
Phil Hewitt
/blob/ DVD rental supplied by Blockbuster. For details of other new DVD releases see www.blockbuster.co.uk.
La Vie En Rose (12), new on DVD through Blockbuster.
Marion Cotillard gives a stunning performance as French singer Edith Piaf in Olivier Dahan’s flawed biopic.
Dahan shows Piaf as a quite ghastly woman, the product of an even ghastlier upbringing - a vulgar woman who overcame the hardest of starts in life by being as tough as they come.
But there’s another side which Cotillard hints at when Piaf learns of the death of her boxer boyfriend in a plane crash.
Throughout, Cotillard is mesmerising as the singer who refuses to give in, who lives it up and battles through, increasingly wrecked and increasingly crippled.
Put it all together rather more chronologically and this would have been a great film.
Instead Dahan interleaves scenes from her childhood with scenes from her final years - an approach which works well enough until he throws into the mix her middle years, a decision which makes a mess of it all.
There’s no compelling reason for the time-flitting which ends up an irritating distraction - which is a crime really when there’s an actress as remarkable Marion Cotillard in the central role.
Phil Hewitt
/blob/ DVD rental supplied by Blockbuster. For details of other new DVD releases see
www.blockbuster.co.uk.
Hairspray, new on DVD through Blockbuster.
Inevitably the small screen does this big film no favours at all, but Hairspray, new on DVD, is still a huge treat, comfortably one of the year’s best movies.
You smile at the start and you smile right the way through this gorgeous upbeat musical - a film with one of the best openings ever as tubby Tracy gets out of bed and greets 1962 Baltimore, singing as she does so.
It’s a great start - and the rest doesn’t disappoint, with some terrific numbers and some equally impressive choreography and acting.
There are plenty of right-on messages about daring to be different, being yourself and fighting for what’s right - all against the background of the unstoppable tide of racial integration.
But it’s the sheer joy of the whole thing that carries you along, a charming story of a young girl (Nikki Blonsky) dreaming the dream and taking everyone else along with her.
And if that’s not enough, there is John Travolta in drag as Tracy’s mum, a wonderful, touching performance of a big woman learning that it’s OK to be... well, rather strange.
Travolta enjoys the film’s best two duets; first when his daughter takes him on the town to introduce him to all the delights of the 1960s and second when Christopher Walken as his/her husband rebuilds a few bridges as they croon under the washing line.
The whole thing is great - a lovely tonic and hugely enjoyable.
Phil Hewitt
/blob/ DVD rental supplied by Blockbuster. For details of other new DVD releases see
www.blockbuster.co.uk.
Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix (12), new on DVD through Blockbuster.
Five films in, and You Know Who still can’t be named. Five films in, and You Know still hasn’t really turned up at the party.
The film’s ambition is set firmly at treading water. You’re no further advanced at the end of it than you were at the start.
True, Voldemort claims a victim, but the death of Sirius Black is no great loss to the series. He’s comfortably the saga’s least interesting character.
Harry tries to gee things up a bit in the final sequence by announcing that at least they’ve got something worth fighting for, but presumably they could have worked that out four films ago.
But fortunately this film isn’t a total dead loss - for when the series is done and dusted, this is the one we’ll look back on and say this is the moment when Daniel Radcliffe came of age.
In all four previous outings, he’s been comfortably out-acted by Rupert Grint and Emma Watson as Ron and Hermione.
But this time, with the advent of angst and anger, Harry comes alive as a character, Radcliffe delivering by far his best performance so far - the kind of performance which probably opened the gates for his superlative appearance in TV’s My Boy Jack.
Back at Hogwarts, though, Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix is a disappointment, beautifully done in many respects but otherwise undermined by the fact that it’s nothing more than yet another in a series which is seeming increasingly bogged down.
Phil Hewitt
/blob/ DVD rental supplied by Blockbuster. For details of other new DVD releases see www.blockbuster.co.uk.
Not Here To Be Loved (15), new on DVD through Blockbuster. Two lonely hearts come together at a weekly tango class in Stephane Brize’s mini-masterpiece of tender understatement.
Jean-Claude (Patrick Chesnais) is a world-weary 50-something bailiff, dragged down by everything around him not least his aggravating, bullying father.
Francoise (Anne Consigny) is a young woman on the verge of marrying a self-obsessed would-be writer.
Jean-Claude wants to get fit; Francoise is preparing for her marriage. For their own reasons they start to tango, little suspecting the pleasures they’ll find when they tango together.
Chesnais is brilliant at conveying all the awkwardness and reserve of the habitual loner; Consigny is equally adept at conveying her own character’s mix of doubt and innocence.
Put them together and they feel a safety in each other’s company which soon develops... despite the manifest obstacles which stand in their way.
As in the very best French films, not a lot happens, but it happens beautifully, teasingly and charmingly - a film which draws you in straightaway, makes you care about the characters and never puts a foot wrong in the spell it casts.
This is the French cinema at its subtle and engaging best.
Phil Hewitt
/blob/ DVD rental supplied by Blockbuster. For details of other new DVD releases see
www.blockbuster.co.uk.
The Night Of The Sunflowers (15), new on DVD through Blockbuster. A brutal murder and an horrific attempted rape set disparate lives on paths of fatal convergence in director Jorge Sanchez-Cabezudo’s excellent Spanish thriller.
Two warring neighbours in an abandoned village, a caver exploring a local find, his girlfriend, a soon-to-retire police chief, his wayward son-in-law and a travelling salesmen are the ingredients in Sanchez-Cabezudo’s potent mix.
Coincidence brings them together and then a ghastly mistake lights the fuse in this mini-masterpiece of suspense.
Sanchez-Cabezudo’s technique is to let each life unravel a little and then rewind things when two lives intersect, layering up a pattern of seeming inevitability as things go horrendously wrong for all concerned.
Carmelo Gomez, Celso Bugallo, Judith Diakhate, Manuel Moron, Mariano Alameda and Walter Vidarte are all impressive as brutality and bad luck link them together.
But the greatest skill is in the editing as each mini-drama contributes to an overall drama in a grim tapestry which grips right from the off.
Phil Hewitt
/blob/ DVD rental supplied by Blockbuster. For details of other new DVD releases see
www.blockbuster.co.uk.
Tell No One (15), new on DVD through Blockbuster.
Harlan Corben’s best-seller crosses the Atlantic very comfortably and ends up making much more sense in Guillaume Canet's French version.
The basic situation remains the same.
Dr Alexandre Beck, eight years after his wife’s apparent murder, starts to get emails from her telling him to tell no one that she is back in the land of the living.
The problem for Beck is compounded by the fact that her re-emergence coincides with the very moment at which the police become even more convinced than ever that he, the hubby, is the murderer.
But where the French version is superior is in the way Canet unravels it all for a much more satisfying ending - one that fully justifies the liberties the French have taken.
Corben’s last-page revelation seems a little bit of an anti-climax, particularly as he’s just glossed over the best scene in the book.
Canet’s strength is to resurrect that scene for the film’s closing moments, ditching the bizarre confession altogether.
The result is a film better than the book, with a surer sense of impact.
Beck (François Cluzet) is still grieving for his wife Margot (Marie-José Croze). Canet brings out the apparent impossibility of her return and the looming threat of his arrest - an arrest which could prevent him from saving her second time around.
The tension grows, and somehow in the French you can forgive much more easily the odd remaining silliness in the plot.
Phil Hewitt.
/blob/ DVD rental supplied by Blockbuster. For details of other new DVD releases see www.blockbuster.co.uk.
Perfect Stranger, (15), new on DVD through Blockbuster. Investigative reporter Rowena Price (Halle Berry) goes undercover in cyberspace to track down her mate’s killer.
Her on-line target is top advertising executive Harrison Hill (Bruce Willis) - a man she’s also trying to trap by getting a job, under a different alias, as a temp in his empire.
Murky stuff which gets murkier by the minute as the two worlds - real and cyber - threaten to collide.
Just who is Rowena talking to online? Is someone else out there?
It’s complicated stuff which takes a fair amount of unravelling, owing its origins to Rowena’s own troubled childhood.
But it’s more than enough to hold your attention for a reasonably entertaining couple of hours of shadow-boxing and second-guessing - an effective thriller with twists ever more twisted as Rowena seems increasingly ensnared in a web of her own making.
Not a film that will leave a lasting impressive, but certainly a film to enjoy while it’s teasing your mind.
Phil Hewitt.
/blob/ DVD rental supplied by Blockbuster. For details of other new DVD releases see
www.blockbuster.co.uk.
Weeds, available on DVD from Lions Gate Home Entertainment.
It really doesn’t take long for these weeds to grow on you, wrapping you up with a quirky series which soon grabs with its weird view of the world.
In the fictional affluent Los Angeles suburb of Agrestic, Nancy Botwin (Mary-Louise Parker) struggles to make ends meet following the sudden death of her husband Judah (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) - until she finds a novel way to keep the wolf from the door.
While one son is hopping in and out of bed and the other son is gazing at camcorder film of his dead dad, Nancy is selling weed wherever she can.
Yes, not everything is at it seems in Agrestic.
The opening sequence shows everyone falling into line and running the same routines in this seemingly-perfect suburb.
But you don’t have to scratch too far below the surface to see the mixed-up, muddled lifes - a great source for a fairly gentle kind of comedy, but also full of plenty of poignant moments which are generally well-delivered.
For DVD viewing, the half-hour episodes are ideal. You can snatch one or chill out to several. Weeds, it seems, is addictive. It’s appealing, witty and very, very different - and well worth catching up with.
Phil Hewitt
Fast Food Nation (15), new on DVD from Tartan Video.
Fast Food Nation is a revolting film, a truly revolting film, a film which looks at America’s fast-food industry from every aspect and finds it grossly wanting in each.
From the corrupt executives who cover up poor food-processing to the immigrant workers bullied and maimed in the factories, it offers a stomach-churning picture of mass food production for instant gratification.
Excrement makes its way into the burgers; workers’ limbs are ripped off; and so too are the consumers, unaware of the gruesome processes which lie behind the smiling face of the big companies who churn out such filth.
The film pulls no punches. The film of animals being slaughtered and disembowelled will doubtless increase veggie numbers.
But does the film work? Just about yes, but there is scope for plenty of reservations.
Fast Food Nation is based on investigative journalist Eric Schlosser’s shocking book, a book which might more naturally have become a documentary - with little box office appeal.
Instead, director Richard Linklater turns it into a fictionalised tale of a particular bunch of people at a particular/fictional meat-processing plant - a decision which brings an even bigger risk.
The general becomes the specific. Detractors will say this is just one plant and a fictional one at that - and so the impact is weakened.
In the event, the film seems a compromise. You have to remind yourself that Linklater and Schlosser are wanting us to believe that this is typical of the whole industry - which is just too much of a leap of faith, even for a veggie like me.
Even so, this is a film which offers plenty of food for thought.
Phil Hewitt
Riding The Bullet, (15), new on DVD through Blockbuster.
A druggie, troubled, death-obsessed art student comes face to face with Death itself.
At least, that’s the only interpretation which makes any sense of this Stephen King tale.
When Alan Parker (Jonathan Jackson) hitchhikes home to see his seriously-ill mum, it proves a bad trip in every sense.
It’s not long before he’s being attacked by slavering dogs and sharing a car with a dead man who lifts his hat to reveal his brain.
The trouble is that the macabre incidents don’t really seen to be going anywhere, and neither is this film. It just isn’t creepy enough to be horror. Instead it just ends up bizarre.
The final few moments try to wrap it all up as some kind of rites of passage-type film, but it’s not terribly persuasive. All interest has long since evaporated.
Phil Hewitt
/blob/ DVD rental supplied by Blockbuster. For details of other new DVD releases see www.blockbuster.co.uk.
The Lives Of Others, released by Lions Gate on DVD on September 17.
The death from stomach cancer earlier this summer of Ulrich Mühe gives added poignancy to this brilliant piece of German movie-making.
Mühe is quite superb as Hauptmann Gerd Wiesler, a drab wire-tapping expert with the Stasi, the East German secret police, during the final few years behind the Berlin Wall.
Wiesler’s tragedy and redemption is that he senses a warmth and a colour totally lacking in his own existence when he is called upon to spy on Georg Dreyman, a playwright suspected of imminent dissidence.
Through his headphones Wiesler becomes aware of all that his life isn’t - a change which Mühe conveys quite mesmerisingly, a change crystallised in a brief scene with a little boy who unwisely starts spouting his father’s anti-Stasi sentiments.
Wiesler is about to demand the dad’s name, but stops himself just in time. Dreyman (a hugely impressive Sebastian Koch) and his world have touched Wiesler in a way he’d never dreamt possible. When Dreyman clandestinely authors an anti-East German article, Wiesler, hearing everything, opts to cover it up.
Part of the brilliance of the film is the fact that Dreyman is convinced he’s safe to say whatever he wants at home - which, of course, he is, though not for the reasons he believes.
The film is maybe a little slow at first, but perhaps in the end that simply makes it all the more gripping, building to a parting shot which surely ranks among the best final lines ever delivered.
A masterpiece, brilliantly constructed, brilliantly played - and now, so sadly, a tribute in its own right to the consummate artistry of the late, lamented Ulrich Mühe, who had himself been a key activist against Berlin’s communist rule.
Phil Hewitt
Fracture, (15), new on DVD through Blockbuster. Ted Crawford (Anthony Hopkins) shoots his wife in the head, waits gun in hand and confesses as soon as the police arrive.
But once the case gets to court, everything unravels in this gripping, hugely-effective thriller - a couple of hours which twist and turn as Hopkins - with shades of Hannibal - wraps the legal process around his fingers.
There is no whodunnit here, simply an even more satisfying “how can he possibly be getting away with it?”.
On his tail is rising star assistant district attorney Willy Beachum (Ryan Gosling), a man who stakes everything on finding the weakness in Crawford which Crawford so effortlessly found in him.
Hopkins is brilliant as the scheming, clever-clever criminal always a couple of steps ahead; Gosling is no less so as the prosecutor pushed to the brink by Crawford’s mix of obvious guilt and seemingly-impenetrable defence.
Excellent performances all round combine with superb pacing and an intriguing plot to deliver a first-rate thriller.
Phil Hewitt
/blob/ DVD rental supplied by Blockbuster. For details of other new DVD releases see
www.blockbuster.co.uk.
Reign Over Me (15), new on DVD through Blockbuster.
One day 9/11 is going to inspire some memorable movie-moving, but we’re not there yet.
Reign Over Me is a vast improvement on World Trade Center, but ultimately it disappoints while still providing some striking images.
Adam Sandler is Charlie Fineman, a New York dentist deep in post-traumatic stress after losing his wife and children in the terrorist atrocity.
He now spends his days scooting around New York, playing video games and collecting records - all part of a second childhood which he uses to blank out everything that has happened.
Which is the point at which his old college room mate Alan Johnson (Don Cheadle) - a guy with a few domestic issues of his own - renews their friendship and decides to help, soon finding though that friendship alone is never going to be enough.
Sandler is excellent in a role you wouldn’t usually expect to see him in, showing a depth of acting talent he more often masks.
But somehow the film doesn’t quite grip in the way it ought to, perhaps because of the underlying delicacy - or perhaps timidity - which means that 9/11 is never mentioned by name.
Rather like Sandler’s character, the film seems to drift, and while it throws in some appealing little moments of humour, it never seems quite to know what tone it’s aiming for.
Fineman, the troubled-soul on his motorised scooter, is the film’s abiding image. The disappointment is that the film doesn’t really move much beyond that point.
Gone (15), new on DVD through Blockbuster. Would anyone really hook up on holiday with someone so obviously bizarre as American drifter Taylor (Scott Mechlowicz)?
But maybe it isn’t so unlikely. People do do the strangest things when they are far from home.
Get over that initial doubt, and Gone is a film to relish – a gripping tale of a holiday friendship which goes chillingly, horribly wrong.
British couple Sophie (Amelia Warner) and Alex (Shaun Evans) are back-packing in Australia when they meet the charismatic Taylor, a guy who exudes an intriguing air of mystery – and a guy who rapidly takes a pic of Alex in a compromising position.
It’s all part of the hold he exerts first over Alex and then over Sophie. They can’t shake him off, and a curious kind of dependency starts to develop – even though it isn’t long before Taylor is playing mind games Sophie and Alex, getting between them in the most insidious, ghastly of ways.
He turns them against each other on a horror journey through the blistering outback. Alex realises what is happening, but Taylor is always one step ahead.
The couple become imprisoned in his truck amid all the vastness of the hostile empty countryside. Not many films can simultaneously serve up claustrophobia and agoraphobia – but this one does, and very effectively so.
You wonder just why Taylor is doing what he is doing – and you recoil at the thought of it. But at the same he time he drags you into his warped world through his sheer cunning and devilry.
It all adds up to a haunting, disturbing and engrossing hour and a half.
Phil Hewitt
/blob/ DVD rental supplied by Blockbuster. For details of other new DVD releases see
www.blockbuster.co.uk.
The Contract (15), new on DVD through Blockbuster.
Once a cop, always a cop. Though he’s a baseball coach now, Ray Keene just won’t let go when he stumbles across a villain on the run.
Keene (John Cusack) is on a bridge-building camping trip with his wayward teenage son Chris (Jamie Anderson) – a youngster thrown off the rails by the death of his mum.
But the pair have barely pitched camp before they come face to face with ruthless contract killer Frank Cordell (Morgan Freeman), who has just managed to slip through the FBI’s fingers.
What follows is an engrossing cat-and-mouse game through some stunning scenery.
Cordell’s mates are desperate to catch up with him – and it’s clearly curtains for Keene and junior if they do. Similarly the police are swarming everywhere – but fairly ineffectively.
But the real interest is in the mind battle between Keene and Cordell – a battle which revives all Keene’s old instincts, but a battle complicated by Cordell’s total composure. He really is the best – and he knows it.
Chris is somewhere in the middle – reasonably aware of what is right but at the same time fascinated by the cool customer they’ve got in their hands.
Gripping, enjoyable stuff – and the great thing is that it comes with an ending which doesn’t disappoint. First-class performances all round add to the pleasure.
Phil Hewitt
/blob/ DVD rental supplied by Blockbuster. For details of other new DVD releases see www.blockbuster.co.uk.
Flags Of Our Fathers, (15), new on DVD through Blockbuster.
Clint Eastwood’s retelling of the tale behind the iconic WWII Iwo Jima image is enthralling right from the word go.
For years, the photograph - so famously turned into an Arlington war memorial - has symbolised triumph over struggle.
In Flags Of Our Fathers, Eastwood - increasingly significant as a director - tells how the moment came to happen and just what that moment meant.
Clever editing intercuts the build-up and the fall-out; just how the US marines reached that point and just how ruthlessly their achievement was exploited for propaganda purposes back home.
With little regard to just who exactly was present, the marines are touted round the country in a war-effort fund-raising drive - to which they respond with varying degrees of disbelief. Hero status isn’t one which sits easily.
The whole film is brilliantly put together, moving from sweeping battle scenes in gruesome detail to the quieter, personal moments of doubt and despair.
The film grips you from the off and never lets go.
Phil Hewitt
/blob/ DVD rental supplied by Blockbuster. For details of other new DVD releases see www.blockbuster.co.uk.
The Fallen, released on DVD on July 30; certificate to be confirmed.
War is hell is the message in this film. Sadly, so too is the film.
It comes laden with awards and nominations, but the sad thing is that these are probably just a response to the right-on message behind it all.
Director Ari Taub is so intent on showing us that war is grim, downbeat and drab that he produces a film which is equally grim, downbeat and drab.
Towards the end of the war, the Germans are beleaguered in Italy; the Italians are having it both ways, supporting the Germans and at the same time undermining them; and the Americans are advancing but still suffering plenty of casualties of their own.
There are moments of heroism, but it is not a film about heroism. Instead it focuses on the pettiness and the compromises, on the corruption, the ineptness and the waste.
But director Taub in creating no great moments, no great characters and no great plotlines creates little to hold the attention – a film which shows the aimlessness and the pointlessness of war, but does so in a fairly prosaic way.
Perhaps it’s a style appropriate to the message, but it’s not a style conducive to great cinema. It’s a film without big names – and so often that means a film with big impact. But not this time.
Phil Hewitt
The Illusionist, Chichester Cineworld (PG, 109 mins), new on DVD through Blockbuster.
Beware the back of the DVD box and a bit of blurb which, if the penny falls sweetly enough, will give the whole game away half way through.
Avoid the back of the box, and you will give yourself the immense pleasure of being led very skilfully up the garden path.
The Illusionist is full of illusions, not the least of which is the one he plays on you in this absorbing, stylish tale of murder, menace and mystery in late-19th-century Vienna.
The film is sumptuous to look at - but beneath the splendour is the ghastly threat of the cruel braggart Crown Prince Leopold.
Childhood sweethearts Sofie and Eisenheim are forced apart for all sorts of social reasons. Sofie becomes Leopold’s fiancee. Eisenheim becomes an illusionist plucking the most amazing tricks out of thin air.
When their paths cross again and they take up where they left off, they are soon in hot water... and the consquences are deadly.
Edward Norton is first-class as the illusionist who weaves a spell far larger than you’d think; Rufus Sewell is equally impressive as the Prince, a man determined to bring Eisenheim down a peg or two; and Jessica Biel is suitably beguiling as Sofie.
The only weakness - just as striking on second viewing on DVD - is the gabbled way in which the truth, all too quickly, is finally revealed.
Phil Hewitt
/blob/ DVD rental supplied by Blockbuster. For details of other new DVD releases see
www.blockbuster.co.uk.
Notes On A Scandal, (15), (90 mins), new on DVD through Blockbuster.
At last a film for all of us not quite convinced of the genius which everyone else seems to see in Judi Dench - a film in which she stops being Judi and acts her socks off.
Dame Judi is quite superb as Barbara Covett, the bitchy, jaded, cynical, scheming, predatory frustrated lesbian who latches onto Sheba Hart (Cate Blanchett), the uncertain, attractive art teacher who joins her school.
Sheba is lonely in her drifting, unfulfilling marriage. Barbara is lonely full stop. And the one is an easy target for the other, Barbara mixing spite and deluded affection as she narrates just how she gets Sheba in her clutches.
Barbara becomes obsessed with Sheba who has become obsessed with a young lad - and that’s the weakness by which Barbara ensnares her, entrapping her as the keeper of her secret.
Sheba’s vulnerability is matched by Barbara’s fury as everything goes hideously, destructively wrong. It’s gripping, disturbing, unsettling stuff - and wonderfully well acted by all concerned.
Phil Hewitt
/blob/ DVD rental supplied by Blockbuster. For details of other new DVD releases see www.blockbuster.co.uk.
Babel, 15, new on DVD through Blockbuster.
Crash on an extended, global scale, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Babel weaves together disparate lives and shows their impact on each other.
In Morocco, two young lads, messing around with a gun, accidentally shoot an American tourist on a bus, provoking a security crackdown by the edgy authorities.
Meanwhile, a precociously-sexual Japanese deaf-mute is struggling with the death of her mother; and a couple of young American children are taken to a wedding in Mexico, a trip which goes disastrously wrong.
There are times when Iñárritu spends too long on one particular thread of the tapestry he’s weaving, which means that the shift from one storyline to another comes as rather too much of a jolt.
But cleverly, very cleverly he pulls it all together, and you realise that pretty much everything is connected in a film which seems to suggest that nothing is without consequence.
And just as with Crash, which it inevitably brings to mind, it’s very much an ensemble piece, a range of actors combining to impressive effect - not least Cate Blanchett and Brad Pitt as the shot tourist and her husband.
Phil Hewitt.
/blob/ DVD rental supplied by Blockbuster. For details of other new DVD releases see www.blockbuster.co.uk.
Fragile (15), new on DVD from Lions Gate Home Entertainment.
There’s something fairly contrived about the way Fragile sets up the archetypal ghost story setting - a rambling old building, cut off and miles from anywhere.
It just doesn’t ring quite true that this could be a children’s hospital in this day and age - even if it is a hospital on the verge of closure for the very reasons that it is so crumbling and isolated.
But if you suspend a certain scepticism, the result is a genuinely-creepy tale, effectively delivered and haunting in ways that don’t stop once the credits have rolled.
The ghost in question is a pretty chilling image - and writer/director Jaume Balagueró wraps it all up in a way that will make you want to view it all from behind the safety of your sofa.
The basic premise is that the hospital is closing, but someone upstairs on a floor not used for decades, doesn’t want it to shut - a wish she expresses by breaking the limbs of the children downstairs.
Calista Flockhart (Ally McBeal) is the new night shift nurse who comes in and discovers staff and management strangely blind to what is going on.
And fortunately for the story, Calista’s the kind of gal who’ll happily go wandering in the ghastly abandoned parts of the building...
All good stuff - well made and very well acted.
Phil Hewitt
/blob/ Fragile is released by Lions Gate Home Entertainment on July 2, priced £15.99, certificate 15, running time 97 minutes.
The Return (15), new on DVD through Blockbuster.
Joanna Mills (Sarah Michelle Gellar) is exactly the right kind of nutcase weirdo loner for this kind of film - a supernatural thriller.
If weird music comes on her radio when she’s driving alone at night, what does she do? She gets out and wanders around in the darkness.
If there’s no answer when she knocks at the door of a deserted old farmhouse, what does she do? She wanders in and goes upstairs towards the same weird music weirdly playing...
As spooky thrillers go, this one is just about passable.
Mills, it seems, is getting visions of a murder which happened 15 years ago, and soon she finds herself drawn to the farmhouse where it actually happened.
The trouble for the viewer is that we are made to share far too much in her confused mental state.
Joanna struggles to distinguish between vision, reality and flashback - and so do we in a thriller which leaves you too much in the dark for too long.
By the time a little sense starts to emerge, you’ve probably more or less lost interest.
Phil Hewitt.
/blob/ DVD rental supplied by Blockbuster. For details of other new DVD releases see www.blockbuster.co.uk.
The Last King Of Scotland, new on DVD through Blockbuster, (123min) (15).
On first viewing, you get caught up in the sheer white-knuckle ride of Kevin Macdonald’s disturbing, gripping thriller.
On second viewing, you can enjoy more the superb peformances which are at the heart of it.
James McAvoy - who doesn’t know how to be anything other than brilliant (Inside I’m Dancing, Starter For Ten etc etc) - is on cracking form as Nicholas Garrigan, the callow young medic who takes up a mission job in Uganda just as Amin sweeps to power.
Like everyone else he is seduced by the country’s charismatic leader who promises everything and tells the crowds “I am you”.
But it isn’t long before the surface charm evaporates and something distinctly sinister and menacing starts to emerge - the true character of
Idi Amin.
Deserving every last ounce of his best actor Oscar, Forest Whitaker is mesmerising in the role, childish and vulnerable but also bullying and brutal - a little boy and a vicious despot rolled into one.
And soon, with evidence of atrocity mounting all around him, Garrigan is desperate to escape. Macdonald delivers the tension to perfection in a nail-biting and gruesome final few sequences.
One might wonder at the use of a fictitious character (Garrigan is an invention) to highlight a ghastly figure in history, but the result works - and works chillingly well.
Phil Hewitt.
/blob/ DVD rental supplied by Blockbuster. For details of other new DVD releases see www.blockbuster.co.uk.
A Good Year, (12A) (117 minutes), on DVD through Blockbuster.
Brash, bullying businessman Max Skinner learns to become a better person more in touch with the finer things in life in this utterly-predictable tale.
But predictable doesn’t mean charmless. Far from it. You know exactly what’s going to happen, but that’s all part of the pleasure.
At the start, Skinner is totally at home in his dog-eat-dog London, but then an unexpected inheritance packs him off to chocolate-box Provence, setting in motion a chain of events which will release the nice guy inside him, hidden at first by all his brattishness.
Skinner becomes the reluctant owner of his ex-pat uncle’s wine-growing estate. At first he is determined to sell it, but slowly the estate wins him over, helped on by a chance meeting with feisty local beauty Marion Cotillard.
Another potential claimant to the estate turns up out of the blue, and slowly, very slowly Max realizes that the whole thing is simply something he can’t let go.
Russell Crowe’ fake plummy Brit accent is fairly woeful, but he settles comfortably into the easy charm the film exudes. It’s all beautifully shot, full of rich, warm vistas and the seductive charms of France – all of which draws out some lovely performances in a film to savour.
Phil Hewitt
/blob/ DVD rental supplied by Blockbuster. For details of other new DVD releases see www.blockbuster.co.uk.
The Page Turner, new on DVD through Blockbuster.
Denis Dercourt’s mini masterpiece is one of the must-see movies of the year so far – a brooding, understated thriller which creeps up on you uneasily and effectively in an intense hour and 20 minutes which grip from the very first moment.
Déborah François is exceptional as Mélanie Prouvost, the young girl who calculates the cleverest and coldest of revenges after celebrated pianist Ariane Fouchécourt carelessly but certainly not callously puts paid to her piano-playing ambitions.
The star signs an autograph at just the wrong moment – and the young Mélanie’s concentration is shattered in a crucial piano exam.
Mélanie locks the piano and turns the key on her dream – a dream now replaced by the desire for revenge. And so, many years later, she insinuates herself into the Ariane’s home.
Sensing Ariane’s (Catherine Frot) mental fragility, she proceeds to make herself indispensable. She becomes her page turner – after which it becomes a question of just when the worm will turn.
The film is superbly done, the silent Mélanie insidiously undermining the whole household as she waits her moment. You don’t need rivers of blood for a successful thriller; you simply need the patience and intelligence director Denis Dercourt so brilliantly brings.
And not the least part of that brilliance is the relative shortness of the film – a haunting piece which is devilishly satisfying.
Phil Hewitt
/blob/ DVD rental supplied by Blockbuster. For details of other new DVD releases see www.blockbuster.co.uk.
Black Book (15), new on DVD through Tartan Video.
Torture, betrayal, murder, sex and more sex... it’s all there in Paul Verhoeven’s racy, action-packed World War Two resistance thriller.
The suggestion of collusion between the Nazis and certain sections of the resistance movement will undoubtedly have ruffled a few feathers in Holland where the story unfurls.
But for the rest of us, it’s a case of sitting back and enjoying the relentless twists and turns of Verhoeven’s faintly old-fashioned adventure romp.
Carice van Houten is excellent as Rachel/Ellis, the Jewish girl who sets out to avenge the murder of her entire family after they are betrayed to the SS.
She joins the resistance and dutifully and indeed passionately accepts their challenge: to seduce the high-ranking Ludwig Müntze (Sebastian Koch) in order to penetrate German intelligence.
But further betrayals soon follow and Carice finds herself just as much at threat from her comrades as she is from the Germans.
It all unfolds at frantic pace; Rachel barely has a chance to grieve as she is swept along by events, a huge sense of menace hanging over everything in desperate times.
Retrospectively one might wonder at a lack of genuine emotion here and there, but perhaps this just isn’t that kind of film. Best just to enjoy a genuinely-gripping action movie, a white-knuckle ride through war-time Holland and out the other side into a new era of peace which brings its own scores to settle.
Phil Hewitt
/blob/ Black Book is released by Tartan Video at £14.99.
The Night Listener, 15, new on DVD through Blockbuster.
Radio show host Gabriel Noone, struggling with the collapse of his personal life, strikes up an unlikely phone friendship with a young lad who appears to be a fan.
But when he tries to get to see the boy, the boy’s carer gets in the way at every turn - to the point that Gabriel begins to wonder whether the boy exists at all.
The Night Listener is an intriguing movie, a genuinely clever movie but ultimately one that annoyingly tries to have it both ways.
Too much of the earlier scenes can’t have happened - or at best needs to be put down to imagination - for the ending to really work.
But there’s plenty of pleasure to be had in the acting, with Robin Williams - as always - so much more impressive when he’s being moodily downbeat than he is when he is being maniacally upbeat.
Toni Collette is similarly strong as the carer, needy and yet threatening in a thoroughly unglamorous role which she makes come alive.
Shame about that ending, though.
Phil Hewitt
Sixty Six, new on DVD through Blockbuster.
Right from the opening voice-over, you know this film’s going to be a winner - and so it proves... a genuinely touching piece of cinema which touches all the right spots.
Leaving you with the warmest of warm glows, it’s sentiment without sentimentality - a lovely insight into growing up and into the huge impact of England’s 1966 World Cup win.
At the heart of it all is little Bernie Reubens (Gregg Sulkin), a lad so lacking in confidence and presence that he fears total invisiblity.
But his barmitzvah is looming, a chance for a big party which will make him a man and force people to notice him.
His tragedy, though, is that his barmitzvah is set for the day of the World Cup final. Everyone tries to reassure him that England will never one, but slowly they progress through the rounds - and so Bernie’s dream of a day to remember slowly starts to implode.
The humour is pitched perfectly, especially when Bernie summons every little ploy to sabotage the nation’s football team - all to no avail.
And his barmitzvah - readjusted to fit the family’s ever more straitened circumstances - is hilarious.
But you know this isn’t the kind of film to dish out disappointment. The resolution, when it comes, is superb - uplifting and fun. Sixty Six is a mini classic, faultless, family film-making at its finest.
Helena Bonham Carter and Eddie Marsan give excellent support as the parents - all part of a genuine tonic of a film.
Phil Hewitt
/blob/ DVD rental supplied by Blockbuster. For details of other new DVD releases see www.blockbuster.co.uk.
Night At The Museum (PG), new on DVD through Blockbuster.
If glorious days at London’s Natural History Museum are a golden memory of your childhood, then this is a film for you - a tale in which all those exhibits come to life.
All of history and all of natural history come to blows every night in the New York equivalent.
Romans fight cowboys, Attila the Hun chases anyone he can, a T-Rex skeleton plays fetch and assorted monkeys, zebras and big mammals go AWOL.
In the centre of it all is Ben Stiller, a rookie night guard desperately trying to keep the lid on all the madness - madness unleashed, apparently, by an ancient curse.
For the most part it’s great fun, a fairly-thin storyline proving all the pretext director Shawn Levy needs for prolonged scenes of museum mayhem.
Maybe it’s not quite as magical as the trailers make it appear and it’s probably not quite the classic the movie-makers hoped for. You wouldn’t want to watch it again and again.
But it’s genuine family entertainment, inventive, pacey and fun, helped by some lovely little cameos by the likes of Steve Coogan, Robin Williams and Owen Wilson, all on fine form.
Phil Hewitt
The Holiday, (12A), new on DVD through Blockbuster.
With spring breaking through, this Christmas house-swap romcom doesn’t quite have the magic it had when it hit the big screens last December.
But it’s still a thoroughly enjoyable confection, funny, touching and genuinely sweet.
Amanda Woods (Cameron Diaz) and Iris Simpkins (Kate Winslet) have reached an all-time low as the film opens. Amanda’s boyfriend has been playing away from home and the rat who won’t let Iris shake herself free has just got engaged.
Both need a change of scene, which is when they hit on the idea of swapping homes for Christmas, Amanda jetting off from LA to picture postcard Surrey and Iris passing her mid-Atlantic.
And that’s when they meet the men that they really ought to be with - which is all very predictable. Equally predictable is the fact that life then construes to throw all sorts of obstacles in the way of them being with the men they really ought to be with.
But given that this never purports to be a life that you or I could ever lead, you’re prepared to forgive this film most things.
Sit down to enjoy it in the right mood, and it won’t appear contrived, gooey and manipulative at all. The chances are you’ll be swept up by its chocolate-box whimsy and sweet fluffy optimism.
You can’t help feeling though that it would have been better to delay the DVD release until Christmas, just to get the full effect.
Phil Hewitt
/blob/ DVD rental supplied by Blockbuster. For details of other new DVD releases see www.blockbuster.co.uk.
The Prestige (12), new on DVD through Blockbuster.
Now on DVD, The Prestige is exactly what it was on the big screen - a genuine cracker of a film, an intriguing, fiendishly-clever delight from first to last.
Magicians Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman) and Alfred Borden (Christian Bale) are friends who become deadly enemies Robert’s wife dies in an on-stage trick that goes disastrously wrong.
One moment they are working together; they next they are undermining each other in increasingly dangerous acts of sabotage - and therein lies the brilliance of the film. That and the rich Victorian settings.
When one tries to get ahead, the other is there to cut him down - a rivalry which soon focuses on the ultimate trick, that of the “transported man”.
Alfred pulls it off; Robert will stop at nothing to steal his secret. Nothing else matters, and it becomes clear that this will be a fight to the death. But whose death? And can you really believe anything you see anyway?
Take nothing for granted when you watch this film; and then watch it again and enjoy the realisation that the biggest tricks are being played on you.
Phil Hewitt.
/blob/ DVD rental supplied by Blockbuster. For details of other new DVD releases see
www.blockbuster.co.uk.
The Queen, (12A), new on DVD through Blockbuster.
New on DVD, The Queen is just as impressive and just as disturbing on the small screen as it was on the big screen.
Impressive because it is a moving, balanced, superbly-acted recreation of Diana’s death and the week that followed, a fascinating moment in our nation’s history - even if that moment’s significance seems to have dwindled in the ten years since.
Disturbing because the whole thing is just too plausible, just too persuasive - so much so that it is troublingly easy to forget the fact that the conversations you see unfurl before you are based on speculation and nothing more.
Very informed speculation, doubtless. And speculation which you feel is probably pretty near the mark.
But that doesn’t get around the fact that this is speculation masquerading as truth - not history, but simply one particular person’s take on events that touched us all.
And with the key figures still in post - most obviously Queen and Prime Minister - you can’t help feeling there is a voyeuristic intrusiveness and even tastelessness about the whole thing.
Yes, Helen Mirren delivers an astonishing performance as the Queen, but do we really want to see (someone pretending to be) the Queen waking up in the morning, wandering around in her dressing gown, uttering an expletive when she prangs her car and shedding a tear at the sight of a stag?
Ditto Michael Sheen who portrays Tony Blair as a grinning idiot who comes into his own in the moment of crisis and instantly reads the mood of the nation in a way the Queen can’t...
It is all brilliantly done, but it remains still at heart a sleight of hand.
Phil Hewitt
/blob/ DVD rental supplied by Blockbuster. For details of other new DVD releases see www.blockbuster.co.uk.
John Tucker Must Die (12), new on DVD through Blockbuster.
Frothy, fun and forgettable, John Tucker Must Die is a teen comedy with a winning style and wit.
The John Tucker in question (Jesse Metcalfe) is a love rat simultaneously cheating on three gullible gals.
Outsider Kate Spencer (Brittany Snow) helps them realise their mistake only to become the focus of their plans for revenge.
The threesome decide that they are going to get Tucker to fall in love with the indifferent Kate, just so that he can learn a thing or two about having your heart broken.
Tucker tumbles and Kate hovers - and there is plenty of fun along the way, not least around Tucker’s great resilence. Whatever the girls throw at him, whether it be female hormones or the embarrassment of being caught out wearing a thong, Tucker turns to his advantange - until he realises that when it comes to Kate, his feelings are feelings he’s never felt before.
All very funny.
And when it comes, the ending isn’t what you’d expect, and that’s another reason to sit back and enjoy this film.
/blob/ DVD rental supplied by Blockbuster. For details of other new DVD releases see
www.blockbuster.co.uk.
Red Road (18), new on DVD through Blockbuster. Forget all the Oscar fanfares and the strange and yet rather unexciting choice of Oscar winners.
Here’s a film which has quietly stacked up an astonishing array of awards without ever once truly stealing the limelight.
Newly-released on DVD, Red Road has been honoured by the Cannes Film Festival, the London Critics Circle Film Awards and the London Film Festival. It has also gardnered a whole host of Scottish BAFTAs - and it is not difficult to see why.
Red Road is an intense, brooding masterpiece, a film which gets into your mind and stays there, a gripping study of grief and revenge which plays its cards close to its chest until the very end.
For the most part, all you know is that Jackie (Kate Dickie), a loner who keeps herself to herself, works as a CCTV operator constantly monitoring a grim Glasgow estate.
And then suddenly she zooms in on a man whose presence disturbs her to the core - a man to whom she is inexorably drawn...
Director Andrea Arnold holds the tension magnificently and keeps you guessing amid the darkness and the ghastly townscapes, a riveting piece in which past connections slowly start to suggest themselves.
One slight problem is that the thick accents are just occasionally incomprehensible, but you can live with that. The spell this film casts - a mix of superb understated performances and superb understated direction - is a memorable one.
Phil Hewitt
/blob/ DVD rental supplied by Blockbuster. For details of other new DVD releases see
www.blockbuster.co.uk.
The History Boys (15), new on DVD through Blockbuster.
A group of history students are schooled for a coveted place at Oxford as Alan Bennett’s play gets the big-screen treatment, with the stage actors moving across en masse with director Nicholas Hytner.
And for the most part it works reasonably well, with the students - bright but academically all over the place - finding themselves suspended between two differing approaches.
On the one hand, there’s Hector (Richard Griffiths), an old-time free-thinker intent on teaching them life rather than lessons - meanwhile groping them on the back of his motorbike.
On the other hand, there’s Irwin (Stephen Campbell Moore), the younger teacher and a man convinced that the best approach to the Oxbridge entrance exam is to treat it as a game, answering the questions with a wilful perversity which will make the crusty old dons sit up and notice.
Between them, utterly predictably, it works, the class notching up a wholly implausible success rate. More of a problem, though, is the film’s worrying indulgence towards towards Hector’s predatory behaviour.
But perhaps there is no point generalising.
This is Bennett’s view of Oxbridge and how you get there. It bears with little similarity to my own experience or probably anybody else’s.
Phil Hewitt
/blob/ DVD rental supplied by Blockbuster. For details of other new DVD releases see www.blockbuster.co.uk.
The Black Dahlia (15), new on DVD through Blockbuster.
Starlet Elizabeth Short was the victim of a particularly hideous murder in 1940s LA – a murder which was never solved.
Via James Ellroy's novel, it hit the big screen in The Black Dahlia and flopped. Now on DVD, it will probably do just the same.
It’s an intriguing case and the film builds effectively towards the end, but you need patience in abundance at the start when the dialogue is just too elliptical, the scenes just too murky and the action just too obscure.
Investigating the deaths are detective Dwight 'Bucky' Bleichert (Josh Hartnett) and Sgt Leland 'Lee' Blanchard (Aaron Eckhart), and much of the piece focuses on their deteriorating relationship with each other and with the array of dodgy characters around them, notably Kay Lake (Scarlett Johansson) and Madeleine Linscott (Hilary Swank).
What emerges is a grubby underworld of drugs and ambition, of gunmen and of would-be stars corrupted by their dreams and by the people who might just make them happen.
But for too much of the dialogue, the actors might as well be speaking a foreign language. In the end, the film just about deserves the concentration it demands. But the final impression remains that the film is just too grim, too drab and too dark for its own good – all of which, of course, is perfectly in keeping with the murder which inspired it.
Phil Hewitt
/blob/ DVD rental supplied by Blockbuster. For details of other new DVD releases see www.blockbuster.co.uk.
Little Miss Sunshine (15), new on DVD through Blockbuster.
Best picture, best supporting actress, best supporting actor… some pretty heavy nominations have fallen this movie’s way.
Does it warrant them? Will it come out covered in glory on Oscars night? Probably no and probably no.
It’s a quirky little film, an original, surprising and occasionally delightful movie and one which you find yourself smilingly thinking about for days after.
But it’s a good film, not a great film – a film with plenty to recommend it but little to make you rave, however rapidly its cult status is growing.
At heart, it’s a road movie, one peopled by a weirdly dysfunctional family of misfits and oddballs, all thrown together in one minivan as they cross the States to take the daughter to a beauty pageant that they all really ought to disapprove of.
Mum (Toni Collette) is a pro-honesty mum incapable of seeing that the would-be Little Miss Sunshine really doesn’t need to know about the gay uncle’s suicidal depression. Dad (Greg Kinnear) is a born loser convinced he’s onto a winner with his motivational big talk.
Grandad (Alan Arkin) is foul-mouthed and randy; and son Dwayne (Paul Dano) is refusing to speak to anyone.
Throw them all together, and there are some lovely moments, with Steve Carell particularly amusing as Uncle Frank. The humour is subtle, understated, never gross – and that’s a large part of the film’s charm.
But Oscars? Hmmm… No, not really.
Phil Hewitt
/blob/ DVD rental supplied by Blockbuster. For details of other new DVD releases see www.blockbuster.co.uk.
Soccer AM III – The Greatest Matches Of All Time, Universal Pictures, £19.99.
With the Ashes abjectly surrendered, it might be an idea to turn to football once again to remember the meaning of the words joie de vivre.
Soccer AM III – The Greatest Matches of All Time offers a pretty good starting point.
I wish I could say that Matt Taylor’s sublime long-range strike against Sunderland a season or two back was the highlight for my ten-year-old.
But no, predictably it was Beckham smearing a bogey on his team mate’s head which won it for him on a DVD which never neglects the funny side of the supposedly-beautiful game.
Rossi’s World Cup brilliance, a section of truly-stunning volleys and England’s 5-1 defeat of Germany offer action you could happily watch time and time again - as do Dudek’s goalline antics during Liverpool’s thrilling European comeback.
Keeping the tone light though (after all, one brilliant goal could just look much the same as any other if you watch too many in succession) are incidents such as the Beckham bogey...
The one drawback, though, to this otherwise excellent package - and it is a fairly hefty drawback - is the truly awful linking passages, a collection of silly injokes about the making of the DVD.
Jokes about what the team ate while making it, how they selected the matches and the team members’ comparative height wear horribly thin horribly quickly - and do nothing to mask the total lack of chemistry between Soccer AM presenters Tim Lovejoy and Helen Chamberlain.
The promoters promise “the sharpest wit and funniest banter in football”. Presumably they were watching a different DVD.
Still, the joy of DVDs is the fast-forward button. And in this particular case, the rewind button for that Matt Taylor cracker.
Phil Hewitt
Adrift (15), new on DVD through Blockbuster.
Director Hans Horn brilliantly plays out a ghastly nightmare in this tense, oh so tense thriller.
One moment’s unthinking madness means six friends suddenly find themselves stuck in the water adrift in the ocean, with safety constantly within sight but permanently beyond reach.
The ladder wasn’t down when the last of them plunged into the sea for a swim, and now they simply can’t get back on board the luxury yacht which sailed them to the middle of nowhere.
They try everything, leaping, scrabbling, tying their clothes together, diving and shouting, and before long old tensions are surfacing. They squabble, bicker and fight – and as time passes, so their plight becomes increasingly hopeless.
Doubling the agony for Amy (Susan May Pratt) is the fact that her tiny baby is alone on the yacht, crying out in fear and hunger.
For the opening 20 minutes, the three couples of the sixsome are pretty much carefree – with the big exception of Amy who has a deep horror of water, a horror she is – somewhat vainly, as it turns out – hoping to confront on the reunion cruise.
Director Horn’s skill in those opening 20 minutes is in giving us just enough of each character for each to come alive in the terrors ahead. Six very different people face the near certainty of death in six very different ways – and that’s what gives this film its power and edge.
It’s based on true events which obviously helps make it so horribly plausible, but Horn is a director who clearly knows how to turn the screw – and he does so here to horribly-chilling effect.
A genuinely-first rate thriller excellently played by all involved.
Phil Hewitt
/blob/ DVD rental supplied by Blockbuster. For details of other new DVD releases see www.blockbuster.co.uk.
Mini's First Time (15), new on DVD through Blockbuster.
College girl Mini turns call girl, coincidentally seduces her stepdad without him realising it’s her and then uses the poor chap in her devilish plan to murder her mum.
Yes, Mini’s quite a girl, and Nikki Reed brings her sparklingly to life in this thoroughly-entertaining black comedy romp.
Alec Baldwin is excellent as the stepdad she twists around her finger, but it’s Reed who steals the film, cunning, confident and horribly cruel at every twist.
With stepdad complicit, she hounds her mum to death, and when the police are unwilling to accept it as suicide, Mini isn’t one to let her control slip.
The whole thing is played out in flashback as Mini delivers her graduation speech, and her racily-stylish narration is a big part of the pleasure throughout.
Maybe the opening moments are just a little difficult to attune to, but you’re reasonably soon into it, sitting back to enjoy a rollercoaster ride of witty villainy.
Phil Hewitt
DVD rental supplied by Blockbuster. For details of other new DVD releases see www.blockbuster.co.uk
Driving Lessons (15)
The best you can say about this film is that it confirms what the Harry Potter series repeatedly suggests - namely, Rupert ‘Ron Weasley’ Grint really is an interesting and appealing young actor.
As for the film itself, though, director Jeremy Brock’s coming-of-age saga is unremarkable, fairly forgettable fare.
Grint plays shy teenager Ben Marshall, a young lad desperately needing to escape the stifling circles of his ultra religious mum (Laura Linney).
That escape comes when he chances on Evie Walton, a batty old actress delivered as pure caricature by Julie Walters. Evie is ghastly, selfish and manipulative, but we are presumably supposed to see her as some kind of liberating life force - and that’s presumably what Ben takes from her before moving on.
Evie kidnaps Ben, turning rites-of-passage into road movie as they journey to Edinburgh on a trip that ends in failure for the one and a kind of empowerment for the other.
But none of it is particularly convincing, none of it terribly memorable. The problem is that Evie - for all Walters tries to suggest a vulnerability and therefore some depth - is hardly the kind of person you’d choose to spend any time with.
Still, the film does at least give us the chance to see Grint away from the Potter context. He’s definitely one to watch.
Phil Hewitt
My Super Ex-Girlfriend (12), new on DVD through Blockbuster
The disappointment is all the worse for the fact that the initial idea is such a good one. It’s in the execution that this film falls flat on its face.
Matt Saunders (Luke Wilson) is thrilled when he realises that his new girlfriend Jenny Johnson (Uma Thurman) is actually the celebrated superwoman who hurtles across the sky to thwart bank robbers and save lives.
But when he realises just how needy, jealous and screwed up she is, he discovers just how hard it is to jilt a superhero who doesn’t want to be jilted.
All those powers normally directed towards upholding justice are suddenly and venomously directed at Matt - a situation with huge comic potential, very little of which is actually realised.
The result is lacklustre and lifeless, a curiously flat film in which nothing genuinely sparks between Matt and Jenny.
Thurman does mad and needy pretty well, but Wilson just doesn’t have the presence his role needs. You could comfortably imagine his real-life brother Luke making a far better fist of it.
In the end it all starts getting just a wee bit tiresome. A shame given the buzz this film could and should have had.
Phil Hewitt
* DVD rental supplied by Blockbuster. For details of other new DVD releases see www.blockbuster.co.uk.
Hidden, 15, on DVD through Blockbuster
TV pundit Georges Laurent and his wife (Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche) start receiving disturbing videos of their own every-day life - and the cracks soon start to show.
It’s an intriguing premise which becomes all the more intriguing still when it appears increasingly obvious that the videos are deliberately targeted to draw Georges back to something very murky in his childhood.
But here responses will probably start to differ.
Michael Haneke opts for a self-consciously elliptical approach, leaving the viewer to make the links and draw the conclusions.
Some will see that as flunking it, a clever-clever arty opt-out which makes a virtue of wilful obfuscation, Hidden hiding its own meaning and therefore becoming pointless. At least’s what my wife reckons.
But... I can’t help feeling there’s something really rather appealing about a film which draws you in and then slips between your fingers, leaving you wondering ‘what the hell was that all about then?’
The final sequence shows kids leaving a school. Look closely and there’s some kind of clue. The next generation meets. But why? Even if you spot them, you won’t be able to say for certain what it means.
And that at least makes you think about it, talk about it, argue (politely!) about it - and that’s surely point enough. Provocative, definitely provocative. Irritatingly so or satisfyingly so? It came out on DVD a few weeks back, but with a bit of a pre-Christmas lull on the new release front, it’s probably worth taking a look.
Phil Hewitt
* DVD rental supplied by Blockbuster. For details of other new DVD releases see www.blockbuster.co.uk
Pirates Of The Caribbean II: Dead Man's Chest (12), new on DVD through Blockbuster.
One of cinema’s most disappointing sequels makes it onto DVD where it is... just as disappointing.
The first Pirates Of The Caribbean was a splendid film, full of wit, swagger, wonderful characterisation, superb peformances and a shipload of fun.
And Pirates Of The Caribbean II starts in similar style, pacey, action-packed and beautifully shot.
But then it starts to drown in the murky waters of its own dark plot.
Geoffrey Rush as Barbossa plus his undead crew were a brilliant invention in the first movie. In the second they are replaced by Bill Nighy as Davy Jones plus his seafood crew - and it’s nowhere near as good. The colour goes and so too do the wit and panache.
And, biggest disappointment of it, the closing moments confirm that it’s all been about nothing more than setting up the third movie in the series anyway.
Still, those closing moments do at least see the return of a certain much-missed character. So there’s certainly still hope - though not enough to explode the view that Pirates Of The Caribbean should have been left as a sparkling one-off.
Phil Hewitt
* DVD rental supplied by Blockbuster. For details of other new DVD releases see www.blockbuster.co.uk.
The Break-Up (15), new on DVD through Blockbuster
Watching two people rip each other to shreds with increasing bitterness is a bizarre kind of entertainment to serve up.
OK, it is occasionally amusing and several times hits laugh-out-loud standards, but there is something horribly down-beat about this movie - something which comes across much more strongly on second viewing on DVD than it does first time round at the cinema.
Part of the problem is that there are only really two endings. Either Gary (Vince Vaughn) and Brooke (Jennifer Aniston) get back together, which would make the whole thing seem pointless. Or they split for good, which would make it all too wretched.
The other big problem is that you really can’t imagine why they were ever together in the first place. She’s lovely if a bit uptight. He’s a lazy slob.
Their conjugal happiness is cleverly whisked through in a series of smiling snapshots during the title credits. After that, you’re straight into the rows - amusing enough, but hardly a spectator sport.
Romcoms succeed because they lift us up in a fairy-tale kind of way. This is simply everyone’s worst nightmare.
Phil Hewitt
* DVD rental supplied by Blockbuster. For details of other new DVD releases see www.blockbuster.co.uk.
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The Omen (15), new on DVD through Blockbuster.
Seven-year-old Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick does a pretty mean line in malevolent looks in John Moore’s remake of the 1976 classic.
Whether it is a quick evil glance or a long satanic glower, Seamus is your boy - just as you’d expect from someone playing the son of the devil.
Whether you’d want your own son anywhere near a film such as this is, of course, another matter, but Seamus’ parents are apparently actors - which presumably makes them a breed apart...
But back to the film... a thoroughly-satisfying piece of movie-making which does justice to the original without ever being quite as scary.
It all kicks off when American diplomat Robert Thorn unwisely agrees to a quick, secret baby swap after his own one dies at birth. It soon starts to emerge that this is no ordinary baby, and when the little chap manages to get his nanny to hang herself at a garden party, diplomat dad (Liev Schreiber) realises he’s going to have the devil of a job getting rid of the little brat.
The subplot of the developed photos which predict the means of the subject’s death is certainly still chilling, and Julia Stiles is excellent as the mum in her dawning realisation that this baby is no baby of hers.
All in all, well worth watching.
Phil Hewitt
* DVD rental supplied by Blockbuster. For details of other new DVD releases see www.blockbuster.co.uk. |
Imagine Me And You (12) new on DVD through Blockbuster
You probably won’t remember too much about it the morning after, but Imagine Me And You will certainly leave you with the pleasantly-warm afterglow of a very digestible romcom.
In fact, it’s a romcom with a difference - and that’s probably what makes it stand out more than most.
There’s a double bit of bad timing when Rachel (Piper Perabo) is consumed by love at first sight.
Not only is she standing at the altar just about to marry Heck (Matthew Goode), but the object of her affections - gulp, shock, horror - is a girl - Luce, the florist (Lena Headey).
Luce knows where she is sexually and nobly doesn’t pursue Rachel too overtly even though she’s just as smitten as Rachel is.
But poor old Rachel is thrown into turmoil, fighting against the unwanted feelings and slowly realising it’s a losing battle.
Writer and director Ol Parker teases it all out in a way which manages to be consistently sensitive and never heavy. There is an appealing lightness of touch which is never pat, even when poor bewildered Heck is wondering what the heck is going on.
Inevitably it’s all resolved sweetly, and there are prizes (and consolation prizes) all round, the whole thing passing off with just the right mix of emotion and wit.
It’s enjoyable, it’s watchable, it’s funny, it’s fun... and it’s forgettable.
Phil Hewitt
DVD rental supplied by Blockbuster. For details of other new DVD releases see www.blockbuster.co.uk.
The Da Vinci Code (12A), (149 min), new on DVD through Blockbuster
One of the most eagerly-awaited films of recent years, The Da Vinci Code just about makes the grade.
In fact, now on DVD, it’s probably better on second viewing than it is on first, a pacey-thriller, stylishly done, built on some solid if unspectacular performances.
At its heart is a complex, convoluted plot around a bid to suppress the shock news that not only was Jesus married, but he had a child - a revelation which dark pseudo-ecclesiastical forces will stop at nothing to hush up.
Drawn into it, in spite of himself, is symbols expert Dr Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks), and it is a measure of Hanks’ skill that the plot - essentially the unravelling of a series of crossword clues - gets pretty exciting in its race-against-the-clock, breathless kind of way.
But the big problem is that the film, in all its (slightly-simplified) loyalty to the original novel, can’t fail but replicate the two failings of the book - namely the beginning and the end.
The film, as does the book, opens with a moment of preposterous implausibility. An elderly museum curator is fatally shot, but still manages, his lifeblood drizzling out, to dream up all sorts of number puzzles and anagrams and spread them around the Louvre.
He strips off, scratches a few symbols on his chest, arranges himself in an outstretched da Vinci pose and expires in just the right position for a spotlight to mask his privates in the dazzle of their glare. How daft is that?
And then the ending... After all the tension, all the chasing, those final moments are just so flat - exactly as they are in the book.
Even so, on balance, the film is still worth watching. Not that good, but certainly not that bad.
Phil Hewitt
DVD rental supplied by Blockbuster. For details of other new DVD releases see www.blockbuster.co.uk.
Hard Candy, (cert 18), new on DVD through Blockbuster
There are times when Hard Candy is pretty well unbearable to watch, for instance when 14-year-old Hayley - cute, flirtatious and seemingly so vulnerable - so unwisely invites herself back to the house of the sinister-seeming fashion photographer she’s met on the net.
Similarly unwatchable is the scene where - having turned the tables on him - she essays a little DIY vivisection as he lies strapped to the kitchen table.
But the cleverness is not in the shocks in this film. It is in the fact that nothing is as it seems as the plot twists one way and then the next, leaving you constantly on edge, constantly uncertain just who is the villain of the piece.
Hayley thinks she’s trapped the man responsible for the disappearance of a local girl and she’s intent on justice/revenge - but justice/revenge in her own deeply-troubling way. Her transformation from victim-in-the-making to super-articulate dominatrix is chilling indeed.
Patrick Wilson is outstanding as the smoothie who turns victim; Ellen Page is equally so as the little girl who turns torturer in a deadly cat-and-mouse thriller which focuses on just two characters for almost its entirety.
It’s exhausting viewing first time round. And worth watching again now its on DVD - for different reasons. When you know what’s coming, you’ll appreciate all the more the sheer cleverness of its construction.
Phil Hewitt
DVD rental supplied by Blockbuster. For details of other new DVD releases see
www.blockbuster.co.uk
Waiting (15), on DVD through Blockbuster The box tries to tempt you with the fact that Waiting comes from 'a producer of American Pie'.
Presumably they got the wrong one.
Waiting shares the grossness of American Pie, but in American Pie the grossness was redeemed by genuine wit.
There’s precious little of that here, maybe two or three sniggers as you while your way through a mini-eternity in the company of the drop-outs, weirdos and losers who people this film.
Never has a movie been more appropriately named. To start with, you wait for the laughs. After a while, you simply wait for the end.
It’s all based in an American diner, and the story, such as it is, revovles around the things that the employees get up to.
The joke is that you don’t mess with the staff. If you do, they do all the kinds of things you rather fear that waiters/chefs might do if you dare to complain.
But as a pretext for a film, it’s about as thin as you can possibly get.
A vague storyline starts to emerge about one of the lads possibly being promoted to deputy manager level, but like the rest of the film, it soon fizzles out.
Phil HewittDVD rental supplied by Blockbuster. For details of other new DVD releases see
www.blockbuster.co.uk.
The Lake House, (12) new on DVD through Blockbuster
It was batty when it first came out at the cinema. It seems even battier now that it’s out on DVD.
But there’s still something rather appealing about this curious film. It’s got a fairy-tale charm all its own.
It all revolves around the friendship and possible romance struck up between jaded doctor Kate Forester (Sandra Bullock) and frustrated architect Alex Wyler (Keanu Reeves).
There is a definite spark between them but there is also a huge obstacle. They share the same strange lake-side house, but they share it two years apart.
The time-slip forces them to communicate through a mail-box which obligingly flips a little lever to let them know when one or other them has made a time-defying deposit.
All very sweet.
But the problems come when they try to meet, making an appointment sometime in the future which they hope will close the gap. Now how can that possibly work?
Even worse, it turns out that they have actually met. The problem of course was that the one in the future didn’t yet know the significance of this meeting in the past
In the end, it makes your brain ache. And whichever way you look at it, it’s just impossible to shoehorn the conclusion into any kind of logic at all.
But maybe that’s missing the point. Best just to remember that the whole thing is barmy. Best to just sit back and enjoy the fairy tale.
Phil Hewitt * DVD rental supplied by Blockbuster. For details of other new DVD releases see
www.blockbuster.co.uk.
Pierrepoint, (15) on DVD through Blockbuster Albert Pierrepoint dispatched hundreds of killers during his reign as Britain’s number one hangman - a fact which doesn’t make the thought of a biopic seem terribly appealing.
But this film of his life comes as a compelling surprise. It is thoughtful, totally engrossing, haunting and ultimately moving.
For Pierrepoint - brilliantly played by Timothy Spall - becoming a hangman was simply a question of joining the 'family business'. And he became exceptionally good at it, sending killers into the next world with an efficiency born of a curious kind of compassion.
His respectful care of their bodies in the aftermath of execution is faithfully reproduced. His view was that they had paid the price and were somehow returned to a state of innocence.
But the strength of the film is in the subtle way in which director Adrian Shergold shows Pierrepoint’s untroubled mind start to cloud. The sheer number of executions he had to carry out after Nuremberg was a turning point; so too was his horror at having to hang a friend. Eventually he cracks. Eventually he comes to his famous conclusion - hanging people achieves nothing more than revenge.
Spall shows it all masterfully and movingly, brilliantly supported by Juliet Stevenson as his wife.
Phil Hewitt
DVD rental supplied by Blockbuster. For details of other new DVD releases see
www.blockbuster.co.uk.
Lucky Number Slevin (18), new on DVD through Blockbuster
Get to the end and you’ll want to go straight back to the beginning.
Lucky Number Slevin is one of those intriguing movies that lead you very satisfyingly down all the wrong paths - one of those movies that it’s good fun to be stitched up by.
Don’t take anything for granted in this cat-and-mouse film. Just who’s playing with whom in this deadly game is probably beyond guessing, and yet when the revelations come, you just know it works perfectly.
Watch it again, and you’ll enjoy it even more now that you know the deceits. Clever, very clever and never annoyingly so.
In the centre of it all is Josh Hartnett as Slevin, a guy seemingly trapped in a nightmare case of mistaken identity. Without knowing why, he finds himself caught between two warring crime bosses, The Rabbi (Ben Kingsley) and The Boss (Morgan Freeman).
Also on his case are Detective Brikowski (Stanley Tucci) and the cruel assassin Goodkat (Bruce Willis). And soon it seems to be spiralling out of control... except that Slevin, seemingly not as lucky as the title implies, never seems to panic.
There’s plenty of violence but there is also plenty of intelligence in this well-plotted and occasionally quite witty movie. The opening sequences are fairly disoirentating, but once you get into it, it’s very worth the watch.
Phil Hewitt
DVD rental supplied by Blockbuster. For details of other new DVD releases see www.blockbuster.co.uk.
Asylum (15), on DVD through Blockbuster
Forbidden and darkly-destructive passion makes this strange film a compelling one - a movie hot on atmosphere and full of threat.
Natasha Richardson is excellent as Stella Raphael, the wife of a staid, distinctly dull psychiatrist (Hugh Bonneville) who finds herself steamily drawn to a wife-murderer (Marton Csokas) in his charge at a gloomy asylum in the 1950s.
There is desperation in the way she risks everything for their raunchy encounters in the greenhouse. And when he escapes, she follows him, knowing his past, knowing that his vicious madness isn’t far below the surface.
And nor is hers. She’s powerless to resist and doesn’t even bother to try, abandoning husband and son on an erotic adventure doomed to disaster. Patrick Marber’s screenplay of Patrick McGrath’s novel finds the perfect director in David Mackenzie.
The result is a brooding masterpiece - but one which sadly loses its way in the final 20 minutes. It appears to end, but then doesn’t. And then starts to ramble - saved in the end by the curious figure of Ian McKellen’s Dr Peter Cleave. Just what is he up to?
Strange, very strange.
Phil Hewitt
* DVD rental supplied by Blockbuster. For details of other new DVD releases see www.blockbuster.co.uk.
When A Stranger Calls (15), new on DVD through Blockbuster
If you fancy an hour and a half on the edge of your seat, then this might just be the film.
There’s nothing remotely original about it, and by all accounts the 1979 original, of which this is a remake, is far superior.
But in its new incarnation, When A Stranger Calls is still a disturbing view, an effective chiller which gives you a decidedly uncomfortable, unrelaxing time of it.
Student Jill Johnson (Camilla Belle) is needing to earn some cash after running up a hefty phone bill - which makes all that follows grimly ironic.
She turns up for a night’s babysitting at a remote house surrounded by swishing trees and before long the phone starts to ring... and ring and ring.
Jill finds herself plagued by a series of increasingly menacing calls. Low point number one comes when the voice chillingly asks “Have you checked the children lately?” Low point number two is when she discovers just where the calls are coming from.
In between times, she does everything you’d expect of her in a film such as this. She peers in cupboards, she goes running around outside armed with just a torch. If there’s danger, she’s ready to walk straight in.
Phew, it’s a relief when it’s all over and you can come out from behind the sofa. Cheap thrills, but thrills nonetheless.
Phil Hewitt
DVD rental supplied by Blockbuster. For details of other new DVD releases see www.blockbuster.co.uk.
Shopgirl (15), on DVD through Blockbuster
Poor shopgirl and would-be artist Mirabelle Buttersfield (Claire Danes) has got a tough choice - either the rich businessman who doesn’t really care or the weird drop-out who might just have a heart of gold.
Which one will she go for? Do we really care? No.
Steve Martin's screen adaptation of his own novella, in which he also stars as said rich businessman, is a turgid, colourless affair from first to last.
It’s dull, it’s lifeless and it’s thoroughly unappealing, none of the characters - not even Mirabelle - sparking any curiosity. You don’t root for anyone and you care for no one.
Shopgirl is that rare thing, a genuinely, consistently boring film - and a film made all the worse by the awful occaisonal voice-over which purports to explain for us the non-events unfurling before our eyes.
It’s the kind of film you feel you ought to persist with just in case there is a sudden flash of brilliance. But believe me it doesn’t come. Go find something else to do. I wish I did.
Phil Hewitt
DVD rental supplied by Blockbuster. For details of other new DVD releases see
www.blockbuster.co.uk
Inside Man, (129 min) (15), new on DVD through Blockbuster
Now on DVD and definitely worth a second viewing, Inside Man leads you just as satisfyingly up the garden path even when you know that that’s exactly where you’re being taken.
On the surface, Dalton Russell (Clive Owen) seems to be pulling off the perfect bank robbery. Even when it spirals into a hostage situation, Russell is always two or three steps ahead of Detective Keith Frazier (Denzel Washington).
He’s cold, chillingly brutal and totally collected whatever happens... And yet somehow nothing is what it seems.
Frazier begins to doubt that Russell’s demand for a jet to get him out of there is for real. And rather than the money, everything soon starts to revolve around a safe deposit box.
Cleverly adding to the confusion, events are interspersed with post-release police interviews with the hostages - interviews in which it is clear Frazier hasn’t the foggiest whether he’s talking to victim or robber.
And that’s the brilliance of the plotting. It all eventually makes sense, but you’ll never spot it coming. This is that rare thing - a clever film which never becomes irritatingly so.
Phil Hewitt
DVD rental supplied by Blockbuster. For details of other new DVD releases see www.blockbuster.co.uk.
Half Light (15), new on DVD through Blockbuster
It’s great to see Demi Moore back and in cracking form in this thoroughly-satisfying thriller, a movie with shades of Hitchcock – and all the better for that.
Half Light sees Moore as novelist Rachel Carlson, a writer thrown into unimaginable grief when her young son drowns – a grief mixed with guilt because Rachel’s self-absorption played a part in his death.
In a bid to make a new start and in the hope of resuming her writing, she moves to a remote Scottish coastal cottage. But clearly she’s never going to escape. A mystic local – a bit of a stereotype in this kind of film – warns her that the dead son is by her side.
But for a while a new life beckons, with Rachel increasingly drawn to the thoroughly-decent-seeming lighthousekeeper on the island opposite. A plausible romance develops… but you know disaster is just around the corner.
When she mentions lighthouseman Angus to her new neighbours back on the mainland, she silences them instantly. They try to break it to her gently. What she says is happening can’t possibly be happening.
In her grief-stricken state, is she imagining things? Or is the supernatural taking over? Director and writer Craig Rosenberg keeps you guessing nicely, ratcheting up the tension skillfully with plenty of twists. A gruesome murder some seven years before starts to take over, plunging Rachel into the darkest of nightmares.
OK it’s far-fetched when you ponder it all at the end, but it’s real enough as you watch it – and it’s a great performance from Moore. Definitely one for those dark winter nights that aren’t so far away.
Phil Hewitt.
DVD rental supplied by Blockbuster. For details of other new DVD releases see www.blockbuster.co.uk.
The Squid And The Whale (15), new on DVD through Blockbuster.
A warring couple’s separation is viewed through the eyes of their two boys in Noah Baumbach’s touching and often funny semi-autobiographical movie - a look at the collateral damage when marriage comes to an end.
The father (the excellent Jeff Daniels) is a smug, complacent lecturer, a once significant novelist who lives in the constant delusion that he could be so again and indeed still is... which explains his jealousy when literary success comes the way of his wife (Laura Linney).
Throw into the mix the boys’ tennis coach, and their marriage is doomed. When it comes to the break-up, the children are split right down the middle, the older lad falling for his dad’s superficial charms, the younger boy opting for his mum.
But hardly surprisingly, both the boys are damaged, particularly by the complicated joint custody arrangements their parents opt for. The younger boy matches lapses into foul-mouthed fury and vindictive sexuality in equal measure; the older boy, in all his uncertainty, opts disastrously for public plagiarism, misguided at every turn by his father’s dubious pearls of wisdom - pearls of wisdom from a father who doesn’t even baulk at nicking the girl his son’s going for.
Their dad is pretty awful, which makes the film seem just a touch imbalanced, but all in all it’s amusing, moving and absorbing, an intriguing piece with fine performances from everyone involved - a persuasive portrait of an eccentric, damaged and damaging family.
Phil Hewitt
DVD rental supplied by Blockbuster. For details of other new DVD releases see www.blockbuster.co.uk
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The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, new on DVD through Blockbuster
Weird just isn’t the word for this modern-day western. But however bizarre it is, it is also quietly compelling.
Cruel-and-nasty border patrolman Mike Norton (Barry Pepper) stupidly though accidentally shoots dead the aforementioned Melquiades Estrada. He disposes of the body in a shallow grave and hopes for the best.
The police show little interest in clearing up the case, and Melquiades is reburied (burial number two) in a pauper’s grave.
But then comes the intervention of hard-bitten Pete Perkins (Tommy Lee Jones, who also directs), a cowboy determined to exact his own peculiar justice for his mate Melquiades.
Pete kidnaps Norton, forces him to dig up the corpse and pressgangs him on a grim mission to give Melquiades the burial (number three) he’d dreamed of, across the border back in his native Mexico.
The film is essentially the story of a journey by three men (one avenging, one forced and one rotting) and there are moments of the blackest of black humour along the way as the decomposition really starts to set in and the stench starts to bite.
But what makes the film is the increasing sense that there’s something really quite noble in Pete’s quest for his dead mate - and also that Mr Nasty Norton is increasingly touched by it.
A bond starts to grow between captor, captive and corpse. Strange, very strange. But very watchable. And definitely one of those films that stays in your mind long after the credits have rolled.
Phil Hewitt
DVD rental supplied by Blockbuster. For details of other new DVD releases see www.blockbuster.co.uk. |
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Proof (99 mins) new on DVD through Blockbuster.
Nothing kills a film more surely than the growing feeling that you’re watching an expanded but essentially unchanged stage play.
That’s certainly the case with Proof, proof of the fact, if nothing else, that plays need to be transformed rather more fully than this if they are to work on the big screen. The outdoors shots seem false; the dialogue over heavy.
Gwyneth Paltrow plays Catherine, the possibly-mad daughter of definitely-mad Robert (Anthony Hopkins), a brilliant mathematician whose genius she may or may not have inherited.
With his madness, Robert’s work inevitably declined - and Catherine was left alone to look after him as he furiously filled notebook after notebook with... weill, either complete rubbish or perhaps yet more works of genius.
And that’s when a brilliant mathematical proof turns up - a discovery which offers a different take on the word proof. Catherine says she wrote it herself, but can she prove the proof is hers?
Hopkins is excellent as Robert, and Paltrow sits cleverly in the grey area between sanity and its opposite, but the whole feel of the piece is wrong - overly wordy and wrong. And while there are a couple of great scenes (Catherine’s opening conversation with a father you don’t yet realise is dead, her impromptu tribute at his funeral etc etc), the interest ebbs away the longer the film goes on.
Sadly the proof of this particular pudding is in the play it should have remained.
Phil Hewitt
DVD rental supplied by Blockbuster. For details of other new DVD releases see www.blockbuster.co.uk
The River King (2005) (95 min) - new on DVD through Blockbuster
When a student at an exclusive school is found dead in an icy river, the school closes ranks to head off any suspicion of foul play.
Police officer Abel Grey (Edward Burns) gets little cooperation when he is sent to investigate. And he gets just as little cooperation from his boss who seems just as keen to shut off any scandal.
School and police collude to try to write off the death of as suicide - a verdict which goes against Abel’s every instinct in a world which slowly sucks him, a world in which a bizarre initiation rite seems to have gone tragically wrong.
Burns is excellent as the dogged detective following his hunch in the face of everything; Thomas Gibson is similarly impressive as the victim of... suicide, murder, accident?
Set against eerie, snowy forests and in the grim school itself, this is a slow-burner of a movie, appealingly understated and cleverly underdone. You might get a little impatient with it just as the start, but like Grey you’ll be drawn into its sinister plotting.
Not a great film, but a hauntingly satisfying one, high on atmosphere and increasingly intriguing. Avoiding hysterics, it slowly but surely grips.
Phil Hewitt
DVD rental supplied by Blockbuster. For details of other new DVD releases see www.blockbuster.co.uk
Failure to Launch (97 min)New on DVD through Blockbuster
There’s a good reason Tripp still lives at home despite being in his mid-30s. Every time a new girlfriend starts to give him 'that look', he takes her back to meet his parents... and within minutes he’s free again.
And it’s driving his parents mad. Which is why they hire Paula (Sarah Jessica Parker), an 'interventionist' who is convinced she knows just how to make him leave the nest.
It’s a scenario which puts Matthew McConaughey (Tripp) right back in How To Lose A Guy In Ten Days territory. Once again he’s being manipulated in a relationship by a girl with her own agenda; once again he and she fall in love.
But so what? How To Lose A Guy In Ten Days was a sweet, witty and enjoyable film, and so is this, particularly in a final scene in which Tripp and Paula are forced to confront each other, unaware that a series of webcams is broadcasting their intimacies to all and sundry.
It’s not a film which challenges, but it certainly entertains. McConaughey stylishly retreads old ground and Parker is suitably winsome when affairs of the heart take over from purely business concerns.
Phil Hewitt
l Rental supplied by Blockbuster. For more details see www.blockbuster.co.uk . |
Sophie Scholl, (117 min), new on DVD through Blockbuster
A simple story is simply told to remarkable effect in this deeply-affecting, deeply-chilling masterpiece from director Marc Rothemund - thanks principally to a mesmerising central performance from Julia Jentsch.
Jentsch is Sophie Scholl, the 21-year-old student who along with her brother was arrested in February 1943 for distributing anti-Nazi leaflets at Munich University.
Within days, they were interrogated, tried, convicted and guillotined. Indeed, execution was carried out within hours of the trial. The maniacal ranting of the top Nazi judge shipped in from Berlin to condemn the Scholls to death is a ghastly moment in this sombre, powerful film.
But the core of the piece is the interrogation, a gripping sequence in which Scholl initially denies any involvement with the White Rose student resistance group, but after her brother confesses to his part in it all in a vain attempt to save his sister, Sophie proclaims her pride in what she has done.
Jentsch brilliantly conveys Scholl’s mix of naivety and absolute conviction, her fear and her faith in a totally compelling, utterly convincing portrait of a genuine martyr.
At one point Scholl seems to be offered a way out if she renounces her group, but she stands firm and is vindicated. Within months of her death, the Allies are dropping tens of thousands of copies of her leaflet over Munich.
Moving, thought-provoking and superbly-crafted, this film should be required viewing.
Phil Hewitt
l DVD rental supplied by Blockbuster. For details of other new DVD releases see www.blockbuster.co.uk
