Anti-Islam jokes and spatters of literal excrement notionally modernise material that would have seemed too hoary for Blazing Saddles.Īdeel Akhtar in Channel 4’s Utopia, to be remade for HBO in the US by David Fincher. That still makes it more fragrant than Seth MacFarlane’s wretched western spoof A Million Ways to Die in the West (Universal, 15), in which the Ted creator plays a milquetoast sheep farmer who falls for a ruthless gunslinger’s girl. He merely seems dedicated and stifled as a grizzled ex-con forester who becomes an unlikely mentor to a headstrong teen: it’s Mud redux, then, with additional stagnant water odour. It’s been heralded as an artistic comeback for Nicolas Cage, which is to say he goes less nuts than usual in it, though I’m not sure how much that works in his favour. There’s man-and-boy bonding of a more conventional sort in David Gordon Green’s effortfully grimy backwoods thriller Joe (Curzon, 15). Not that there’s much to remember about this glib, perky recycling of the eponymous 1960s cartoon sideshows, despite the bewildering premise of a genius time-travelling dog fighting for custody of his adopted human son. Essentially mirroring the narrative of the still-unreleased Israeli film Bethlehem, it’s tight, thoughtful, slightly over-tidy discussion cinema.īig-studio animated features come down the pike with such frequency these days that I had entirely forgotten Mr Peabody & Sherman (Fox, U) by the time it arrived on DVD. More recent headline news is fused with fictional melodrama in Hany Abu-Assad’s Oscar-nominated Omar (Soda, 15), an effective thriller about a young Palestinian baker (the promising, arrestingly handsome Adam Bakri) forced by the Israeli authorities to become an informant after participating in the execution of a soldier.
#Fruitvale station dvd crack#
Colin Firth is nobly miscast as the southern PI who helped crack the case open, while a more interesting arc goes to Reese Witherspoon, fine and flinty as the lone doubter among the victims’ parents, but the film can’t commit to a point of view. It’s still a more urgent take on a true-crime tragedy than Atom Egoyan’s disappointingly utilitarian Devil’s Knot (EV, 15), which brings little to the grimly fascinating story of the West Memphis Three, the trio of American teenagers unjustly convicted of child murder in 1993, which hasn’t been covered in the comprehensive Paradise Lost documentary trilogy.
Photograph: Allstar/Image Entertainment/Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar
‘Disappointingly utilitarian’: Colin Firth and James Hamrick in Devil’s Knot. With echoes of the Trayvon Martin case contained in its fury, this is compelling but emotionally irresponsible film-making. Compressing and occasionally fabricating details of Grant’s existence, the film fashions its story as one of a flawed, working-class hero Grant may well have been that, but his construction as a character invites viewers to feel worse about an unarguable atrocity than they would do otherwise. It’s worth seeing for reasons of argument alone, particularly on DVD, which flatters its brightly modest aesthetic, but I remain in the unconvinced camp.Ĭoogler’s dramatisation of the last day in the life of Oscar Grant, a young black father shot dead by a white Bay Area cop on New Year’s Day 2009, is short, sincere and gracefully acted, yet there’s something discomfitingly artificial about its version of the truth.
W hen Ryan Coogler’s debut, Fruitvale Station (Spirit Entertainment, 15), split opinion at Sundance last year, the ensuing critical debate proved noisier than the film’s belated UK release.
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