For what it's worth...

Top Ten Films at the UK Box Office    
for the weekend of October 11-13, 2013: 
     
1 (1) Prisoners (15)   
2 (3) Sunshine on Leith (12A)
3 (4) Blue Jasmine (12A) **
4 (2) Filth (18) ***
5 (5) Rush (15) **
6 (new) The Fifth Estate (15) **
7 (new) Le Week-End (15) *** 
8 (6) Runner Runner (15)
9 (7) Justin and the Knights of Valour (PG)  
10 (10) White House Down (12A) 
     
(source: Guardian.co.uk)

My top five:    
1. Prince Avalanche
2. Captain Phillips
3. The Epic of Everest
4. The Pervert's Guide to Ideology  
5. Enough Said
 
 
Top Ten DVD rentals: 
     
1 (new) Jack the Giant Slayer (12) **    
2 (new) Identity Thief (12) *    
3 (5) Iron Man 3 (12) ***     
4 (4) Cloud Atlas (15) ****    
5 (3) Olympus Has Fallen (15) ***    
6 (1) Star Trek: Into Darkness (12) ***     
7 (2) Mud (12) ***     
8 (6) Lincoln (12) ****    
9 (re) A Good Day to Die Hard (12)    
10 (8) Zero Dark Thirty (15) ***
     
(source: lovefilm.com)
     
My top five:    
1. We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks    
2. Renoir
3. Like Someone in Love  
4. The Pervert's Guide to Ideology 
5. More Than Honey
 
     
Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:      
1. The Lady Vanishes [above] (Saturday, BBC2, 8.35am)
2. Die Hard (Saturday, C4, 9pm)
3. Halloween: H20 (Friday, BBC1, 11.50pm)
4. The African Queen (Wednesday, C4, 1.05pm)
5. Leaving (Saturday, BBC2, 12.55am)

"Last Passenger" (The Guardian 18/10/13)

Last Passenger (15) 97 mins ***

The British action movie remains a rare beast – understandably so, if you recall 1997’s Downtime, which attempted to emulate Die Hard in a tower block with an asthmatic Paul McGann. The genre may get a boost from writer-director Omid Nooshin’s enjoyably crafty, neo-Hitchcockian debut, set aboard a midnight commuter train. Dougray Scott is the medic trying to return his son to Sevenoaks when the guard disappears and the driver – whose death drive is left chillingly motiveless – speeds through Tunbridge Wells, with no terminus in sight save, perhaps, the English Channel. It takes a judicious while to introduce Scott’s ambiguous fellow travellers, yet even when the pace accelerates, Nooshin holds onto a strain of logic that doesn’t often survive at this level of filmmaking: if you’ve ever wondered what goes on inside a driver’s cab, or glimpsed something indecipherable through a rain-spattered carriage window, it should just work. 

Last Passenger opens in selected cinemas from today.

"The Broken Circle Breakdown" (The Guardian 18/10/13)

The Broken Circle Breakdown (15) 111 mins ***

Advance word on this Flemish tearjerker was formidable, but I’m afraid I couldn’t quite see past the oddness of its conceit: to redo Blue Valentine with songs. Felix van Groeningen’s film at least justifies its title’s eccentricity: the relationship between a beardy bluegrass singer (Johan Heldenbergh) and a tattooed free spirit (Veerle Baetens) is set out as fragments of life before and after the death of their young child, scrapbooking nudey frolics alongside heavily-worn regret. The music lends it whatever unity it has: though there’s a certain comic incongruity in the idea of all this banjo-plucking going down in Northern Europe – the spirit of Rednex lingers – it’s chiefly regarded as a fleeting source of solace. The leads emote their hearts out, and it’ll doubtless make a resonant soundtrack album – but van Groeningen needs those tunes to carry us over his somewhat contrived and flatpack-like vision of bohemia. 

The Broken Circle Breakdown opens in selected cinemas from today.

"The Lebanese Rocket Society" (The Guardian 18/10/13)

The Lebanese Rocket Society (uncertificated) 93 mins **

Lebanon’s modest contribution to the Sixties space race – the society formed at Beirut’s Haigazian University by Professor Manoug Manougian – is here reclaimed as a source of optimism: it encouraged students from across the Middle East to fire rockets skywards, rather than at each other. Yet this dour-seeming documentary only succeeds in framing the Society’s efforts as so much elaborate tinkering – a science-fair project that briefly caught eyes before being consigned to history’s attic. The flat-footed investigative approach, shuffling between archives, hardly helps; only with a belated attempt to reconstruct the rockets does the film poke its head beyond the shed door.

The Lebanese Rocket Society opens in selected cinemas from today.

"Escape Plan" (The Guardian 18/10/13)

Escape Plan (15) 116 mins **

What’s the most preposterous aspect of this not-so-great escape: that Sly Stallone should be playing the brains behind the weighty tome “Compromising Correctional Institution Security”? That he should blithely accept Government coin to test the perimeters of an off-the-grid panopticon where Vinnie Jones commands greater authority than Sam Neill? Or simply that he’s then obliged to accept the protection of Austrian anarchist Arnold Schwarzenegger? (A brawnily tender shower scene may have hit the cutting-room floor.) Director Mikael Håfström clears some space for his hotchpotch cast, and delivers one smartly concealed twist, but he’s stuck with increasingly ropey material, and the problem of setting semi-crucial structural talk in mouths that haven’t formed a coherent sentence for decades. It’s basically Prison Break for dopes, and – in everything from the prisoners’ jumpsuits to the streaks in Arnie’s hair – decidedly grey pulp, never quite distinctive enough to merit anything more than a tardy, generally unmemorable DVD viewing.

Escape Plan is in cinemas nationwide.

At the LFF: "Gone Too Far!"

1993 saw the release of Gurinder Chadha's Bhaji on the Beach, one of those well-intentioned crowdpleasers that wasn't ever likely to take the BAFTAs by storm, but was evidently the start of something noteworthy, not least for Chadha's career; in the two decades since, henna and sag aloo have become staple ingredients of British cinema - and, beyond that, British life. Gone Too Far!, the Peckham-set debut of Anglo-Nigerian director Destiny Ekaragha, gives off much the same vibe: adapted from Bola Agbaje's Olivier Award-winning stageplay, it uses the odyssey of a would-be playa forced to babysit an embarrassing older brother from Nigeria as a way of shirttailing a particular conversation playing out on the streets of the inner city.

Though all skin colours are represented, this isn't quite the same territory as Kidulthood, and not so very far from the Peckham of Del Boy and co. The humour is broad - characters are chased by dogs, and walk blindly into lampposts - yet often disarming: one bad boy knocks an old dear off the pavement with his bike at one point, only to then go back and give her a hug. The big difference between this and the more earnest Bhaji is that the talk Ekaragha's camera overhears clearly comes from the end of a conversation, and not the beginning. Though these characters endlessly debate racial distinctions ("even my mum calls me black, and I'm white"), they almost always find themselves with more pressing matters to be getting on with, whether nipping to the shop on an errand, trying to get laid, or - in one particularly lovely image, carefully positioned at the heart of the film - rollerskating with friends: white, black, whatever.

It's undeniably episodic in form, and that it's pitched chiefly at a home crowd is evident from the decision to preserve Agbaje's patois-heavy dialogue more or less intact and without subtitles, but much of it does feel fresh (there's no Adam Deacon, which is a start), and its unabashed, front-and-centre enthusiasm - its sense of look, we're making a film! - is both infectious and gets it most of the way to the finish line. In twenty years, I predict okra will play more of a role in British cinema than it presently does - and we'll have Agbaje and Ekaragha to thank for it.

Gone Too Far! screens at the Odeon West End tomorrow (Fri 18), the Hackney Picturehouse on Saturday, and the Vue West End on Sunday; ticket details can be found here.

For what it's worth...

Top Ten Films at the UK Box Office  
for the weekend of October 4-6, 2013: 
   
1 (1) Prisoners (15) 
2 (new) Filth (18) ***
3 (new) Sunshine on Leith (12A)
4 (3) Blue Jasmine (12A) **
5 (2) Rush (15) **
6 (4) Runner Runner (15)
7 (8) Justin and the Knights of Valour (PG)
8 (5) Insidious: Chapter 2 (15) ***
9 (6) About Time (12A) **
10 (7) White House Down (12A) 
   
(source: Guardian.co.uk)

My top five:  
1. The Pervert's Guide to Ideology
2. Le Week-End  
3. Nobody's Daughter Haewon  
4. Filth  
5. Folie à Deux
 

Top Ten DVD rentals: 
   
1 (new) Jack the Giant Slayer (12) **  
2 (new) Identity Thief (12) *  
3 (5) Iron Man 3 (12) ***   
4 (4) Cloud Atlas (15) ****  
5 (3) Olympus Has Fallen (15) ***  
6 (1) Star Trek: Into Darkness (12) ***   
7 (2) Mud (12) ***   
8 (6) Lincoln (12) ****  
9 (re) A Good Day to Die Hard (12)  
10 (8) Zero Dark Thirty (15) ***
   
(source: lovefilm.com)
   
My top five:  
1. We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks  
2. Like Someone in Love
3. The Pervert's Guide to Ideology
4. Pieta
5. Behind the Candelabra 
 
   
Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:    
1. A Fistful of Dollars [above] (Saturday, five, 9pm)
2. Point Blank (Friday, BBC2, 12.10am)
3. Senna (Sunday, ITV1, 10.20pm)
4. Shane (Monday, C4, 12.50pm)
5. No Way Out (Wednesday, BBC1, 11.45pm)