Out on Friday 24 February
A manhunt led by Mark Wahlberg. Xavier Dolan’s star-studded family drama. Richard Gordon’s compelling George Best doc.
Yes, here's this week's new releases. Click on for our reviews of Patriots Day, A Cure for Wellness, It’s Only the End of the World, The Fits, Sweet Dreams, Southern Fury, and Best.
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Patriots Day
Mark Wahlberg and Peter Berg have carved out a niche as re-constructors of real-life disasters, from a Navy Seal op in 2014’s Lone Survivor to the BP oil spill in last year’s Deepwater Horizon.
Like Deepwater, Patriots begins with breakfast. Not just in the home of Tommy Saunders (Wahlberg), a Boston cop tasked with managing crowds at the finish line, but also Tamerlan Tsarnaev (Themo Melikidze) and his brother Dzhokhar (Alex Wolff), Chechen-born siblings who are heading to the race with a far darker purpose.
We also meet a pair of newlyweds, a security guard and a cop from the suburbs (J.K. Simmons) who all have a part to play in the imminent tragedy – one that, when it comes, is staged with a visceral immediacy and harrowing precision that leaves us rightly shaken and appalled.
Establishing a command centre at a vast and vacant cruise-ship terminal, the FBI – led by a no-nonsense Kevin Bacon – sets about analysing evidence and identifying the perpetrators. The trail leads them swiftly to the Tsarnaevs, whose attempts to elude capture take up the rest of the film in a fashion not dissimilar to Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood.
It’s a brilliantly taut episode, matched by another scene in which Tamerlan’s American wife (Melissa Benoist) is mercilessly grilled by a female interrogator. Another stand-out set-piece is the chaotic confrontation on Simmons’ patch that sees pressure-cooker bombs tossed about like firecrackers.
It’s hard to miss, however, how few of these moments feature Wahlberg, for all of the script’s efforts to incorporate his composite character into the action. It’s as if the film knows that Tommy is a fiction, encouraging us to yell “bogus!” when he uses his encyclopaedic CCTV knowledge to assist Bacon’s investigation or miraculously happens to be in the right place at the right time when one of the bombers finds himself cornered.
Berg’s intention is to show how communities come together in the face of atrocities that are both horribly inevitable and largely unpreventable. But Patriots Day also proves something else: that the requirements of a star-led Hollywood vehicle are antithetical to those of factual recreations with multiple spheres of activity.
THE VERDICT: A senseless outrage is handled with sensitivity in a stirring film that doesn’t need an A-list hero.
A Cure for Wellness
Dusting himself down after The Lone Ranger ate dirt at the box office, Gore Verbinski returns with another looong, misshapen movie. This one plays like an odd cross between Edgar Allan Poe and such sanatorium-set thrillers as Shock Corridor, Shutter Island and American Horror Story: Asylum.
With Lockhart’s health and sanity draining away as surely as the arresting visuals are leeched of any bright colours, A Cure for Wellness attempts a Lynchian burrow beneath the sanatorium’s placid croquet lawns to diagnose the soul-sickness of modern man, no less. But its message is pompous and murky, only drugging the action.
Still, at least the final act perks up, accelerating into all-out horror territory that’s part Dr. Phibes-style camp and part Hostel-flavoured gore (there’s a reason for that 18 certificate). You might say it’s an insane mix.
Director: Gore Verbinski; Starring: Dane DeHaan, Mia Goth, Jason Isaacs, Celia Imrie; Theatrical release: February 24, 2017
It’s Only the End of the World
A crème de la crème cast (Marion Cotillard, Vincent Cassel and Léa Seydoux) fuels Xavier Dolan’s (Mommy) Cannes Grand Prix winner. But like the awkward family reunion they gather for, nobody comes out well.
It’s shot mostly in claustrophobic close-up, given the usually good actors nowhere to hide over 97 relentless minutes of spittle-soaked squabbling.
Director: Xavier Dolan; Starring: Nathalie Baye, Vincent Cassel, Marion Cotillard, Léa Seydoux, Gaspard Ulliel; Theatrical release: February 24, 2017
The Fits
Newcomer Royalty Hightower stars as a pre-teen tomboy who forsakes boxing practice with her brother to join a dance troupe, only for the older girls to start suffering mysterious convulsions.
Director Anna Rose Holmer’s narrative debut is eerily strange, grappling with issues of gender, adolescence and conformity. Mood ultimately trumps character, but Holmer’s helming brims with promise.
Sweet Dreams
Middle-aged journalist Massimo (Valerio Mastandrea) remains deeply troubled by the mysterious death of his mother when he was aged just nine.
Shifting between Massimo’s sepia-toned ’60s childhood and his ’90s adulthood, this sentimental drama comes undone via the redemptive romance between its emotionally introverted protagonist and Bérénice Bejo’s compassionate female doctor.
