Out on August 21 and August 28
Liev Schreiber rolls with the punches. Florence Pugh leads a powerful period piece. Kristen Stewart explores the spooky world of fashion.
Yes, here’s the new DVD and Blu-Ray releases coming out in the next two weeks. Click on for our reviews of The Bleeder, Lady Macbeth, Their Finest, Batman and Harley Quinn, Unforgettable The Levelling, The Marx Brothers Collection, Personal Shopper, The Age of Shadows, A Quiet Passion, Security, and One-Eyed Jacks,.
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The Bleeder
In Rocky sequel Creed, Liev Schreiber made do with a voice role. But, with a pleasing circularity, he dominates the ring in a lower-key boxing movie that tells the frayed-at-the-edges tale of the bum who inspired Rocky. As played by Schreiber, Chuck Wepner is a Noo Joisey fighter who’s too sweet to hurt anyone but loves putting on a show. Usually, said show involves bleeding on opponents – hence his nickname ‘the Bayonne Bleeder’.
Wepner isn’t great at family business either; cover Stallone’s ears, but he cheats on wife Elisabeth Moss (reliably excellent) and neglects his daughter. Yet when he gets to fight Muhammad Ali in 1975, he lasts 15 rounds, becomes a local hero and snags Sly’s attention.
Wepner’s modest post-Rocky celebrity descends into drugs and drink, yet director Philippe Falardeau (Monsieur Lazhar) enriches the clichés. Wepner’s low-key life is smartly contrasted with romanticised movie boxers, especially at his nadir, where he shares the ring with bears for money and arrives coke-blitzed for a school-teacher meeting.
Character-based intimacies take the plot weight, well-served by nimble-footed casting: Ron Perlman and Naomi Watts aside, Morgan Spector is a note-perfect Stallone. But the show belongs to the often unsung Schreiber, who keeps Wepner engagingly human and likeable without diluting his flaws. Hollywood should make a film about the guy…
Lady Macbeth
Not a spin-off from the Scottish play, this powerful period piece from debut filmmaker William Oldroyd is a corset drama for anyone who thinks they don’t like corset dramas. Loosely adapted from a 19th Century novella, Lady Macbeth traces the murderous path that Katherine (Florence Pugh) takes to escape her loveless marriage.
Their Finest
London, 1940. Screenwriter Catrin (Gemma Arterton), tasked with scripting a morale-boosting propaganda movie, conjures two sisters risking all to save soldiers at Dunkirk. Adapted by Gaby Chiappe from Lissa Evans’ novel and directed by Lone Scherfig (One Day), Their Finest is propelled by female talent; while nominally about confronting sexism, it also celebrates the Blitz spirit and the power of cinema to liberate.
Unforgettable
Doesn’t do what it says on the tin. Not even close. Soapy without being camp, derivative without being smart, this embarrassment to the CVs of all involved is singularly unmemorable. A former victim of domestic violence (uncomfortably used as a salacious plot device), Julia (Rosario Dawson) comes a cropper at the hands of her fiancé’s bunny-boiler ex, Tessa (Katherine Heigl), because all women are psychos or punchbags.
When a man is found murdered in Julia’s kitchen, whodunnit? And whose panties are in his possession? Really, who cares? Insultingly dumb.
The Levelling
An astonishingly assured first feature – as both writer and director – from Brit talent Hope Dickson Leach. We’re on the Somerset Levels after the catastrophic flooding in 2014. Trainee vet Clover Catto (Game of Thrones’ Ellie Kendrick) returns to the family farm following the death (accident? suicide?) of her younger brother, to confront her estranged father, Aubrey (David Troughton).
Grief, anger and guilt clog their fraught confrontations; secrets physical and emotional lie buried, waiting to be unearthed. Kendrick and Troughton are on searing form, while Leach’s script cuts deep.
The Marx Brothers Collection
Mercilessly lampooning everything from love to dictatorship, the Marx Brothers’ first movies obey the motto of film’s funniest family: “High pressure, first, last and always.” Starting with their stagily hilarious early-sound-cinema hit The Cocoanuts, this covetable limited edition of the fab four’s Paramount offerings (The 4 Marx Brothers At Paramount: 1929-1933) shows their frantic comedy developing from fast-paced Broadway shtick to classic satire full of filmic flourishes.
Zany ’30s high-society satire Animal Crackers gets two minutes of risqué gags restored, until it pops with sly pre-Hays Code innuendo. The bulging extras, with commentaries from experts such as Harpo’s son Bill Marx, show how stowaway comedy Monkey Business got its skittish, even surreal feel. Comic innovation surfaces in the lesser-known college comedy Horse Feathers, in which Groucho’s intolerance skewers vamp Thelma Todd, feeling like the granddaddy of short-fuse comedies such as Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Hard to believe their now-iconic, anarchic take on war and diplomacy, 1933’s Duck Soup, opened to mediocre box office, as this package’s classy feature-length doco reveals. All five rib-ticklers have been buffed up splendidly in 4K restorations on Blu-ray.
Personal Shopper
An iPhone. A train. And a scared Kristen Stewart. Those are the key ingredients in one of the year’s most nail-biting set-pieces, delivered with verve by director Olivier Assayas (Clouds of Sils Maria) in this atmospheric genre-blender.
Personal Shopper’s ‘creepy text’ sequence is a highlight, but it’s just as effective elsewhere, as Stewart’s bored PA hunts ghosts in Paris. There are stretches with zero dialogue, and masterful scares, which combine to create something ethereal and unforgettably unique.
A Quiet Passion
Director Terence Davies (Sunset Song, The Deep Blue Sea) takes a deep dive into the life of 19th Century American poet Emily Dickinson (Cynthia Nixon) and her struggles with the dual tyrannies of puritanism and patriarchy.
Davies draws out timeless themes of oppression and identity, and shots are composed with a classical formalism, but it’s wordy, didactic and ultimately restrained to the point of suffocation. Perhaps that’s the point, given Dickinson’s own life, but it makes for frustrating viewing.
Security
Antonio Banderas becomes the latest ageing action star to play a super-skilled badass who happens to be in the wrong place at the right time. He plays Eddie Deacon, an ex-special services captain now working as a night-shift mall cop who is forced to save a young girl from Ben Kingsley and a mini-army of trained killers.
There’s a promising preamble before the action situation kicks in, however it’s eventually betrayed by a series of repetitive shootouts and a lack of interesting character moments. Less Die Hard, more Try Hard.
One-Eyed Jacks
Marlon Brando’s only film as director came with a formidable pedigree – both Sam Peckinpah and Stanley Kubrick helped develop it. Brando does a fine job, creating a revenge western as raw and wild as his own tortured performance as bank robber ‘Kid’ Rio, locked in an Oedipal duel with Dad Longworth (Karl Malden), the outlaw-turned-lawman who left him for dead.
