By Ashley Clark
Not a great deal in the way of new releases this week, but bags of variety at South London’s best cinema.
The big new release this week is Peter Jackson’s (perhaps undeservedly) epic The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey in 3D. Starring Martin Freeman (who’ll always be Tim from The Office to me) as young Bilbo Baggins, it’s the first instalment of the New Zealand director’s second big budget Tolkien trilogy. It has opened to a mixed critical response, but fans should go away happy. Meanwhile, Benedict Cumberbatch fans will be pleased to hear the wonderfully-named one pops up as arch-villain Necromancer.
Also new is the highly impressive doc Chasing Ice, which picked up the prize for Best Cinematography at this year’s Sundance film festival. Using time-lapse photography over months, years and three continents, National Geographic snapper James Balog created a series of stunning mini-docs of glaciers breaking up and falling into the sea, and in some cases simply vanishing into dry land. Director Jeff Orlowski mixes these docs up with footage of Balog at work and intriguing news footage to great effect. A must for anyone with any interest in the climate (which should be all of you!)
For food lovers who are tired of Come Dine With Me re-runs, there’s a re-release of 1987 gastro-comedy Babette’s Feast. It’s a charming film about the titular 19th-century political refugee and former chef who finds shelter with two pious, elderly sisters whose devotion to their preacher dad and his Protestant sect has denied them any chance of romance or adventure. Babette decides to give them a chance to live the lives that have thus far eluded them, the catalyst being the lavish meal she insists on preparing following their father’s death. On a further rep tip, you shouldn’t miss one of two late-night weekend screenings of Peter Jackson’s awesome 1994 drama Heavenly Creatures, about two girls in 1950s New Zealand whose imaginations get the better of them with disastrous consequences.
This week’s Discover Tuesdays slot is filled with wacky Canadian comedy Starbuck. Patrick Huard stars as David Wozniak, a shiftless fortysomething who works (badly) for his father’s meatpacking company as a delivery driver. He’s $80,000 in hock to local gangsters, and then his on-off girlfriend announces she’s pregnant. Things get even worse when it emerges that in the ’80s, Wozniak – operating under the pseudonym ‘Starbuck’ – was a sperm-bank regular, fathering some 533 children. Now 142 of his sprogs have decided to take legal action to discover the identity of their biological dad, with madcap results. It’s a moderately entertaining piece of work, but also off-puttingly cartoonish and manipulative.
Films continuing their runs this week include Mike Nichols’ stodgy Dickens adaptation Great Expectations; Martin McDonagh’s overcooked comedy-thriller Seven Psychopaths; winning mental illness-themed comedy Silver Linings Playbook; the return of Ben Affleck’s fake-movie beardy wonder Argo; Thomas Vinterberg’s timely, harrowing man-accused-of-child-sex-abuse drama The Hunt; excellent black comedy Sightseers, which sets the very worst of the English national character against the very best of the English national landscape; Michael Haneke’s austerely moving study of dementia Amour; and finally Paul Thomas Anderson’s wilfully obscure, well-acted and visually captivating The Master. For the kids, you’ve got Nativity 2: Danger in the Manger, the excellent Rise of the Guardians and a couple of showings of Arthur Christmas.
