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DVD Reviews

 

 

Cash

Director: Stephen Milburn
Starring: Sean Bean, Chris Hemsworth, Victoria Profetta
 

A zippy low-budget film in which a suitcase full of money lands on Chris Hemsworth’s car and he and his wife set about spending it. Unhappily, the suitcase’s owner (Sean Bean) – his twin brother threw it from a van during a police chase – tracks them down. He moves into their house until they can raise the money to pay back what they’ve spent. Before you know it they’re robbing convenience stores whilst Bean keeps a tally to the last cent.

Bean is suitably threatening, the tone of the film is a nice mix of menace and humour, there’s a pleasant enough sub-Tom Waits soundtrack and a neat little twist after the end credits have started rolling. Worth a look.
 

 

 

 

The Merry Gentleman

Director: Michael Keaton
Starring: Michael Keaton and Kelly MacDonald
 

Not quite a thriller but a fine directorial debut from Michael Keaton, who also plays the titular merry fellow (not). He’s a troubled hitman who develops an unlikely friendship with Macdonald - who is on the run from a troubled marriage - in the hope she can save him. As there’s a detective who has also taken a fancy to her you know there’s going to be trouble ahead.

The film has an indie feel to it: Keaton doesn’t move his camera around much, the look is relentlessly unglamorous and the pace is slow as he takes his time developing the relationship between two lonely people. Although there are murders they are mostly off-screen and this is too quiet a film to count as a thriller. Indeed, it almost goes against Mr Chekov’s famous dictum that if you introduce a hitman in the first act he has to kill someone by the end of the third – or something.

The film’s focus is on MacDonald and she is extraordinary. How the homely girl of Gosford Park turned herself into Texan trash in No Country For Old Men and now into this complex, damaged character is proof of her brilliance. And Keaton, always watchable in front of the camera, shows he has a good eye behind it. Most impressive.



 

The Informant

Director: Stephen Soderbergh
Starring: Matt Damon
 

This one came and went without troubling the box office too much, which is a shame given it’s one of versatile Damon’s most compelling roles. Any film about a whistleblower is going to suffer in comparison to Michael Mann’s magisterial “The Insider” – the film Rusell Crowe truly deserved an Oscar for. Perhaps that’s why Soderbergh goes for a light touch. Damon, who piled on the pounds for this role, plays fantasist Mark Whitacre who blows the whistle on corporate fraud in a jokey spy film. Soderbergh provides his usual added value with his commentary on the extras.

 

 

Katalin Varga

Director: Peter Strickland
Starring: Hilda Peter, Norbert Tanko
 

A startling debut from Reading-born, Budapest-living director Strickland . Filmed on a minimal budget in the Hungarian countryside it tells the story of a young mother (Peter) and her son (Tanko) who set off across Transylvania in a horse-drawn carriage and on foot to take revenge for a past crime. Not much happens for much of the film but the landscape is stunning and the tension builds and eventually it is a powerful tale of betrayal, revenge and, of course, redemption.
DVDextras include Strickland himself talking engagingly about the film to camera. Worth checking out.


 

 

 

Previously reviewed, now out on DVD.

 

Harry Brown

DVD BLUERAY

Worth buying for Michael Caine’s commentary alone.  It ranges far wider than this film

Loved the film, still love it on DVD - except the subtitles are tiny.

 

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