DVD & Blu-ray review: Lawless (18) John Hillcoat (116mins)
Strip this bootlegger tale of its extreme violence and what you’re left with is one of those hokey, cliché-ridden afternoon TV movies.
January 12, 2013
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Strip this bootlegger tale of its extreme violence and what you’re left with is one of those hokey, cliché-ridden afternoon TV movies.
This violent actioner opens with three redneck brothers massacring 13 heavily tattooed chaps in their Alabama home. Turns out they’ve slaughtered the wrong mob.
Michelle Williams’s mildly depressed wannabe author is married to Seth Rogen’s slightly juvenile cookbook writer. But then she meets free-spirited Daniel (Luke Kirby).
“You look like the back end of a bus,” growls Alfred Hitchcock (Toby Jones) to his long-suffering PA (Penelope Wilton) in this compelling portrait of the director’s sadistic relationship with his leading lady, Tippi Hedren (Sienna Miller), on The Birds and Marnie.
Derek Jacobi and Anne Reid appear to be enjoying themselves immensely as former childhood sweethearts who reconnect via Facebook in this initially cosy (the series takes on a darker hue later on) comedy-drama, set in Yorkshire.
The third Harold & Kumar film is a cosy, cockle-warming comedy, which is quite an achievement, considering that it contains, to quote the parental guidelines, “strong crude and sexual content, graphic nudity, pervasive language, drug use and some violence”.
“I didn’t even know who Laurence Olivier was,†admits a wonderfully entertaining Michael Gambon of his audition for the National Theatre.
Leigh Francis’s fake-tanned, sleazy northern businessman, as seen on ITV2’s Celebrity Juice , gets a feature-length caper which will please his fans while baffling and/or disgusting everyone else.
Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, Chuck Norris, Arnold Schwarzenegger … how can so many pensionable men be involved in a film which seems to have been written by an eight-year-old?
The Bourne franchise continues (this is number four), with Jeremy Renner sitting in for Matt Damon and the series writer, Tony Gilroy, taking over the director’s job from Paul Greengrass, but the transition is a surprisingly smooth one.