DVD & Blu-ray review: Jack Reacher (15)
Lee Child’s popular hero, a former-soldier-turned-drifter, is famously 6’5“. So who plays him
April 20, 2013
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Lee Child’s popular hero, a former-soldier-turned-drifter, is famously 6’5“. So who plays him
joss Whedon’s perky series about wisecracking, renegade space cowboys, operating 500 years in the future, might have infamously been axed in 2002, but since then Firefly (above) has become the definitive cult success, spawning a terrific film, Serenity, and topping numerous lists for best sci-fi series.
Best not to eat anything during David Cronenberg’s queasy, exploding-heads horror from 1981. Hammy, often unsettling, performances abound (Patrick McGoohan in particular) in this wild tale of scanners, a group of psychics who can lock into a person’s nervous system and make their head pop.
Barnaby Southcombe’s funereally paced but inventively lit oddity stars Charlotte Rampling (the director’s mother) as a lonely divorcée who after hooking up with a rotter at a speed-dating event, goes back to his Barbican flat and smashes his head in.
A comedy about an all-female student a capella group, Pitch Perfect rehashes a plot that’s older than Mickey Rooney. Â Â Â Â
Midsomer Murders meets David Lynch in the BBC’s ripe, horribly compelling five-part thriller. A 15-year-old May Queen goes missing in a provincial town and three disagreeable middle-aged men – Peter Firth’s grubby property developer, Aiden Gillen’s sneering layabout and Peter McDonald’s creepy cop – are the main suspects.    Â
BBC’s wildly successful Sunday-night entertainment is certainly preferable to the cloying Lark Rise to Candleford and it doesn’t flinch at portraying domestic abuse in late 1950s Poplar.
JRR Tolkien’s sweet, 320-page fantasy has presumably been turned into a monstrous three-part film in order to make as much moolah as possible. Â Â Â Â
It’s another week of slim pickings with new DVD releases.
“Go shopping until you cheer up,†is the unhelpful advice given to Rebecca Gibney’s distraught mum, Shirley, in a cake shop.    Â