The cinema release calendar is more crammed than it has ever been, yet good films still slip through the cracks on an alarmingly regular basis. Not even an Oscar nomination and a recent Edinburgh film festival premiere could save Gina Prince-Bythewood’s throbbing, neon-hot musical soap opera Beyond the Lights (Universal, 12) from direct-to-DVD ignominy here, echoing the fate of far too much vital African American fare on our shores. It deserves more generous exhibition, not least as a star-sealing showcase for British ingenue Gugu Mbatha-Raw, whose livewire turn as a Rihanna-esque pop star on the brink of self-destruction marks a more emphatic arrival than last year’s Belle.
There’s nothing here you haven’t seen in countless backstage dramas dating back to the pre-sound era: she’s the supernova for whom money can’t buy inner peace; Nate Parker is the good civilian who might yet be her saviour; a peak-form Minnie Driver is the merciless stage mother driving her to the edge. The devil (or the diva) is in the details, as Prince-Bythewood perceptively probes modern-day definitions and demands of class, race and celebrity within the grand, velvety framework of Hollywood melodrama. Like the star at its centre, it does not suit being ignored.
It has to fight for the spotlight, too, in a strong week for arthouse releases, none better than Ruben Östlund’s wickedly pointed family-crisis comedy Force Majeure (Artificial Eye, 15), in which the Swede’s preoccupation with the warped moral subtext of everyday human behaviour finds its most broadly entertaining narrative to date. Not that any iciness is sacrificed as a well-to-do family unravels over the course of a plush ski vacation, following an instinctive act of selfishness by Dad. Östlund unpicks shifting rules of gender and authority in the domestic sphere with a laugh-as-you-cringe precision that the mooted US remake will have a hard time matching.
That said, there’s something irreplaceably American about the woozy picket-fence terror underpinning It Follows (Icon, 15), David Robert Mitchell’s sinuous John Carpenter evocation. It’s not the first horror film to make adolescent sexuality its chief conduit of fear, as a mysterious chasing curse is passed like an STD from one randy teen to the next, but it’s bracing in its sensitivity. Mitchell is as interested in his characters’ real-world relationships as he is in his supernatural metaphor. I’m not convinced the rules of the latter bear the closest scrutiny, but the film’s alluring alcopop atmosphere overrules such practicalities.
Consistently underrated even within her breezy comic forte, a superb Jennifer Aniston sets out to prove a point through gritted teeth in Cake (Warner, 15), playing a dun-haired, pill-popping chronic pain sufferer with nerve and against-the-grain humour that isn’t quite matched by the indie-by-numbers drama surrounding her. Would that she could team up with as lively and astute a chronicler of the human condition as Desiree Akhavan, star and director of Appropriate Behaviour (Peccadillo, 15), in which she plays a Persian-American bisexual muddling her way through the fraught Brooklyn social scene; it’s a mottled but auspicious debut and a singular statement of identity. More curious still is Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter (Soda, 12), a cool, devastating midwestern mystery that weaves contemporary urban legend into its own riff on the Coen brothers’ Fargo. Short-form description does it few favours, but it’s an off-track beauty.
The week’s standout documentary arrives, once more, courtesy of Netflix. Coming months after its Sundance debut, Liz Garbus’s What Happened, Miss Simone? is a loving but appropriately hard-bitten portrait of brilliant, prickly jazz great Nina Simone. Rifling exhaustively through public and private archives, Garbus fashions a necessarily complex student of a woman who remained elusive even through her most candid art. She needn’t work as hard to remind us of Simone’s intensity as a performer, though there’s plenty of that, too, in this riveting portrait.
The week’s bounty of independent offerings leaves little room for the mainstream. That’s not a great shame in the case of The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (Fox, PG) – the title is its best joke – an amiable return to Jaipur for its ensemble of sparky pensioners that doesn’t defy a single expectation set up by its predecessor. You already know whether or not you’ll like it, which can’t quite be said for Jupiter Ascending (Warner, 12), the Wachowskis’ much-maligned crazy quilt of sci-fi kitsch. Catching up with this gaudily eccentric space opera months after its commercial cremation, I’m not remotely surprised by its failure, but I was unexpectedly beguiled by the film’s obsessive world building and a rogue streak of romanticism that I wouldn’t trade for a dozen stencil-cut Marvel movies. It’s an unarguable folly, but that needn’t be a bad thing.
