Superhero films, in all their Lycra-wrapped machismo, are easy enough for sceptics to mock; once the film-makers join in, however, a strained sense of regimented fun creeps into proceedings. So it is with Deadpool (Fox, 15), an eager but terminally smug exercise in self-aware Marvel prankery that leaves no fourth wall undemolished. Starring Ryan Reynolds as an ex-military victim of medical experimentation left with superhuman healing powers and super-irksome wisecracks, Tim Miller’s film follows the Kick-Ass course of self-covering provocation: sadism or sexism with a wink, it reasons, isn’t sadism or sexism. (Deadpool’s girlfriend may be a colourless stock figure, but she does get to sodomise him. Feminists, you are hereby appeased.)
It feigns offensiveness, though only those appalled by hormonal schoolboys need take umbrage. Credit where it’s due to Reynolds, who sells the whole thing with smarm and charm that aren’t mutually exclusive, but this is a glib, greasy idea of fun.
For violently funny subversion of Boy’s Own fare, look instead to Bone Tomahawk (The Works, 18), S Craig Zahler’s splendid, morbid revival of the cowboys and Indians western. The palefaces’ enemy this time is a fantastical tribe of mutant cannibals (“Men like you wouldn’t distinguish them from Indians,” one Native American character pointedly observes) who kidnap some local townsfolk, setting sheriff Kurt Russell and his motley crew off in hard-squinting pursuit. Zahler has an adoring eye and ear for the idiom of Hollywood’s old west, with a salty, satirical streak that frankly outclasses Quentin Tarantino’s recent strain of pastiche. The film then thrillingly jackknifes into fresh, bloody B-movie terrain, yet even at its most viscerally grisly points, Zahler’s limber, literate way with language never deserts him: listen out especially for the sublime Richard Jenkins’s monologue about circus fleas.
As beguiling as it is utterly classification-resistant, Laurie Anderson’s roving personal essay Heart of a Dog (Dogwoof, E) got a tad lost in cinemas last month, but should be cherished on small screens. Beginning as a grief-stricken Valentine to the film-maker’s late terrier, it unrolls with graceful imprecision into a meditation on narrative, music, philosophy, even the paranoia of post-9/11 America. Its cobweb connections make far more sense seen than described.
Simpler in its sweetness is Our Little Sister (Curzon, PG), an unashamedly small tale of sibling bonds lost and found that accrues power with its accumulation of fine domestic (and fragrantly culinary) details. It’s less preoccupied with emotional escalation than some of director Hirokazu Koreeda’s more acclaimed works, and more moving for it. Far more acrid human observation is to be found in Chilean-American auteur Sebastián Silva’s Nasty Baby (Network, 15), in which a gay couple’s attempt to conceive a child with a female friend (Kristen Wiig) goes off course via a neck-snapping plot twist that I found at once exhilarating and unconvincing.
Reissue of the week, by a long yard, is Dissent & Disruption: Alan Clarke at the BBC (1969-1989) (BFI, 18), a mammoth compilation of the gut-spilling social realist’s collected TV dramas, alongside his feature films Scum and The Firm, here presented in a new director’s cut. The total comes to 13 discs, 33 hours and more than a hundred quid; an investment for the committed, not the curious. I’m still working my way through, but it’s a stunning assembly: the cleaned-up transfers haven’t lightened the dirt under these films’ nails one bit.
Finally, you have just over two weeks left to head to Mubi.com and stream the year’s most dizzying swirl of cinema so far: Miguel Gomes’s Arabian Nights trilogy, a bounding, incandescent triptych of films themselves composed of profuse interlocking parts, addressing history, mythology and contemporary European economics through its own eccentric version of Scheherazade’s storybook. There are chaffinches and ghost dogs here; Gomes juggles personal and political grievances here, finding room for love, law and Lionel Richie. At over six hours, it sounds imposing, but proves a leisurely, enveloping wallow.
