The next Sundance festival is just over a fortnight away and sure to unveil a surfeit of genial-to-gelatinous American coming-of-age indies that will trickle down to our screens over the next 12 months. We’re still working through last year’s batch: luckily, Dope (Sony, 15) is one of the charmers, even as it scrabbles to make a point beyond its own adorability. Director Rick Famuyiwa previously examined the trials of African American young adulthood in his 1999 debut, The Wood, but this is a fresher, springier take, infused with a bright-eyed nostalgia for the 90s its young protagonist never knew. (Courtesy, largely, of a bang-on soundtrack curated by executive producer Pharrell Williams.)
With his geek-chic styling and straight-A grades, enterprising teen Malcolm (the delightful Shameik Moore) bucks the stereotype of South Central youth. Famuyiwa’s script, however, puts him through a series of hoops designed to test his resistance to the thug life, inveigling him into a high-stakes MDMA heist. The cultural mismatch makes for some spry comedy, though the underlying message – is this brush with gangsterism presented as a critique of the options available to black youth or a dubious rite of passage? – is less confident. Still, it rolls along at an infectious pace, shot with a hazy, late-summer glow that is all the more welcome in the early January murk.
It’s more cheering than the half-baked stoner farce of American Ultra (EIV, 15), in which a sweetly ineffectual pothead couple (Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart) are revealed – to the audience, as well as to Eisenberg’s memory-wiped character – to be something else entirely: a deadly CIA agent and his doting agency minder. That’s the joke, and if it tickles you on paper, you may get a little further into the film before the laughs dry up entirely. It’s material unworthy of the gamely compatible energy that Stewart and Eisenberg – reunited from the far smarter Adventureland – bring to it.
Stewart is turning into the kind of performer who can complicate the sketchiest part. Another, I would venture, is Zac Efron, whose imperceptibly punctured dreamboat perfection is the ideal fit for At Any Price (StudioCanal, 18), Ramin Bahrani’s heavy-handed but undervalued allegory for the corrupted American dream. Two very American vocations – industrialised corn farming and Nascar racing – clash in the warring ambitions of crooked farmer Henry Whipple (Dennis Quaid) and his rebellious son Dean (Efron). As the latter resists the prescribed footsteps of the former, a wealth of heartland tradition is called into question. The rhetoric is brash and beefy; the Nicholas Ray allusions, meanwhile, go further than the James Dean namesake of Efron’s character.
As in Bahrani’s film, a character is pointedly named Dean – with the same Rebel Without a Cause implications – in Just Jim (Soda, 15), a tale of aspirationally cool Welsh teendom that marks a promising if tonally wayward directorial debut for its young star Craig Roberts. It at least seems the work of a more assured film-maker than The Cobbler (eOne, 12), a barren body-swap bauble that catastrophically blends earnest whimsy with the baser comic brand of star Adam Sandler. Its most startling twist is that it’s directed by the highly capable Tom McCarthy, currently Oscar-tipped for Spotlight. Aficionados of low-rent ecclesiastical horror, meanwhile, may wish to check out The Vatican Tapes (Signature, 15), a shrieky exorcism exercise that at least goes in an unexpectedly nihilistic direction — and features one of cinema’s more memorable scenes of egg regurgitation.
Two little-discussed British classics, Guy Green’s The Angry Silence (StudioCanal, PG) and Basil Dearden’s The Captive Heart (StudioCanal, PG), debut on Blu-ray this week. The former, a bristling individual-versus-industry parable spiked by a top-flight Richard Attenborough performance, retains a little more punch today than the latter: a stiff-but-trembling-lipped Ealing Studios venture into second world war melodrama, carried with grace by Michael Redgrave as a Czech army captain assuming the identity of a slain British soldier.
New Year’s Day saw a rare flood of new titles added to the Netflix library, running the gamut from Darren Aronofsky’s Pi to Mo’Nique: I Coulda Been Your Cellmate!. On balance, it’s a bounty of greater quantity than quality, but a few essentials are finally available to stream: if you’ve never seen Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil, don’t delay, and if Carol has got you in the mood for more Patricia Highsmith on film, Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr Ripley – comfortably his greatest film, and until recently the greatest of all Highsmith adaptations – hasn’t lost one silky layer of its malevolent lustre in 16 years.
