Photograph: LMK
The Coen brothers pull off an elegant bait and switch in Hail, Caesar! (Universal, 12). Lured by the respective bright lights of a vintage Tinseltown milieu, a game star ensemble and George Clooney’s glistening teeth, we arrive expecting a weightless bauble. What we get is a pretzel-knotted spiritual rumination to be filed nobly alongside A Serious Man. It’s no surprise that the Coens can handle dense theological inquiry and noir-style puzzle plotting with equal aplomb, nor that they’re movie-literate enough to direct Scarlett Johansson in a sublime pastiche of an Esther Williams mermaid musical. It’s less expected to see them exhibiting all these skills in one film, but as Josh Brolin’s flailing Hollywood studio boss wades into ever murkier backlot shenanigans, the dream-like tonal and logical lurches of Hail, Caesar! feel like part of its woozy, seductive design. The Coens are besotted with the absurdity and artifice of cinema, but see real life as an equally strange construction.
Reality gets a simultaneously bleak and oblique twist, meanwhile, in Anomalisa (Curzon Artificial Eye, 15), cockeyed genius Charlie Kaufman’s lovely, long-faced first foray into animation. Co-directed with stop-motion artist Duke Johnson, this story of a grey customer service expert, Michael, gazing into the existential void shows humanity as an eerie, uniform mass – our voices alike, our faces identically built from multiple, not-quite-joining parts. With love comes distinction: when Michael (drily voiced by David Thewlis) falls for Jennifer Jason Leigh’s whimsical, admiring, anomalous Lisa (geddit?) in a drab Ohio hotel, his world, for a time, opens and expands. Kaufman explores these broken-souled puppets as tenderly and inquisitively as he has done his live-action characters; animation just feels an obvious aesthetic progression for a film-maker who was never quite of this world to begin with.
Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s sensuous, sun-bleached debut Mustang (Curzon Artificial Eye, 15) is, in a sense, caught between worlds. The film delineates, with great sensitivity, the plight of an oppressed band of sisters in a remote Turkish village, while couching their story in chic arthouse terms that make the Ankara-born director’s Parisian upbringing quite clear. (A Turkish-German-French co-production, the film was claimed by France at this year’s Oscars.) Whatever its cultural makeup, it’s vibrant, affecting stuff: the young women’s liberation may follow a crowd-pleasing formula, but the film’s western influences perhaps aptly reflect the characters’ own desires. Ergüven connects with them at a gut level, and with breezy formal flair to boot.
Her airy touch would be welcome in Mon Roi (Studiocanal, 15), a shrill unparcelling of a destructive marriage that, despite its occasionally impressive grandiosity of feeling, comes as a disappointment from Polisse director MaÏwenn. Emmanuelle Bercot took home a best actress prize at Cannes for this, but there’s something self-admiring and put-on about her and on-screen sparring partner Vincent Cassel’s fever-pitch work.
Elisabeth Moss, however, delivers steaming, real-deal intensity in Alex Ross Perry’s Queen of Earth (Eureka, 15), a clammy, claustrophobic and wholly arresting study of female friendship gone haywire that makes a swift transfer from cinemas to DVD. The wan, plastic-wrapped “girl power” of Allegiant (eOne, 12), meanwhile, could use one iota of Moss’s potency. Now three films in, this drab, sub-Hunger Games dystopian fantasy franchise makes less sense than ever, and seems even to have defeated Shailene Woodley’s perky spirit. A fourth film looms next year with all the promise of a dental check-up.
Finally, a pair of nifty domestic thrillers wring dread and tension from that most middle class of social setups: the dinner party. In The Ones Below (Icon, 15), first-time director David Farr (writer of TV’s The Night Manager) effectively plays on the maintenance and reversal of polite British distance as two adjacent couples, both expecting children and occupying the same smart Islington terrace, gradually eat away at one another. It overboils badly in the last act, however, which can’t be said for US director Karyn Kusama’s super-sleek, super-smart The Invitation, which recently popped up on Netflix. Shamefully denied a UK cinema release, this sharp, shivery tale of ex-spouses circling each other at an ostensibly friendly social reunion riven with hidden histories and agendas keeps its mysteries on a teasingly tight leash throughout. It’s a must-see – and for Kusama, left languishing too long in the Hollywood doldrums following 2000’s tough-shelled indie Girlfight, a career-reigniting revelation.
