There are those who associate the words “costume drama” with genteel comfort viewing, as if no act of brutality or subversion could ever be committed in a hoop skirt. It’s a perception that Lady Macbeth (Altitude, 15) upends with stringent, stinging fixity of purpose. An elegantly appointed chamber piece in which toxic masculinity, destructive sexuality and racial exploitation bounce ever more violently off the walls, William Oldroyd’s ice-spined debut straps the viewer in a corset and pulls the laces to suffocation point.
It does the same to its teenage protagonist, headstrong Northumberland child bride Katherine – played with cutting brilliance by Florence Pugh – whose psyche runs obsessively hot and cold in response to abuse at the hands of men. She takes a lover, but carnal release is a complicated freedom here; as she coolly faces down every human obstacle to her desire, the moral burden of her liberation becomes harder and harder to support. If Lady Macbeth is a feminist parable, it’s hardly a rousing one. Inventively adapted from a 19th-century Russian novella, this is a vital Victorian horror story in which oppression becomes a sick game of pass-the-parcel. Even its lovely frocks turn sullied and rancid in the process.
Their Finest (Lionsgate, 12), on the other hand, is old-school British heritage cinema of the comfiest, most flannelly sort, with no kinks or caveats to its female-empowerment message, and that’s just dandy. Jauntily following the professional and romantic travails of a film crew enlisted by the Ministry of Information to make morale-boosting wartime fare in 1940, Lone Scherfig’s Horlicks-flavoured lark finds a soft comic middle ground between Ealing Studios and Richard Curtis – yet despite its tonal lilt, emerges now as an improbably ideal companion piece to Christopher Nolan’s infinitely sterner Dunkirk. The piffling, propagandistic Dunkirk adventure dreamed up by sparring screenwriters Sam Claflin and Gemma Arterton on film may have no intricate time loops or gruelling war-is-hell outlook, but Britain comes bravely and exclusively to the rescue in both.
Also basking in the glow of the golden age of movie-making, but to rather more muted, melancholic effect, is Warren Beatty’s Rules Don’t Apply (Fox, 15) – a throwback exercise rather ironically being given a digital download-only release. Beatty has been out of the Hollywood game for some time: that one-foot-in, one-foot-out status is evident in some of the mustier aspects of the film’s construction, but it also lends a peculiar personal resonance to Beatty’s portrayal of an ageing Howard Hughes, his attempted film empire looking rickety and outmoded in the late 1950s. The future instead belongs to two of his underlings, kept ingenue Lily Collins and bright-eyed chauffeur Alden Ehrenreich; in turn, Beatty’s beguiling young leads politely pull the film out from under him, their starlit love story giving this odd reverie a breath of life.
Two edits in, Laura Poitras’s documentary Risk (Dogwoof, 15) still feels like a work in progress. A character study of Julian Assange in which his actual character continues to slither just out of view, it has been substantially reworked from the film Poitras originally presented at Cannes last year, which took a more sympathetic view of the WikiLeaks founder. A year later, Poitras is more sceptical not just of her subject – including damning reflections on WikiLeaks’s dubious involvement in last year’s presidential election campaign, among other updates – but of herself, her voiceover candidly confessing the limitations of her earlier perspective. As a study in the transience of documentary film-making, it’s intriguing; as a documentary in itself, it remains frustrating.
Rounding out the new releases, The Bleeder (Lionsgate, 15) is a gritty, grease-stained 1970s boxing biopic, the familiar beats of which make its direct-to-DVD status understandable – but its gutsy performances from Liev Schreiber and, particularly, Elisabeth Moss, plus its unexpected grace in defeat, merit a closer look. The Belko Experiment (Fox, 18), meanwhile, is an ultra-grisly office-space slasher flick that accepts its low-rent status, notwithstanding a contrived quasi-Orwellian premise; it’s a disappointment from genre-savvy Wolf Creek director Greg McLean.
Finally, the week’s standout rereleases: the still shrewd, sharp-angled social needling of The Graduate (Studiocanal, 15) and the lively intersectional outsider celebration of My Beautiful Laundrette (BFI, 15) are hopefully not revelatory to too many viewers, but glossy new Blu-ray clean-ups are as good a reason as any to revisit them. Edward and Caroline (Studiocanal, 12), however, is a light, silky discovery to me. Set over a single evening, in which a family party aggravates intimate domestic and class-based conflict, Jacques Becker’s 1951 marital comedy may be thankfully dated in some aspects of its gender politics, but retains much of its dry fizz.
