A question: how is it that we seem to get a new screen version of Hamlet once a decade or so, yet Macbeth (Studiocanal, 15) has remained largely untouched since Roman Polanski’s hefty 1971 version? If it wasn’t already the most wildly cinematic of all Shakespeare plays, Justin Kurzel’s stripped-back, blood-caked and fire-breathing new version is certainly out to prove the point. Some have complained that it loses too many words, yet in their place are vivid, scorched-in images: snow and sparks, heaving bodies in tangled states of violence, skies that bleed in saturated scarlet.
I honestly can’t remember which passages are missing. Kurzel finds such an intuitive visual language for the Scottish play that I heard them in my head anyway – if not quite as rivetingly delivered as they are by Michael Fassbender and, as a most sensually persuasive Lady M, Marion Cotillard. Both performances boast a kind of lean modern classicism; there’s no strained updating of either character, but each has been conceived and concentrated for the intimacy of the camera, not the echo of the stage.
Kurzel’s approach could hardly be bolder, but I’d still pay good money to see Canadian director Denis Villeneuve take on a Shakespearean tragedy. He practically directs the climactic reckoning of Mexican cartel thriller Sicario (Lionsgate, 15) like one, albeit with a far terser cast of characters.
Like Villeneuve’s strappingly silly Prisoners, it’s a film I recall chiefly for its astonishing visual and sonic textures. Its black-opal cinematography and raging, reverberating score have both been deservedly Oscar nominated. Beneath its glittering tar surfaces, however, there’s a somewhat chiding moral irony to this story of an FBI agent (Emily Blunt) drafted into a task force of uncertain allegiance to bring down a major druglord. The film even makes a smug virtue of short-changing its heroine: Blunt is phased out of the narrative just as her character is stymied at every turn by misogynist male authorities. It’s up to the viewer to decide on the merits of that mirroring.
Also masking a less than illuminating story framework with startlingly advanced technique is The Walk (Sony, PG), Robert Zemeckis’s narrative account of Philippe Petit’s landmark tightrope crossing between New York’s former twin towers – a film that, coming seven years after James Marsh’s Oscar-winning Petit doc Man on Wire, is hard pressed to avoid seeming superficial and superfluous by comparison. Vertiginous visual effects wizardry makes the film a triumph of physical sensation, though even its stomach-rearranging spectacle takes a tumble on a 2D television format.
Woody Allen’s Irrational Man (Warner, 12), on the other hand, feels just as vindictively small on DVD as it did in cinemas. Kant-inspired only in the manner of a student zealously taking a highlighter to his text, this greyish noir proves as listlessly academic as Joaquin Phoenix’s protagonist – a disaffected philosophy professor prone to contemplating, as a number of Allen’s men have been known to do, the perfect murder. Solely enlivened by Parker Posey as an aggressively amorous colleague, it at least occupies the stranger corner of Allen’s lower tier.
Anton Corbijn’s Life (Entertainment One, 15) takes a rueful, elegiac approach to the often bland terrain of Hollywood icon portraiture. Viewed twice over through a photographer’s eyes – Corbijn’s first, then those of celebrated showbiz snapper Dennis Stock, played on screen by Robert Pattinson – it’s a James Dean study that doesn’t look behind the iconography but into it, considering the tension between Dean’s constructed and distracted selves, both given inspired life by the remarkable Dane DeHaan.
Corbijn’s film deserved more patient consideration last year from critics and audiences, as did Miss You Already (Entertainment One, 12), a tear-stained terminal disease drama that is stoutly, unfashionably honest in its embrace of melodrama and emotional candour, however ugly the ensuing cry. As the soon-to-be-separated best friends at its centre, Toni Collette and Drew Barrymore gift the film with a rare, sustained flash of human connection. The same, to more sweetly shuffling emotional ends, can be said for the direct-to-DVD French miniature Dans la cour (Studiocanal, 15), starring the appealingly odd match of Catherine Deneuve and Gustave Kervern as two emotionally singed, socially opposed inhabitants of the same Parisian apartment block, each of whom finds an improbably sympathetic ear in the other.
To close, a release limited to digital platforms. Hailed as the first feature film to emerge from the landlocked southern African state of Lesotho, Andrew Mudge’s The Forgotten Kingdom is less novel than that claim might suggest. A traditionally structured personal odyssey, it follows young Atang (the disarming Zenzo Ngqobe) on a quest to return his father’s ashes to their rolling native land. But its ravishing impression of place nestles in the memory, as does its ambitious union of magical and social realism – much of the latter concerning the country’s ongoing Aids crisis. No landmark in itself, then, but the growing regularity of new African releases on streaming outlets is heartening.
