Some Oscar nominations are set in stone before the cameras start rolling. Cast an actor at the sweet spot in his career as a suitably illustrious historical figure in a digestible Hollywood biopic and it’s awfully hard to escape the Academy’s notice. As the eponymous, McCarthy-blacklisted screenwriter in Trumbo (eOne, 15), Bryan Cranston seems engaged in a cheeky experiment: how much overbaked ham can he serve in a still-successful Oscar bid? A lot, it turns out. His braying, smirking turn as the cigar-chomping showbiz rebel takes a thoroughly literal approach to “larger-than-life” characterisation. It is not good acting by a long shot, but it is less dull than the stuffy, overdressed film surrounding him, which professes cynicism at the Tinseltown machine, but is mostly in wide-eyed thrall to high-end movie stars giving high-pitched performances in high‑style clothes.
Another film dewily in love with its megawatt stars? By the Sea (Universal, 15). The difference here is that one of them is the director: a certain Angelina Jolie, joined on screen by husband, Brad Pitt (but, critically, none of their brood), as an exquisitely miserable couple holed up in a plush seaside hotel in 1970s France. He wrestles with writer’s block, she stares moodily into mirrors; now and then they convene for a round of sullen glaring.
The arrival of a young, sexually compelling couple in the room next door raises the temperature a degree or two before the thuddingly obvious backstory kicks in. Antonioni it ain’t, but credit Jolie for brazenly committing to the vanities of her vanity project: it’s a film coldly fascinated by its own creamy beauty and the luscious lassitude of its stars in glam-glum repose proves weirdly transfixing.
Hypnotic to more stimulating effect is Evolution (Metrodome, 15), French renegade Lucile Hadžihalilović’s worth-the-wait follow-up to 2004’s sublimely disquieting Innocence. Her latest follows that film’s cross-breeding of fairytale, body horror and gender theory, cultivating clinically lyrical atmospherics around its tale of a young boy in an eerie seaside village, populated entirely by male children and female minders, who works out what’s behind the community’s strange demographic balance. What could have been the stuff of B-movie sci-fi pulp is given a very different tonal slant by Hadžihalilović’s gorgeously nightmarish imagery and symbolism.
What goes on underwater in Evolution is certainly more unnerving than anything happening in The Forest (Icon, 15), a low-energy chiller starring Game of Thrones’ Natalie Dormer as a Yank seeking her twin sister in Japan’s Aokigahara wood, a notorious suicide spot. It’s the same location that did for Gus Van Sant in last year’s dire, still-unreleased Sea of Trees, albeit with more insidious exoticised spirits drifting about this time, jumping out at all the expected intervals.
There are few surprises in the construction of Truman (StudioCanal, 15), Spanish director Cesc Gay’s amiably melancholic buddy movie, in which a cancer patient on the brink of death gradually bids adieu to the world – and his beloved bull mastiff – with the help of his visiting best friend. It’s the careworn performances of Javier Cámara and Ricardo Darín, however, that sell you on this dogeared, tear-stained premise anyway. Gay’s film is pure sucrose beside the bittersweet humanism of Flowers, Will Sharpe’s rare black orchid of a sitcom that defies all expectations of the usual dysfunctional family wackery: still streaming at Channel 4, it’s enough of a keeper to merit box-set investment.
Robert Altman’s 1969 curiosity That Cold Day in the Park (Eureka, 15), widely dismissed upon release, has been given a rehabilitating polish by the Masters of Cinema team: there’s renewed glister to the broken edges of this aloof study in abnormal psychology, many of them in Sandy Dennis’s fascinating performance as a lonely young woman seeking companionship in an unresponsive teen. The Criterion Collection, meanwhile, takes a safer punt on Here Comes Mr Jordan (Sony, 15), 1941’s winsome reincarnation romcom (remade by Warren Beatty as Heaven Can Wait) that has perhaps lost some of its Great American Standard status in recent decades. The new restoration doesn’t exactly invite renewed perspective – the film breezes along as blithely as it ever did – but it’s welcome all the same.
Finally, mubi.com’s ongoing partnership with the Cannes festival’s Directors’ Fortnight programme yields its wildest revelation yet in Austrian director Peter Tscherkassky’s head-scrambling short The Exquisite Corpus. The 19-minute found-footage fantasia splices together scenes from assorted vintage erotica, soft porn and advertisements, treated and distorted to form one consistent daydream of desire and sensual discovery. It’s the kind of miniature marvel for which streaming platforms are ideal: there would be little way of shoehorning Tscherkassky’s film into commercial cinema screenings, but for a short time, it’ll stun those who stumble upon it.
