A Disney creature-feature doubling as a pointed lesson in identity politics and institutionally enforced prejudice? Sounds perilously worthy at best or smugly mirthless at worst. Miraculously, Zootropolis (Disney, PG), the Mouse House’s best full-length animation since the similarly fur-coated The Lion King, is none of these things. A bounding, popping fusion of fuzzily fantastical escapade and straight-to-the-bone satire, it’s conceived and structured like an adult-oriented mystery, but never aims snarkily over the heads of its young audience. Instead, it’s the rare family film that trusts children with subtext.
There’s certainly enough of it to go around in the sprawlingly imagined urban animal kingdom of the title, where predator and prey have evolved to a state of peaceful coexistence, one threatened by a spate of inexplicable rogue attacks. It’s up to diminutive bunny cop Judy Hopps to investigate, reluctantly assisted by devious hustler fox Nick Wilde (marvellously voiced by Jason Bateman) in what turns out to be a surprisingly knotty noir pretzel.
This is storytelling that works splendidly enough at face value, but is deepened and distinguished by wry, sly allusions to media outrage culture, diversity awareness and even (with the most delicate of touches) the Black Lives Matter movement. Younger kids needn’t get its every political nuance, as they’ll see the (lusciously illustrated) rainforest for the trees: a smart, sharp plea for recognising difference, not separation. All that and Shakira as a singing gazelle – it would be churlish to ask for more.
I’d call Zootropolis the week’s best thriller if that didn’t sound like an undue slight to French director Alice Winocour’s very fine Disorder (Soda, 15), a crisp, close-shaved tension exercise starring Matthias Schoenaerts in the mode that suits him best – brutish brooder with something behind the eyes – as a PTSD-affected soldier turned bodyguard to Diane Kruger’s endangered trophy wife. It’s not especially fresh material, but Winocour directs it like a dream: all curt, coiled suspense until a battering action breakdown. Hollywood should snap her up: I’d love to see what continental cool she’d bring to a neat genre runaround such as 10 Cloverfield Lane (Paramount, 12). Building loosely and cleverly on 2008’s found-footage horror Cloverfield, this shadow-strewn chamber piece benefits chiefly from the jangling performances of Mary Elizabeth Winstead and John Goodman as agitated strangers sharing an underground bunker after what may or may not have been a chemical apocalypse. Its charcoal atmospherics are both effective and a bit impersonal.
Slipping quietly and undeservedly straight to DVD, James Ponsoldt’s sweetly mournful The End of the Tour (Soda, 15) is certainly a niche proposition: a gentle, conversational account of a five-day encounter between Rolling Stone journalist David Lipsky and the late novelist David Foster Wallace, set 12 years before the latter’s suicide, but imbued with longing for lost ideas. You don’t need to have been a Wallace acolyte, however, to be moved by the film’s thoughtful articulation of the burden of creativity or by Jason Segel’s unexpectedly crinkled, compassionate inhabitation of the man himself.
Also on the unsung indie end of the shelf, British novelist-turned-director Helen Walsh’s teen-focused class-clash drama The Violators (Bulldog Film, 15) meshes lyricism and urban realism with some chin-thrusting flair, despite an overblown final act.
It’s a bumper week for classic reissues: new, high-sheen editions of Andrei Tarkovsky’s pristine, ribbon-like dream poem Mirror (Curzon Artificial Eye, U), Stanley Kubrick’s eternally absurd political ruckus Dr Strangelove (Criterion, PG) and Ken Loach’s form-setting social-portrait essay Poor Cow (Studiocanal, 15) all merit purchase. But the rare, revelatory treat in the pile is The Complete Buster Keaton Short Films 1917-1923 (Eureka, U), compiling 32 of the deadpan wonder’s comic shorts across four discs and 12 hours, with a feast of extras and academic materials. A few of the shorts are strictly curios, but most still play as purest comedy gold.
Finally, the latest talk of the streaming world has been Netflix’s new series Stranger Things, a retro-kitsch sci-fi exercise that I confess I’m munching through as I would a packet of original cheese Nik Naks. Its hodgepodge of 1980s popcorn inspirations, from Spielberg to Stephen King to Joe Dante, is as compulsive as it is nutritionally modest. This midwestern missing-person saga, electrified with a jolt of telekinesis, mines a decade that has already been pretty comprehensively plundered by nostalgia-hunters, such as JJ Abrams’s Super 8, and its wistfulness for the Formica blandness of Reagan’s middle America seems a little phoney. But it’s easy and greasy and gives a cannily cast Winona Ryder something to chew on. I’m sticking around for things to get stranger.
